Online Reputation Management - Local Style!

I have a client right now who is suffering from some bad reviews appearing online. The problem is that when you search on his company, the bad reviews are forefront - and this is not good for his board of directors to see.

Unfortunately, I am not sure how much I can really do to help.

The problem is, if there are no legal issues, having a bad review removed from a site is pretty difficult. Google believes that this gives a clear picture of the business and helps the consumer make an informed decision. Conceptually they are right, while in practice it is usually much more messy. Why? Because angry people take vengeance, and can do so with their power to review.

So how do you manage your online reputation?

Get Listed
Local search listings tend to pull their information from data centers. If you cover the major data centers, your listings are often well represented on many different sites.

I by no means am a local search expert, but I know enough to submit to the following data centers when needed: Yelp, Superpages.com, insiderpages and infoUSA. These are 4 of the most trusted data centers (as far as I know anyway), and they distribute their data to many other, smaller players. The result can be lots of listings for less effort.

In addition to getting in the data centers, you want to get mentioned on other sites where your business is named in conjunction with uniquely identifiable information about your company.

These listings are often referred to as "citations." While conceptually, they are easy to understand, I found this definition by Bill Slawski that does a good job of explaining what you aim for:
"A local document - one associated with particular geographic area, which can be associated with a location, by one of the following means:
* A document may mention a business at the location,
* The address of the business, and/or;
* A telephone number associated with a business."
So this means, in local listings, you don't really have to have a link back to your site...the mention, with the included specific information about your business helps strengthen your power.

Optimize It!
Before you go to the data centers, you want to make sure that you are taking advantage of what you can do with the listings. Most won't let you do much with the name of the company (don't try to spam it), but in your descriptions, you can use keywords that give power to your site. Make sure that you provide all of the information you can...it depends on the specific listing, but some allow you fatten up the profile pretty nicely.

Back to Our Story
So how does this get back to my client with the bad reviews? Because like I said, you really can't do much about bad reviews...but you can make them harder to find. My plan to help my client is to go thru the basics first (noted above: I will make sure he is represented and optimized as much as possible). Then I will get more positive press out there for him to try to force the bad crap beyond anyone's searching patience. Will it work? Hope so - this business deserves it.

It underscores that managing your online reputation is not necessarily difficult, but it does warrant some serious focus and attention. You might not be able to stop bad press, but you can make it a smaller part of what people find about you online.