Until recently (about the last 5 years or so) no one really thought much about the way a search engine results page might affect their business. But with the prevalence of widespread access to SEO strategies and a huge growth in SEO firms and freelance SEOs, more website owners are becoming savvy to the strategies that will help them rank better. Although this is good knowledge to have, it can also be damaging to your business. For example, review sites optimize their sites so that their reviews will rank well when people search for business names. That’s great if you have a lot of good reviews, but not so great if the top review on that site is negative and untrue.
This is why reputation management companies have been popping up in the last few years. They are hired by companies to combat negative reviews and information that appear in the search results for their clients’ names. And the reason they are becoming more popular is that they work.
As a marketer, reputation management is now something you need to be aware of so you can get ahead of reputation attacks before they begin and make sure your company is unaffected by such attacks.
3 Reasons Why Your Online Reputation is Important
1. Your Search Results Pre-Convert
Although you may have created a fantastic company website with stellar copy that is designed to convert any potential customer who sees it, if the search results page for your company name includes a number of negative results, your potential customers may turn away before even visiting your website. If they see a series of negative reviews—or, God forbid, one of those nasty “scam reports”—you’ve lost them before they’ve even had a chance to get to know you.
On the other hand, if you can use positive reputation management strategies to fill a search results page with positive (or neutral) information about your company, you’ll be pre-converting customers to your company and its products and services. That is, if customers search for your company name online and see no negative information in the results, they will be predisposed to trust you and buy from you.
2. Get Ahead of Potential Problems Before They Start
I’m sure all this advice sounds great to established companies who have had to deal with these problems before, but what if you’re a new company and no one’s published anything bad about you? If you achieve any measure of success, you’ll face these problems soon enough. That’s why you need to get ahead of potential problems before they start.
Starting a positive reputation management strategy from the start will help you get ahead of any nasty, untrue, or negative information before it becomes a problem. As a marketer, would you rather wait until you have a pile of “scam reports” filling your search results to implement a strategy, or would you rather those negative attacks were never seen in the first place?
3. Better Search Results = More Customers
The truth of the matter is that when the search results page for your company name is clean and positive, you’ll get more customers visiting to your website. If your results are filled with negativity and half-truths, you’ll lose customers before they even visit your site. So, as a marketer, it’s your job to get on board with a positive reputation management strategy as soon as possible, so you can prevent attacks against your company and continue to be successful.