Maintaining really great company reputation is critical for companies, especially since this helps in building a positive relationship with current and future customers. So many marketing firms these days are offering online reputation management services and it is really to understand why since this can be seen as vital. However, choosing a really good reputation management company is not as easy as it might seem.
Unfortunately, there are so many reputation management companies that do not really know what they are doing. They trick customers and can actually hurt their business. It is really important that you are careful whenever you see the following red flags as you choose what ORM firm to hire.
A Guaranteed First Page Ranking
There are firms that now guarantee a first page ranking or you do not pay anything. This is a clear indicator that something is wrong because there is nobody that can actually guarantee the fact that you are going to get that number one rank. So many factors are influencing ranking movement, including external factors that simply cannot be controlled. Also, search engines keep improving algorithms, which is going to impact ratings every single day.
Review Generation
Reviews are really important for businesses as they will influence the purchasing decision of the modern consumer. Negative reviews will drive the potential customers away so you need to monitor everything that the customers say. Reputation firms do include review management and monitoring. This is completely normal. However, what is not a good idea is generating reviews.
You can generate reviews in a completely natural way, like talking to actual customers and asking them to write a review. What should never happen is creating reviews that are fake. Freelancers are normally hired to publish the fake reviews. Sometimes they even end up being duplicate across various platforms. It takes just one to be noticed for the business to lose a lot of credibility.
Spam Content Distribution
Managing online reputation in a proper way automatically means you need to create optimized, positive and strong content. This is a service that is really common among the ORM firms since content will be published and distributed. However, the fraudulent firms will publish really low-quality content on many sites at once, creating a large number of backlinks to the main site. The client pays for high-quality, unique content that is to be published on really high quality sites but the result is content that is duplicate or just spam.
Guaranteed Negative Content Removal
The ORM firms that promise the removal of the negative Google reviews straight from search engines have to be avoided at all costs. This is the most common service promise that is made by fraudulent firms in order to attract prospective customers. If there is no legal ground, removing negative content from search engines is simply not possible.
Never trust any company that promises to offer removal of negative information of any kind from the internet. Some will use black hat spam SEO to penalize the sites while others will simply promise and find various reasons why it was not possible.
