So You Have Online Reputation Issues?
The amount of people who are looking for services in online reputation management is on the rise. With an increasing amount of people searching for a solution to their problem on search are even writing reviews on the products and services they find. And not all are positive.
Agencies who are offering search engine optimization services are getting ask what they can do about negative results popping up on the first page of the result page on Google. Another issue can be the fact that as when stakeholders are typing in the brand on search engines, the autocomplete has negative suggestions. The fact is that an increasing amount of brands are seeing this happen. The key is for brands to be better prepared if ever they are faced with a reputation issue.
Once brands are faced with this kind of problem, they can experience a decline in sales depending on the degree of severity of the problem. There is a correlation between the visibility of negative content or information a potential customer sees and the amount of sales you will garner online. Even though customers know who you are and has visited your website before, they are very likely to still go to search engines to look you up. The more people click or interact with a search result, the more likely it is for it to move up. Brands can’t know for sure the exact figure but will notice a decrease quarter over quarter on their sales. This is due to the fact that customers where scared off from purchasing from the company with the negative result.
Even though brands who are completely legitimate might have some kind of negative reviews that will make a person think twice before purchasing. It even depends on the type of industry they are competing on what the buyer behavior will be. Brands would want the negative results to disappear as soon as possible to ensure they lose as little sales as possible. This is where online reputation management comes in to suppress these results. There are people who believe that there is an unethical factor involved with playing with the Google algorithm. But on the other hand a completely lawful company is being affected by negative results who can have been written by competitors, or disgruntled employees. All you have to do is publish useful and positive information about the brand. The trick is to provide stuff people want to engage with to outperform the negative.
