This is one of the first questions any business or individual asks when deciding to manage their reputation. Unfortunately, there isn’t a straightforward answer. ORM and Reputation management specialists combine multiple techniques to promote content, attract organic traffic, and push negative results off the first page of a search. Many different factors come into play during this process and can affect the timeframe for results.
ReputationDefender must evaluate the strength of the client’s prior profile as well as the amount of unwanted or irrelevant content already existing on the web for that search term. Typically, new clients have only a sparse internet presence. Many owners of small and medium-sized businesses still fail to understand the importance of building an online profile before negative comments appear. This can leave them struggling to launch social media pages and attract followers with positive content even as negative posts are beginning to gain momentum.
Additionally, the relative strength of competitors’ profiles will affect the time it takes to build your brand. If you’re working in a field where there is already an established industry leader with a network of strongly-ranking links, it will take longer to gain ground against this presence. On the plus side, the quality of your content does count. Reputation management will take less time if you are promoting a story that resonates with a lot of people or has a strong inspirational message.
Building Long-Term Ranking
Producing content is of course the first step, but any client should plan on a 3-12 month period of professional promotion to allow time for ranking to stabilise. Search engines place high importance on the long-term value of a page. A recent press release will initially rank highly based on current interest, but it will quickly drop as other more relevant content is added. On the other hand, pages that continue to attract traffic over a sustained period of time, such as a Wikipedia article for instance, will achieve consistent, long-term ranking. This is the type of content you want to support your reputation.
Some updates and tweaking are always necessary, of course, but in general reputation management becomes more self-sustaining over time. As ReputationDefender continues to monitor and promote your profiles and blogs, Google will start to rate them as durable content that is of lasting value to users. These pages will gain traction and move up in the search engine results so that manual intervention becomes less and less necessary. At the same time, unwanted content will lose momentum as it is pushed farther down the page.
If you’ve already faced serious reputation issues, this process will take much longer to achieve, and continual monitoring may be necessary. No two reputation management cases are alike, so it will take careful analysis of your profile before a definitive time estimate can be made.
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