subject: Repairing A Tarnished Brand Reputation Online [print this page] Brand's Reputation Repair You've used the Internet enough to know useful it can be for disseminating ideas and services and products. If you own a business, this means a kind of success you might not have had a generation ago. It also means, though, that if someone writes something negative about your business, it's out there, more or less forever, and the longer it sits around, the greater the chance it'll come up in a search and start ruining your hard work.
It may seem like a permanent stamp on your business, but that's only as long as there are eyes to see the bad stuff. This is where reputation repair services come in. These businesses, which have evolved in the last few years, understand the workings of a search engine well enough to know how to move things around, effectively giving you the option of exiling the negative content to distant, unreachable lands.
Trust in Your Brand Reputation People trust what they see at the top of search engines. That's what they're going to value. After the first few pages or so, the content, in their minds, becomes irrelevant. So a reputation repair service will just shuffle the site with the bad stuff down off the first pages, down four, five even ten pages or more, where it's forgotten by the users.
This solution is only possible online. It's harder to replace bad thoughts with good in the real world. But so you'll now have a sparkling new reputation with which to deal with new customers and have the kind of relationships you should've been having the whole time. Without having to worry about that random negative comment.
What If You Have no Brand Reputation? But you don't have to be suffering from some random attack to find the good in this kind of service. Maybe you've got a newly launched business that no one is visiting because you aren't ranking highly enough. In that case the services can give you a boost to the top of the search rankings, where suddenly you're the new darling of the online world.
What you should take away from all this is that there's a version of you online that's just as adorable as the real you. Only it's a version that is uniquely vulnerable to attack, and so it's in your best interests to keep an eye and a hand on that online image. If you're not going to control it, you can bet that someone will come along who will. And then you're going to be struggling to figure out who the heck you are.
