What the internet says about you matters. It’s the idle location where people would go to search up an opinion about an individual or a company, which makes it important to maintain reputation on the web. Negative online reputation can lead to devastating results which include, but are not limited to, loss of customers, loss of trust, closure of business and even mental illness.
Removing negative online reputation is no easy feat as some people think. It requires a lot of focus and months of hard work to get some favorable results. Here are few requirements of recovering from negative reputation online:
1. SEO
You need to be a great SEO expert to get negative pages back in search engine results. Most authority sites like Yelp have a high page rank, and they appear on top. A negative review posted on an authority site won’t be easy to remove. A physiologist from Philadelphia was listed as a graduate of a distance learning institution that was closed down. This greatly affected his clientele.
At first, people will try to manipulate search engine results manually by removing images, participating in social media and hiring freelancers to outweigh the negative results, but the offending data quickly reaches into deep cyberspace, making it harder each day. Watching the official YouTube channel of Reputation.com will give you an idea of how expert help can reduce the optimization time of suppressing negative reviews.
2. Good content
If you’re planning to promote something positive, then it won’t create a big impact if it’s not written well. In hope of aggregating positivity, people even resort to auto-generated content. However, readers in the age of technology are smart enough to know the difference between auto-generated and human-generated content.
To make sure that there’s no further negativity, you can go for engaging human-generated content in the form of social media posts, press-releases etc. Engagement would also allow you to get in touch with the customers or readers, giving you a chance to explain your side of the story.
3. Temper
A clothing brand was found in the negative limelight when arguing with a customer about the size of a v-neck. The scenario would have been different if the customer was dealt with politeness, and this may have even raised the green flag about the brand being customer conscious.
There may be people who disagree with your opinion, and replying in a negative tone would do more harm than good. You’ll need to keep a cool head and diligent voice when dealing with them.
By reading these requirements, you’ll get an idea of how difficult it can be deal with negative reputation online, and why there’s an increasing demand for experts and reputation managers to promote and maintain positive reputation online.
