Reputation Management is the process of dealing with negative results about your company. Online, this usually means making sure there are no bad results about your business on the first page of Google for your company name. To remove any negative results about your company from search engines, a reputation management firm will usually try to build backlinks to positive content (in order to increase its ranking in Google), and eventually drive any negative results to the second page and beyond.
Some people say that reputation management, in itself, is wrong. It can be argued that companies who do things like this are creating an artificial image of themselves. What potential customers see when they Google the company name isn’t an accurate representation of their feedback, but just a list of results they want you to see. If you run a dodgy company and negative complaints on the web about you are warranted, then you should fix that before hiring a reputation management firm.
There are a few things you need to know, however, before hiring a company that offers reputation management. Try to avoid companies that won’t tell you how they actually operate. Anyone who won’t reveal the SEO tactics they use because they are ‘trade secrets’, is most likely a total scam artist. In your first meeting, it’s important to ask this question: ‘What SEO tactics and strategies do you actually use, and how do you take control of Google listings. If you can’t understand their answer, then you don’t want to be dealing with them.
You will usually be charged on a monthly basis when dealing with a reputation management company. If you don’t see much change after the first month, then dump the agency. They should be able to show their work, and that includes progress reports and links to pages or websites they have created. You should not hesitate to abandon a reputation management company if it’s clear that they are overcharging you.