Clean Reputation Management

Keywords are the building blocks of any reputation management campaign. Just like in search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns, keyword research is a major part of the process of building up an online reputation management drive. The difference is that these keywords have to be negatively inclined.

For example, the brand name is XYZ. A SEO initiative would use this keyword for its online campaign. But the reputation management services would use something like ‘XYZ scammer’ or ‘XYZ spam’. The reason is that users who post negative reviews on the Internet would use these keywords for their optimization.

The reputation management team has to target these keywords because they have to drive away the negative posts from the search engine ranks. The challenge for the online reputation management would be to use these keywords in a positive light. The objective is to get into a direct conflict with the negative reviews and flush them out.

The more innovative reputation management services are the more number of keywords it can cover. If there is a crisis that they have to tackle, the keywords specific to the crisis can be clubbed with the brand name for effective combinations.

The ‘Hide’ option that Google has introduced lately in its search engine will be a boon for reputation management. With this option, the search engine giant has put the choice of search results on the user. Users can now personalize their searches and hide or block web results that they feel are not authentic or negative.

Online reputation management services can see some promise in this perspective because users will steer clear of biased reviews and posts. The task of reputation management services will become easier.

The catch in this process is that the reputation management team has to ensure that the websites they are using have quality content. Their social media efforts, posts and tweets come under the scanner as well. Online reputation management teams will be able to affect the search engine results with excellent content and material.

That is so because the users will not take to kindly to websites that cannot provide them with what they want. They will use their discretion to hide/block your page from their personalized searches. What’s worse, they will forget all about the blocks they have placed and may never unblock your web link and explore your menu.

There are several online reputation management teams that create review websites of their own to promote the products and services of the brand that they are working for. This method of reputation management helps the brands to create the kind of content that is suitable to them. Then, the SEO specialists go all out in promoting and optimizing these websites on search engines for favorable rankings. There is some caution that reputation management services have to undergo while doing this.

To begin with, the reputation management writers have to be careful about the praise that they lavish. They cannot be unequivocally positive about every aspect of the product or service. In the same vein, they will have to review their competitors in an unbiased light. If the online reputation management pushes the envelope too much in putting the rivals down, the ploy that your reviews are partial will come across too clearly.

A technical aspect that the reputation management service managers have to be careful about is to host the review websites on different servers. Never host them on the same server as the actual website of the brand. The administrator and the entire back-end operations of the website have to be exclusively different.

The online reputation management department often makes a very common mistake. Before we reveal what the mistake is, let’s take a closer look at the practice. Teams of reputation management services have to contend with review sites that publish user-generated content on products and services.

Any Internet user with a user account can write their personal reviews about a product or service. If the review is well-written with judicious use of keywords, the post will be ranked favorably by Google or other search engines.

The mistake that reputation management writers commit is crank out positive reviews about the product or service and publish them on the same review site. The posts are written anonymously, of course, but readers familiar with such writing can easily find out it’s a fake post. There are some tell-tale signs. The posts are often published the very day that the user account was set up!

It could also be that the positive post is way over the top in praise. Sometimes, amid a sea of negative writing, there is this one post showering heaps of praise on the same product that the others have trashed unanimously. Online reputation management teams have to steer clear from such methods.