Best Online Reputation Management Compared by Crazy Egg

Your business’s reputation may be the last thing on your mind—but deep down you know it shouldn’t be. It’s tough to think about spending time and money on outsourcing something as intangible as a reputation. To make that decision easier, we spent hours pouring over every detail of the best online reputation management services out there. Our top pick is WebiMax because of it’s straightforward approach, proven track record, active monitoring features, and aversion to cookie-cutter solutions.

The Best Online Reputation Management for Most

For the past decade, WebiMax has been on a mission—to safeguard the reputations of its clients and help them shine online. With an unparalleled 97% client retention rate, their track record speaks for itself.

Their team of experts knows that no two clients are alike. That’s why they provide each client with a dedicated campaign manager and a custom strategy built from the ground up. From reacting quickly to diffuse negative reviews or proactively shaping your long-term reputation strategy, WebiMax brings the experience you need to take control of your online narrative.

Best Online Reputation Management: Golden Eggs

While we dive deep on several solid options below, we want to spotlighting our favorites first. When your reputation is on the line, good enough doesn’t cut it—you need a company that’s able to go above and beyond to protect your brand with the care you deserve. Which is exactly what our Golden Eggs deliver. Each one has a proven track record of success, but also offers the right level of flexibility to suit nearly anything you can throw at them.

WebiMax is a full-service digital marketing agency and reputation management powerhouse that’s trusted by brands of all sizes—ensuring your customized reputation strategy delivers the results you’re looking for. Get your free reputation analysis today.

NetReputation is perfect for organizations that need to fight against negative results and recover from damaging reviews. Schedule a free consultation to find out how NetReputation can repair your negative online perception.

InternetReputation.com specializes in reputation management for individuals and businesses alike, offering a wide range of reputation monitoring and personal branding services. Reach out today for a free consultation.

When it Makes Sense to Invest Into Online Reputation Management

There are three main reasons to invest in online reputation management—to build, repair, or maintain your brand’s perception online.

Many startups and businesses expanding into new markets use online reputation management providers to build a positive reputation from scratch. Online reputation companies help put more information about your brands on the web through new reviews and positive PR.

Other companies seek out online reputation management services after a specific incident harmed the brand’s reputation. Anything from bad reviews and reputation attacks to scandals and viral news would fall into this category.

Online reputation management companies can help you react swiftly by either surpassing the results before they get out of control or by putting a positive spin to reshape the narrative in your favor. The best firms can turn a crisis into an opportunity to strengthen customer trust and brand loyalty. They can also work to uncover the source of the fake reviews, address policy violations, and push for their removal while also improving your overall review profile.

The third and often most overlooked reason to invest in online reputation management is to maintain a positive brand perception—even if things are already going good.

This involves a more proactive approach to controlling what’s being said about your business online. And if something happens to go wrong, you’ll have a team in place to tackle the problem ASAP—which is more effective than scrambling to find help at the last minute.

Most of you reading this right will fall into one of these three categories. But if you don’t have the budget and you’re confident in your product, services, customer service, and branding strategy, you probably don’t need an online reputation management company just yet.

#1 – WebiMax — Best Reputation Management for Most

WebiMax provides you with the cheapest way to revive and keep a positive reputation online.

And you can confidently trust them. Why?

Because they have more than a decade of experience in the reputation management space. So they’ve seen pretty much everything.

That’s why they’re ranked #1 by trusted sites like Business.com and Clutch. They have full reviews online dissecting everything you need to know about them. We also wrote a detailed review of WebiMax.

One of many great things about WebiMax is how they create a custom strategy for your business, bolstered by a team of WebiMax support representatives dedicated to your needs.

Through this service, you’ll receive both guidance for protecting your reputation over the long haul as well as agile, proactive support to help squash emergent negative perceptions of your business.

Here’s what WebiMax can do for you:

• Find and leverage unclaimed profiles on the web
• Generate a report of all negative content
• Delete negative content
• Promote positive content
• Get more reviews
• Monitor and respond to reviews
• Promote your top reviews

After your initial consultation and proposal, the reputation experts at WebiMax will give you a realistic timeline to achieve your business goals. So you’ll know exactly what to expect along the way.

Beyond the specific reputation management services offered by WebiMax, they also provide a wide range of solutions to help improve business and take control of how your business is perceived online. Other services include PPC management, SEO, local marketing, and more. They can even help you get more leads.

So if you’re looking for a partner that can really transform your brand’s online reputation, WebiMax truly does it all.

To get started, simply contact WebiMax to get your free quote and proposal.

#2 – NetReputation — Best for Power Washing Away Negative Results

Negative reviews can bury your business. They slowly suck the life out of your reputation and cause your revenue to plummet like a plane with a blown engine. 

NetReputation is the best friend that lifts you up when your business is spiraling out of control because of negative feedback. 

This reputation management company is masterful at burying negative search results. So, if you are feeling the heat from poor social media reviews or other review sites, they can clean your reputation up quickly, leaving it shining like a newly waxed car. 

NetReputation provides online reputation management services for businesses and individuals alike. It’s also one of the fastest-growing reputation management firms in the country today.

Their process is a bit unique. NetReputation doesn’t always have to remove negative information about your business to be effective. Instead, they often choose to suppress those results with positive ones using a content-based strategy.

With that said, they do have services that can permanently remove negative results. Here’s a closer look at what NetReputation offers:

• Suppressed search results
• Search result removal
• Online reputation protection
• Online reputation monitoring
• Review management

Whether you need to establish or repair your online reputation, NetReputation provides one of the most unique solutions in the entire reputation management industry—Wikipedia page management.

For businesses and individuals alike, having a Wikipedia page can be extremely valuable. Wikipedia tends to rank high in the search results, which gives you more control over what’s being said about you online.

NetReputation can help create a Wikipedia page for you or make edits to the existing one. They’ll also monitor it proactively and help prevent false information from being published there. If you don’t currently qualify for a Wikipedia page (due to Wikipedia’s rules), the experts at NetReputation can help you bridge the gap for what’s required.

NetReputation also has local SEO services, public relations services, and branding solutions. We like NetReputation so much that we named it to our list of the best reputation management software options.

Schedule a free consultation to get your reputation score from NetReputation today. Their team will give you a free analysis and quote.

#3 – InternetReputation.com – The Best for Personal Brand Management

InternetReputation.com blows the other options on this list away in terms of personal brand reputation management.

One lapse in judgment and your rep online is in the toilet. This applies to entrepreneurs, public personalities, and anyone else concerned about their public image.

The internet can be a cold place, where people hold no punches about how they feel about you or your products and services. That’s why it’s so important protect your brand from day one—and InternetReputation.com can make that happen.

With InternetReputation.com’s personal branding services, any individual can gauge their online reputation. The company then can help you build a campaign to improve it, whether in terms of building positive sentiment or raising your online visibility.

InternetReputation.com helps you monitor over 50 different channels for your reputation, from social media platforms to review sites or online communities, and a whole lot more.

Whether you’re looking to build up clout as a professional or are building an online following and want to monitor digital sentiment, you’ll be able to gauge, track, and improve your online reputation with InternetReputation.com’s platform.

You’ll also get extremely helpful guidance from their professionals. Get help with optimizing your social profiles and public-facing personas, personal brand asset design, and content creation. You can even order additional services to help you in those regards.

This gives you a level of online reputation management usually only afforded to midsize or larger businesses.

You also get identity protection through their Privacy Guard. So, while you build up your digital reputation, you can also rest assured that private details that you don’t want to be visible online are found and scrubbed away.

In addition to helping individuals with personal brand management, InternetReputation.com provides a wide range of services for businesses, including:

• Reputation repair
• Reputation monitoring
• Review management and removals
• Content removal
• Local SEO
• Google Ads Management
• Public relations

They can even assist with things like mugshot removals.

With InternetReptutation.com, you can build up positive connotations with your brand, quell negative sentiment, and combat online misinformation about you. For individuals with any goals, they deliver unmatched insight into your reputation.

Reach out today and get started with InternetReputation.com.

#4 – Nextiva — Best for DIY Online Reputation Management

Hiring a reputation management agency isn’t always necessary. If you’re a smaller business and don’t need to spend tens of thousands for experts to handle complex strategies on your behalf, you can use Nextiva and just take care of everything yourself. 

With Nextiva’s social media management platform, you’re getting a single tool that monitors all of your social media channels and analyzes their performance. 

Track brand mentions, get alerts for new reviews, and engage with your customers without having to separately manage each social profile. All you need is the time to engage with social media users and the Nextiva platform, and you can accomplish what you would otherwise have to pay a ton to outsource.

The software also comes with a social media scheduling tool. So, in an hour, you can schedule all of your social posts for the upcoming month or longer, ensuring that everyone who finds your profiles knows that your business is active. 

Responding quickly to customer complaints, comments, and messages is half the battle of maintaining a good online reputation. Nextiva simplifies this, making it easy even for the busiest small business owners to take control of their social presence. 

Other highlights include:

• All-in-one inbox
• Ticketing and helpdesk features
• CSAT and NPS surveys
• Private and bulk messaging
• Performance dashboard
• Tags and alerts

Another unique standout of Nextiva is how the software uses AI technology to power the platform.

In addition to helping you make sense of your customer sentiment across reviews, you can also use Nextiva’s AI capabilities to help you respond to customers with its AI-embedded Review Assist tool.

Best of all, Nextiva is extremely affordable compared to hiring a full-service reputation management company. Plans start at $149 per month, and you’ll pay $99 per additional user if you want anyone other than yourself to have access to the platform. 

For more additional features, you’ll need to upgrade to the mid-tier Growth plan. Starting at $299 per month, this comes with competitor analytics, advanced team management tools, custom workflows, live chat, and custom response surveys.

Custom-priced enterprise plans are also available for organizations that want custom integrations and implementation, AI routing capabilities, and other advanced features.

The only real drawback is that it’s all DIY. You won’t have any professional assistance with PR, getting negative reviews removed from third-party review sites, or deleting negative content from the web. But, for the majority of small businesses, none of these services are necessary. 

For that majority, Nextiva delivers the tools for small businesses to manage their own reputations with ease. Request a free demo to get started today. 

#5 – Birdeye – Best Multi-Channel Review Management for Local Businesses

Birdeye is an all-in-one platform for generating, monitoring, and managing customer reviews from a single source of truth. It’s an enterprise-grade tool that’s simple enough for small businesses to use, which is why it’s trusted by more than 100,000 local brands.

This easy-to-use software tracks customer reviews from over 200 review sites. You’ll get alerts for new reviews, and you can reply to everything from a single dashboard. 

It’s no secret that your company’s reputation rides on customer reviews. But for smaller businesses, getting customers to write positive reviews about your products or services can seem like an uphill battle. Birdeye simplifies this by providing you with the tools you need to get more reviews on multiple platforms. 

Here are some of the ways you can use Birdeye to improve your brand’s reputation with customer reviews:

• Automate review generation campaigns based on customer actions
• Use scannable QR codes to request real-time reviews
• Turn post-purchase customer surveys into reviews
• Showcase reviews on your website and social media
• Add a review widget to your website
• Create an SEO-optimized microsite so reviews show up in the SERPs

Birdeye also provides you with valuable insights and analytics to help you understand what’s working with your review strategy and what’s not. These are available in simple reports, and you don’t need to be an expert to read them. Pricing is based on the number of locations you have and the solutions you need. Request a free quote from Birdeye to get started.

#6 – Podium – Best For Grabbing Google Reviews Customers Love Giving

Podium is the standard when it comes to the speed and ease of getting Google reviews.

That’s because when your representative communicates with your customer. They can send a quick link that allows the user to give a powerful review right when they are clearly in a position to recall all the benefits they received from doing business with you.

Podium takes a proactive approach to generate helpful, positive reviews for your business. It starts with the platform’s baked-in omnichannel capability. Podium helps businesses leverage texting in customer interactions and, thus, utilizes MMS and SMS to prompt customers to leave your company a review.

If you want to utilize text campaigns, Podium can help you get 10DLC registered and approved in less than 24 hours. This ensures you can run these campaigns compliantly and benefit from higher deliverability rates.

Striking while the iron is hot makes the review potent and believable, which matters when prospects are researching them to see if they want to do business with your business. 

Otherwise, getting good Google reviews is like pulling teeth. Email chains and chatbot requests are not the most efficient way to get someone to give you a stellar review. Most of the time, they take too long to get a result, losing that in-the-moment, truthful positivity. 

In a familiar, Facebook Messenger-style interface, you can follow up with people and provide them an easy way to give feedback and leave reviews. No links are required or surveys that take 15 minutes to fill out.

The reviews that you get have a direct impact on your sales and customer retention—not to mention the online authority it helps solidify for your business. 

This is how Podium helps you generate direct feedback and public reviews to boost your reputation. But beyond that, the dashboard is exceptional at gathering, charting, and tracking the ups and downs of your online reputation overall.

Beyond its usefulness in encouraging customer reviews, Podium is an all-encompassing business messaging platform. It allows you to start on your website chatting with a customer and move to SMS texting, which keeps you in contact with your customers no matter where they are.

Podium also has industry-leading AI capabilities designed to improve productivity and enhance the customer experience. The AI assistant can generate new messages in seconds based on your goals, like collecting new reviews or announcing a new promotion.

In terms of pricing, are three different packages for you to choose from:

• Essentials – Starting at $249 per month
• Standard – Starting at $409 per month
• Professional – Starting at $599 per month

The Essentials plan is ok for small businesses and solopreneurs. But most businesses would benefit the most from starting at the Standard tier. This will remove Podium’s branding from messaging, unlock scheduled messaging, and give you access to advanced content segmentation.

Check out our detailed Podium review to learn more about how this service can help you.

Boost your organization’s online reputation by getting started with Podium today.

#7 – Reputation Rhino — Most Versatile Online Reputation Management

Here at Crazy Egg, we promote specializing. But when there is an exception, we love it. 

Reputation Rhino is extremely good at mapping your business and coming up with a plan that molds to your organization’s requirements for reputation management. 

The versatility of Reputation Rhino is second to none. They help businesses of all sizes improve their image, and even offer this service for individuals who need it as well. 

They do this with an expert team that understands your industry and how your customers think. They do this with content development with article marketing. They also can shepherd your site to the top of SERPs for all major search engines and make your social media profiles more potent. 

Beyond that, Reputation Rhino also offers SEO, brand management services, social media management, and more. If you are having a difficult time finding a provider that can help with your business’s unique clientele in a wide variety of venues, Reputation Rhino can help. 

Some of the industries they have experience with include:

• Car dealers
• Restaurants
• Financial services
• Hotels
• Real estate
• Doctors
• Retail
• Ecommerce
• Lawyers

The best part about Reputation Rhino is its versatility. In terms of reputation management, they do it all.

This is an excellent choice for businesses that want to tackle reputation management from multiple angles. It also works well for organizations seeking a long-term reputation management partner. So as the needs of your business change over time, you can pivot without having to work with another agency.

Reputation Rhino can handle everything from reviews management, listings management, and removing negative search results to Wikipedia management, Glassdoor monitoring, and more. 

They provide services for businesses and individuals alike. So if you or an executive in your organization runs into trouble and needs help cleaning up a PR mess, Reputation Rhino has your back.

Another unique standout of Reputation Rhino is its industry-leading guarantee. All of the online reputation repair and reputation repair services are backed by a 100% money-back guarantee.

Contact Reputation Rhino for a quote to get started.

#8 – Big Leap — Best for Building Superior Brand Loyalty Over Time

Regardless of the business type or industry, brands that stand the test of time all have one thing in common—they plan ahead focus on brand supremacy over the long term.

If you’re just starting out and want to achieve this goal, then you should definitely consider Big Leap for help reputation management.

No matter how ambitious your goals are, Big Leap is capable of helping you chart a course to the top. With service offerings beyond reputation management, they can help you achieve customers that are loyal for life.

Big Leap creates and improves your reputation through content and social media like many other providers, but with an eye on the long haul. With a slogan like “Digital Marketing Built on Trust,” it’s clear that Big Leap understands the importance of implementing a consistent plan over time.

They deliver high-quality content that brings in backlinks with ease, then they dig in with their creative and focused content management strategy. In fact, they are also one of the few providers that focus on conversion rate optimization (CRO), which makes it simple for your visitors to make a buying decision because of the improved onsite experience they’ll help you create. 

Big Leap tackles reputation management from different angles, including strategies for:

• Managing reviews
• Monitoring brand mentions across the web
• Influencing search results

These three areas are crucial for building and maintaining a holistic approach to brand reputation. It ensures that your company is perceived in a positive light, regardless of the medium.

How do they make this happen? It’s all about tailoring a strategy to your company’s unique needs.

Big Leap starts by evaluating all mentions of your brand across the internet, determining which are positive and which are negative. It then creates a report that also shows which of these mentions give you the ability to control the message. 

Next, Big Leap implements its plan for driving the positive messages and the messages you control toward the top of your brand’s search results. They’ll even generate content for you on third-party websites, further establishing your brand as an expert in a particular category. 

Finally, after achieving success with your brand’s reputation, it tracks your brand’s performance continually going forward, tweaking its plan as needed.

This approach isn’t necessarily unique compared to other reputation management companies on the market. But what makes Big Leap different is the fact that they’re looking to partner with you for the long haul—not just a quick three-month sprint to boost search rankings or get more positive reviews in the short term. They shine in strategizing and expanding this plan for the long-term future of your company.

If you’d rather work with a full-service agency, as opposed to a firm that only handles reputation management, look no further than Big Leap.

#9 – REQ — Best for Tracking Your Reputation in Real Time

If you are a business owner who leans on cold, hard data, then REQ is exactly what you need. 

They use a proprietary dashboard that analyzes SERPs and reputations in real-time. Using both qualitative and quantitative metrics, you’ll be able to view your reputation score at any given time—from anywhere.

REQ gives you unparalleled visibility into not only how customers see you, but why—which is immensely useful when the way to improving your reputation is more opaque than reacting to bad reviews.

Not knowing how your company is perceived will hold your business back from offering the best service you can provide, plus it keeps you in the dark on how to improve your brand loyalty and perception in a focused way. 

You’ll get fantastic, tangible metrics resulting from REQ’s algorithm for scoring your reputation and online perception. The algorithm is based on factors like:

• Social media
• Sentiment analysis
• User behaviors

These results are shown at local, regional, and global levels. You’ll also benefit from live tracking alerts related to your reputation. 

What is also great is that when you want to learn more, you don’t buy a cookie-cutter plan. You speak with a REQ account rep and get your pricing itemized. This shows you exactly what you’re paying for and you get to learn all the specifics about trial periods and fees that may be attached to the plan. 

REQ also provides services for public relations, SEO, branding, content, and more.

Contact the team over at REQ for more information; they have offices throughout the US.

#10 – Matter Communications — Best PR Solution for Building Your Brand with Content

Matter Communications is a bonafide public relations provider that uses storytelling to relate with users and prospects. They get to know you and what makes your business unique by getting close to what made you begin your journey in business. 

They make your business personable and not some lifeless, faceless entity.

Your brand story is what you build your reputation upon. Matter Communications uses a pinpoint focus to get content in front of the right audience for your industry. 

They help you with analyst relations, which means they evaluate your situation and offer recommended relationship strategies that can be paid or sponsored. 

Here’s a quick look at some of their top PR services:

• Influencer programs
• Media relations
• Content creation
• Product PR
• Event support
• Executive/C-Suite visibility

They also have a wide range of services for things like podcasts, copywriting, UX/UI development, brand planning, campaign development, and business opportunity planning.

You decide exactly what deliverables you want and learn how you can see the metrics that show you your business reputation is improving with Matter Communications’ chosen strategy. 

We want to be clear, this firm won’t necessarily help you remove poor reviews from the web. But they can assist you with big-picture branding through PR, which is great for bolstering your company for the long haul.

#11 – Go Fish Digital — Best for Yelp Review Building

Online reviews are written practically every second of every day. The internet doesn’t sleep. And, no matter your business, Yelp is the leader in reviews that people trust. 

Go Fish Digital is the company that has the knack for improving reviews on Yelp or removing them. 

They are capable of improving your reputation and increasing your rating on Yelp as well as protecting your brand. They understand that times have changed and now word-of-mouth is more commonly done in subreddits, review sites, and social media pages. 

Go Fish avoids using tricks and temporary actions that only fix a few items at the surface layer. Rather, it digs into the real reasons your online reputation is suffering. Go Fish works to counteract negative items with positive and high-quality content that drives the negative items lower in search. 

Go Fish works with you to find the best strategy to get your business perceptions in the green, all in a manner personalized and tailored to your business.

Here’s a closer look at the core online reputation services offered by Go Fish Digital:

• Yelp and online review improvement
• Search engine result improvement
• Google and Bing autocomplete cleanup
• Public affairs messaging and amplification
• Reputation monitoring and reporting

Overall, this firm takes a well-rounded approach to reputation management. 

Another thing that offers you extreme value from Big Fish Digital is the award-winning customer support and top-tier account management. 

They communicate extremely well with you and not only when you are working with the sales team. 

We have all been there when we have a major problem to solve and can’t get a hold of support. Big Fish doesn’t put you through this nightmare. 

With that said, improving reviews and removing negative reviews on Yelp is their specialty. So if your business falls into an industry that’s highly dependent on Yelp, Go Fish Digital will be a great option for you.

Methodology For Choosing The Best Online Reputation Management Solution

To ease the buying process, we’ve identified the factors that should be reviewed during your search. This will make it much easier for you to narrow down your options. Plus help you understand why reputation automation is a good idea, but why some companies are not to be trusted.

Ensuring Authentic Reviews

Selecting a provider that will represent your business when building or improving your reputation, usually starts with you reading about them. So you want to find a provider that has consistently helped other businesses achieve this goal by doing it the right way.

Look out for horror stories of companies paying for reviews and having employees leave reviews to boost favoritism. Don’t allow yourself to fall victim to such tactics.  

Use a review management provider that offers the proper technology and operations to easily collect reviews bursting with life. 

That is exactly what customers feel when they look at your business. They want to see reviews that can be trusted and are relevant to their situation. That has a way of gravitating more people to your business.

That is why authentic reviews must be collected at the right time. With the providers on this list, you are able to send out review requests while your service team is on the phone with the prospect. This allows your business to capitalize on the ideal time to get customers to leave a beneficial review. 

The process of building reviews people can trust is simple and uniform with the providers we reviewed on this list—no matter what representative is dealing with a customer.

Industry-Specific Expertise

This is something we here at Crazy Egg believe in wholeheartedly. We are always talking about specialization and how you often get more value from working with a specialist.

The same holds true for reputation management and the industry you work in. Real estate firms require a different type of representation or PR approach than, say, a donut shop that had a couple of cockroaches in their store and wants that review gone. 

Many providers on this list offer specialized services for helping a particular type of business. Healthcare and automotive service providers, to name two examples, need delicate approaches to reputation management. 

You need an account manager that knows this and knows how to build reputations or improve them if a business or individual is found in a negative spotlight. 

What we hope you understand is generalization often means you are not getting the best service available for you. There are benefits to specialists knowing the quirks of your industry intimately and also how customers and prospects view that particular industry. 

This is something a general reputation management company may lack the agility to provide, leaving you at a disadvantage.  

Too often, business owners hop into a contract with a provider thinking they know what they are getting—only later realizing there was no concrete plan built for their specific industry or client base.

By following this methodology you can avoid this expensive mistake.

Clear Deliverables

The best online reputation management companies make it crystal clear what steps it takes to repair your reputation.

This shouldn’t be a guessing game. They should provide clear performance indicators and procedures with checks and balances, along with tangible metrics and what the final results will look like.

You want a provider that creates a strategy, deploys it, and optimizes it over time based on the strategy, testing, and data they collect. Reporting and analytics are key.  

For example, REQ gives you a roadmap of how they provide service to your business—starting with a personalized approach and management tools they use to analyze the landscape and collect data about your current state of perception from people. 

A lack of clarity can ultimately cost your company unnecessary aggravation and stunt its growth. It’s up to you to know what platforms you want to use. And it’s a wise choice not to leave it all up to the provider. 

Don’t just read through a reputation management service’s website and sign up immediately. Instead, reach out to the service and explain the kinds of problems you are having to get an idea of whether they can help.

Ask for examples of how the service solved problems similar to yours in the past. If a service tells you it cannot give you such examples until you subscribe, this should be a massive red flag. 

Ideally, an online reputation service provider will be honest with you about whether it can help with your specific problem or needs. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen, so be proactive and vigilant in your search for the right partner.

Transparent Pricing

Making sure you read the fine print about pricing is always a good idea. 

However, what’s even more important is that you know how the process of trial periods work. In one example we found, a company stated the plan was risk-free for 90 days, but after the first 30 days charged the provider for the full year. 

This mishap is enough to blow up your business budget for a few months if you can’t get out of the contract. There are hidden fees and tiny extras that can be charged because of deliverables you may want provided. 

Everything should be listed clearly for your pricing. All the better, too, if you can get a service level agreement in place.

Another thoughtful idea is to read online reviews about how pricing works. Are there complaints about the company being dishonest or having incognito charges that damaged the relationship between a business owner and the provider? 

When there is a lack of transparency in pricing it always leads to disaster, so prevent unwanted charges and surprises by being as diligent as possible when reviewing pricing and procedures as a new customer.   

It’s also a huge boon to get a direct point of contact at your reputation management provider, so you have one person to call or email about questions, concerns, misaligned expectations, or ongoing support.

Top-Tier Account Management

Having an account manager in your corner means you have a dependable person to count on and one that understands your business and what your plans are for creating a brand that people love.

The only problem is some providers don’t offer this kind of support and communication. And if you can’t find a reputation management company that communicates well with you, how can they offer the right representation of your brand? 

Think about Go Fish Digital, for example. They are known for their award-winning service and communication. They don’t leave you fending for yourself when incorrect content is added to your site and you need it removed ASAP, or a poor review shows up and is tearing through social media like a tornado through a cornfield. 

When you need things from your provider, you don’t want to lean solely on a chatbot or have to only communicate through email. Your reputation is on display every day; it’s only fair you get the attention from your online reputation manager that resolves problems quickly, instead of being passed around like a hot potato between support reps. 

When you are shopping for an online reputation provider, you want to speak with support, not only sales. You want to find out who your point of contact will be and if they can actually make the changes you need, or if they are only a person that takes down your concerns and passes them on. 

It’s critical to understand that every feature and benefit in the world doesn’t matter when you can’t get emergent issues dealt with quickly—especially if suspicious billing charges show up, but you can’t get any support. That helpless feeling is what top-tier account management helps you avoid.

Technology

While online reputation management is most often thought of as a service, the technology used to power that service is of equal importance.

There are two tiers to consider when you’re evaluating the technology of an online reputation management solution:

• What technology is the provider using?
• What technology are they offering you?

For example, you can ask a provider how they plan to monitor your brand mentions and identify reputation attacks across the web. Are they using some type of proprietary model? Or are they simply setting up Google Alerts?

The best technology not only tracks mentions but can also identify customer sentiment. This is far more valuable information to uncover what’s being said about you online.

Some companies also offer self-service technology that you can access on your own. A review management dashboard that lets you view and respond to reviews from every platform is a common example of this.

Other dashboards contain real-time reputation insights. You’ll even find some tools with AI-powered response generators to collect customer reviews.

Ultimately, it’s about finding the right balance between service and technology that aligns with your reputation management goals.

Proactive vs. Reactive Reputation Management

In a perfect world, online reputation management should be an ongoing business initiative for your brand.

If you set up alerts, monitor reviews, respond to customers, and take other steps to ensure there’s a positive sentiment about your business online, then minor bumps along the road can be addressed quickly before spiraling into a bigger problem.

However, there are some instances where a specific incident or reputation attack against your business can’t be stopped. In these rare scenarios, it’s best to work with an online reputation management service with in-house expertise and guidance to resolve everything.

Something like brand alerts or DIY software probably won’t be enough for those types of problems.

So while you should definitely be taking a proactive approach to build and maintain your online reputation, sometimes you’ll need more of a reactive solution to help with one-off incidents and reputation repair.

Expanding Your Knowledge: Best Online Reputation Management

Summary

What’s the best online reputation management company?

It depends on your unique needs. Use the methodology I described above to help narrow down your options. Then refer to the reviews and top picks mentioned in this guide.

Regardless of your company’s current online reputation, you can use the companies in this article to manage it.