What do online reputation management services do?

To break it down, these are the actions reputation management companies will take to analyze, build, protect and restore your brand's online presence, and the main features you should look for when choosing an ORM service:

Search engine optimization and management: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making your online content rank higher in popular search engines like Google.  Reputation management firms will do this for your content so that Internet users searching for you, your business or topics that relate to your business will find you. Moreover, they will find honest, relevant information about you in the process. If there is negative information about you in your search results, your ORM provider can strategize ways to use truthful, positive content to detract from any negative content by pushing it back farther into the list of search results. This way, people who search for you or your business won't be immediately greeted by negative results.

Content development and management: This goes hand in hand with SEO, because in order to rank well in search engines and to build up a good reputation, you need to have good-quality content. This means making your website and blog organized, unique and well written. It also means creating quality press releases to spread the word about your business the right way. Most reputation management services will help you improve your existing content and create new material so that Internet users will not only find positive results about you or your business right away, they'll also see that the content you share is real, relevant and worth reading. This adds even more credibility to your brand and your reputation.





Social media management: You're likely already on several social media networks, be it for personal use or for your business. While platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram can all help you grow your business or personal brand, it only takes one inappropriate picture or comment to cause a PR nightmare. Most ORM services can help you clean up your social networks to make sure they're appropriate, and ORM services can monitor how your social media profiles affect your reputation, too.




Third-party website monitoring: Even if your website and social media presence are up to speed, outsiders can still easily damage your reputation. This includes former employees and displeased customers. Not only are there a wealth of review websites, like Yelp and Glassdoor, where anyone can sign up and post a review of your business, it is also incredibly easy to create a new website or blog, where people can write whatever they please. For example, if you were to fire an employee, or one of your employees were to leave on bad terms, there's nothing stopping them from writing malicious blog posts or putting false information in reviews about you all over the Web. Reputation management services will monitor the Internet for this kind of content to see what people are saying about you.


All of these steps contribute to a successful reputation management campaign; however, choosing the right ORM provider isn't always easy.