SEO is about making one specific website controlled by the client to rank for a general search term (e.g. whitehouse.gov for “president”). Online reputation management (ORM) is about making many websites not controlled by the client rank for a specific search term (e.g. positive news articles for the name of an individual or company).
It would be incredibly inefficient to utilize standard SEO techniques to target each spot in the first page of results in the way ORM can. The expense would be 10 times that of a regular SEO engagement, and each of the sites in question would compete with the others, reducing their impact collectively. ORM is a much more nuanced approach that spreads promotional factors between many sites in order to build the right impression in the most cost-effective manner possible.
It’s about pushing up the good content and pushing down the bad one. The top page of search results has the biggest impact on your reputation, because more than 92% of searchers never go beyond that page. Less than 2% go beyond page two.
To fight negative or misleading items on your first page, we create high-quality, positive content about you. As positive material goes up, negative material gets burried where no one will see.
Search engines use longevity of interest to determine the importance of a particular website. For instance, press releases typically shoot to the top of the search results and then fall back down just as fast, which makes sense given the short-term value of a press release. Wikipedia articles, on the other hand, almost always rank highly because the type of content they provide is, by its nature, of long-term interest.
In designing an effective engagement, not only do we need to factor in the amount of time needed to produce the desired results, but also the amount of time needed to convince search engines that the desired results are relevant over the long term. This is why we typically aim for 12-month engagements. Search engines consider any online search trend lasting less than one year to be short term.
After approximately 12 months, the process of reinforcement becomes less reliant on manual intervention, due to the psychology of online search. People click items near the top of the search results page, increasing organic traffic to those websites. Unwanted sites that have been pushed down for months, contrastingly, see a corresponding drop in traffic that reinforces their new position on lower pages.
In some cases, we can produce results more quickly through the aggressive application of our proprietary technologies. However, there is a limit to how much the process can be sped up. If done too quickly, the promotions look suspicious to search engines and our work backfires.
Our standard engagement timeline has been designed for the best balance between cost and impact. If timeliness is a priority, however, we can provide you with expedited service at an additional fee.
Content is made to your specifications, but it is always professional, positive, and understated. We start off most engagements with biographical writing. If additional content is required, we also publish articles, blog posts, and other types of supplemental content. In all cases, you get to review what we write before it goes online.
You provide the raw information you desire to have featured and our editorial team works from that material. You may also have information directly imported from other sources such as your LinkedIn account, excisting website etc.
A number of factors are involved in our cost calculations. We look at the specific factors influencing the search results under consideration, the authority of individual domains and links, the traffic patterns, the longevity of the search results, the competitiveness of the search term, and so forth. These factors give us a baseline estimate for what it will cost to solve the issue.
For each client, we spend a significant amount of time to come up with the right strategy for them.
All of our clients will have an engagement team comprised of three specialist groups. Individuals in these groups work on the client's account on a weekly or daily basis and will provide monthly reports.
Client management: Interfacing with the client, communicating client goals to the rest of the team, providing weekly progress updates to the client via phone conference, overseeing the generation of reporting.
Tech resources: Creating custom technology, building backend systems, developing customized promotional strategies, assessing the results of the engagement, suggesting changes in direction, implementing new approaches.
Publications and editorial: Creating custom content, developing publication strategies, Web design, site optimization, targeted cross-promotion, quality control.
Absolutely. By default, we target North American searchers who use English-language websites, but our proprietary systems often have a spillover effect into other markets and languages. We also have many clients who have an international presence and would like content specifically targeted at other languages and markets, we can accommodate those goals as well.
No. Deleting content against the wishes of the hosting site would require illegal hacking.
It’s very hard to get content removed through legal channels—and to make things worse, legal efforts often draw even more attention to the initial issue. The best option is to build positive content to outrank any negative content.
It has become extremely difficult to do this all on your own, although it used to be possible in the early days of the Web. Even if you have the time to create large volumes of Web content and are a prolific writer, you'll need some professional help. Online reputation management is as much about the content you release than the technical skills to make your positive content rank high.