Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Online Reputation Management?
Every individual or organization has an online reputation. Online reputation management enables people and businesses to take charge of the online narrative that surrounds them, leveraging techniques and strategies to ensure they are portrayed fairly, accurately, and in a positive light when people search for them on the internet.
What Does Online Reputation Management Entail?
Prior to developing and deploying an online reputation management strategy, it is crucial to gain an accurate picture of a person or business’s online profile. This is achieved by conducting anonymized searches, exploring alternative sites and keywords, and monitoring search volume to gain a basic understanding of the situation.
Setting up profiles and publishing accurate and positive content is one of the most important steps anyone can take towards claiming and protecting their online reputation, as this helps to ensure that positive content curated by them appears first in the search results.
Why Does Online Reputation Management Matter?
In an increasingly digitized age, for individuals and businesses alike, adopting a proactive stance regarding online reputation management is integral to taking control of the online conversation. Where defamatory and damaging content appears online, online reputation managers can ensure that it is taken down, or forced so far down the search engine rankings it cannot be found, ensuring the client is portrayed in the best possible light.
What Can Individuals and Businesses Do to Tackle Defamatory Content Published About Them Online?
With the percentage of global social media users skyrocketing over the course of the past decade, people are increasingly finding themselves and their businesses falling foul of online defamation. The first step to countering a rising problem is contacting the perpetrator directly with a takedown request.
Should this approach prove unsuccessful, approaching the website that published the content or the web hosting company could be an effective means of ensuring that defamatory content is removed, particularly where the content violates the website or hosting company’s terms of service. Alternatively, contacting Google and other search engines could result in the offending webpage being delisted from the search results.