The Reason Reputation Management Costs More than SEO

Tightened company budgets and a growing number of reputation management firms chasing business has increased the use of competing on fees as the main selling point for a reputation management campaign.

The pitch runs along the line of how similar reputation management campaigns are to SEO campaigns and that the costs should be commensurate as well. It’s true that a reputation management campaign will employ many of the same tactics as an SEO campaign. Optimizing for selected keywords, creating articles, blog posts, and building inbound links are tactics that are used in both methodologies. The differences exist in the actual execution and objective of each type of campaign.

The biggest difference between the two campaigns is the ultimate objective. An SEO campaign will likely have as its goal a first page presence on the search engines for keywords they select. Under these circumstances, taking a single spot on page one would be considered as reaching the objective. For competitive keywords a single top five ranking might the cause for celebration.

The objective for a reputation management campaign is to remove negative content from the front pages of the search engines. In order to remove this content, a reputation management campaign must push the company’s web pages and other content up high enough in the rankings so that the negative content gets pushed down. This is done by running multiple SEO campaigns simultaneously due to the fact that the end result of a reputation management campaign, in order to be successful, may have to be the occupation of all of the top thirty positions (the first three pages) for each keyword that is returning the negative content as a result.

The job becomes more difficult if negative content has been posted on an authority or news website. While sitting in the second spot to news article might be all well and good for an SEO campaign, it’s not an acceptable outcome for a reputation management campaign.

So how does a reputation management company reach the objectives for their client on an SEO budget? Chances are they won’t, leaving the client poorer for the experience and further down the road still needing a successful reputation management solution.

It may be a cliché, but in reputation management you get what you pay for. Pay for an SEO campaign and that’s what you will ultimately get. Due to the labor and time intensiveness of reputation management, a growing number of companies are employing the services of firms which specialize in online reputation management services. For a free initial consultation on protecting your company’s reputation, visit http://www.reputationmanagementllc.com/