Do It Yourself

results about your company is build backlinks to good content or positive articles about your company, in order to push down any negative listings.

There is some debate about whether reputation management is ethical. Really, companies who engage in this are artificially chaging their online image. It’s argued that reputation management just misleads customers into seeing a heavily altered, biased list of results that are not honest. If you run a dodgy company and negative complaints on the web about you are warranted, then you should fix that before hiring a reputation management firm.

You should be aware of some things before you decide to take on a company that tries to sell you reputation management services. You should not deal with firms that can’t explain what they actually do to get you results. Companies that go on about how their methods are ‘top secret’ or ‘trade secrets’ are just trying to rip you off. So that should be the first question you ask: ‘What, specifically, do you do to control what results show up for my company in Google?’. If you can’t understand their answer, then you don’t want to be dealing with them.

You will usually be charged on a monthly basis when dealing with a reputation management company. If you don’t see much change after the first month, then dump the agency. A good firm should give you regular updates on what they are actually doing, including proof of work. Don’t be afraid to cut your losses if you have hired a firm that isn’t doing anything for you.