Your reputation is everything. Consumers no longer blindly make purchases or wake up and decide to do business with you. They conduct careful research to find out who they are dealing with. If your online reputation is not in good shape, you could be missing out on a lot of business.
Create a Positive Reputation Before Anything Negative Happens
One way to manage your reputation is to make sure you have as much positive press as possible. When the internet is flooded with positive news stories about you, negative ones do not seem to matter as much. Many of them will be drowned out by the positive press while others will be disregarded by readers due to the abundance of encouraging news.
In order to build your positive reputation you need to claim all your online profiles. By this I mean you need to create a Facebook page, Twitter handle, Crunchbase profile, and more. You need to sign up with every website that allows you to create a profile. It is also recommended that you purchase your branded domain name.
Pushing Down Negative Content
One of the best ways to remove negative information is to push it down the search results. Things that wind up on page 2 of Google are rarely seen by those using the search engine. As such, you can effectively “remove” negative content simply by pushing it down Google pages.
The way to push negative content down is to outrank it with positive content. You will need to conduct media outreach in order to do so. Getting yourself mentioned and linked from high authority websites will help with the process. Simply find out the domain authority of the website you want to push down. Then, try to land featured articles in publications with a higher domain authority.
Online reputation management is synonymous with SEO. There are many SEO techniques to avoid and you need to keep this in mind when trying to push down negative content. Make sure to optimize content properly so that it will outrank the negative content you are trying to get rid of.
So basically there are two methods of online reputation. The first, and most important, is to have a positive reputation in the first place. The second is more of “reputation repair” in which you try to suppress negative content. Anyone with an online presence should be aware of these methods in order to maintain a positive perception and be able to rebuild if someone tries to disparage you.