Reputation Protection 101 – How to Defend Your Online Reputation

By: admin@repairbadreputation | April 18, 2022

Reputation Protection 101 – How to Defend Your Online Reputation

In this day and age where everything is already done online, even one’s reputation can also be felt and seen on the Internet. Back in the day, everyone knows about your company through radio advertisements, television commercials, and even through word of mouth. Today, all it takes is just a few clicks on a smartphone and everyone can see what your company is like. Everyone has access to what your company does, what it is, and how your company treats its customers and workers.

And just like how we want our business to work, we always want to make sure that it has a sterling reputation. As the CEO or owner of a company, it’s your job to make sure that your company’s reputation is well earned and protected. Because the moment a bad review hits your business, everything can turn from bad to worse in just a few minutes especially if you don’t have a good reputation control plan.

That is why it’s important to learn about reputation protection. As the person who painstakingly worked so hard to build up your company’s reputation, it’s your responsibility to protect your company’s online reputation.

That is why for today, we are going to learn how to protect your company’s reputation through understanding what online reputation is, how reputation protection works, and defining reputation repair and comparing it with reputation protection.

The Value of Online Reputation

As mentioned earlier, online reputation is a big deal nowadays not just for companies, but even with famous personalities too. Politicians, actors, actresses, and even influencers now care about what the general public has to say about them online.

In fact, a study about recruiters revealed that around 38% of brands believed that recruiters can get the best talent if they didn’t have to go through undesirable search results over and over again. These talent recruiters could’ve just gone and found the best talent as quickly as possible without wasting time and money scrutinizing talent that had a bad reputation from the start.

Businesses also understand the value of online reputation; consumers nowadays are not as gullible as before and many of them go through forums and search results in order to get the latest product review about an item or service first before deciding to shell out their money. This is bad news for a company that has a bunch of negative reviews!

Online Reputation Protection – What Is It and How Is It Done?

Online reputation protection is the long-term strategy of fortifying your branded search landscape against unknown future threats. It’s another term for proactive online reputation management to make sure that your brand or company’s reputation remains immune or protected from negative reviews and reputation crises.

There are many ways to build up your company’s online reputation protection. Some of the tactics used include search engine optimization, content creation, strategic outreach, social monitoring, and others. The target of online reputation protection should only just be one thing; to prevent any and all types of negative mentions and reviews from destroying your brand’s online reputation. As such, a lot of companies employ many of these online reputation management tools and tactics on a regular basis.

Online reputation protection usually comes in two phases:

Reputation Building – This is the offensive part of online reputation protection. This is where reputation protection checks the entire search landscape for your company CEO, brand name, industry, and your competitors. This offensive approach gives the company owner a detailed picture of where your brand stand compared to your competitors.

Reputation Management – The defensive part of online reputation protection. At this phase, the main point is to make sure your brand’s reputation is well protected against any and all forms of negative mentions by suppressing negative publicity that is already present in the search engines.

Frankly speaking, it’s difficult to get negative mentions completely removed from Google but with the following steps, we can protect your brand by keeping damage to a minimum:

• Keyword Research – A deep analysis of the keyword landscape for a particular industry can help in checking whether there are any gaps or opportunities to get more customers or market share. Keyword research also helps in getting the best reports for social monitoring tools. This way, you are always ahead when it comes to monitoring what people think about your brand on their social media accounts.
• Creating controllable digital assets – Owning web assets is an important part of owning your brand’s overall narrative in Google’s search results. As such, developing controllable digital assets can help your brand big time when it needs protection from any negative mentions. Digital assets include any and all social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.
• Using SEO to own Google’s first page rankings – Google is currently the king of search engines. It’s been that way and it will probably stay that way. The most important thing here though is for your brand to secure a spot in Google’s first page rankings. A company that does so is able to sway the search page in its favor, thus burying all negative press or mentions all the way under the rest of Google’s search page results. This means little to no chance for these negative mentions to see the light of day whenever a potential client or customer should search the Internet for reviews about you and your company.

Online Reputation Protection VS Online Reputation Repair

One of the most frequently asked questions encountered when it comes to online brand management is always the comparison between online reputation protection and online reputation repair.

For us to answer this question, we need to first understand and define what online reputation repair is.

As the name suggests, online reputation repair is all about repairing the reputation of a brand or company right after a bad reputation crisis. It is a long process of fixing a damaged reputation after negative content has already gone in inside your search engine results.

Meanwhile, online reputation protection means using SEO-driven tactics to boost the positive listings of your brand or company that can be found on the search engine pages before negative content comes out.

When asked which is better, it’s obvious that preventing negative mentions from destroying your company’s online reputation is a whole lot better than salvaging a damaged reputation after a crises attack.

Because as everyone says, an ounce of prevention is a hundred times better than a pound of cure!