When I began my career, I worked for a content mill that handled reputation management. I ghostwrote short biographies and articles for this company’s clients. All this content included keywords and word counts for reputation management.
In today’s digital world, you’ve no doubt heard about the importance of online reputation. A single negative review has a significant impact on your business’ success. Conversely, a positive review increases your sales.
According to the numbers, around 90 percent of consumers check online reviews. Almost 85 percent of those individuals trust reviews as much as personal recommendations. And another 89 percent read through how a company responds to its reviews. That’s a lot of consumers checking out your business online. And that’s all before they buy. Leaving you unaware of their presence and your online reputation.
It also impacts how consumers interact with your business. When they see you responding, they trust your business more. Meanwhile, positive reviews increase your SEO rankings. Plus, you can charge more for your products when you have a strong, positive online reputation.
Online reputation management (ORM) has a massive impact on your success.
As a ghostwriter, I wasn’t responsible for doing keyword research and such. But, I worked at that job for several years. And I picked up several best-practices for building and maintaining online reputation.
What a Positive Online Reputation Looks Like
Positive online reputations involve a blend of interactions, content, media, and actions. These form a perception of and brand for a business. It’s an intangible concept, yet plays a huge role in professional success.
Credibility is one component of a positive online reputation. Transparency and consistency in your field demonstrate credibility. As does expertise shown within your field.
Trust and visibility are two more components. Trust grows through authentic interactions and positive customer experiences. Meanwhile, you grow visibility with a strong search presence.
Finally, there is engagement. Your engagement involves your participation across multiple online channels. Stay active with this participation, and constructive. That’s how you boost engagement perception.
Check What Your Online Reputation Is
You know what a good online reputation looks like. But before you begin building your reputation into that, you must know where you stand.
At the beginning of the race, know where the starting line is.
With online reputation, you evaluate yourself with an audit. Search your company name, or variations of it, along with key employees. Check the webpages that appear in the first three search result pages. These include competitor comparisons, social media pages, review sites, and press mentions.
Compile the results you see on these pages. For instance, consider the ratio of negative reviews to positive ones on review sites. Compare the results for your business to competitors. And to what your ideal online reputation looks like.
This gives you an idea of where you need more work. You may be great at responding to reviews, yet your official website doesn’t appear in search results. As you start the process of building your reputation, you know that you are fine with responding. But your SEO needs work on the official site.
How Do You Build Your Online Reputation?
Now, the good stuff. Knowing where to go and where you’re starting is all well and good. But how do you actually build your online reputation?
Improve Visibility
People believe what they see. So, how do you improve your reputation? You stay visible across all platforms.
Get your business listings optimized. Claim your company’s Google Business profile, and complete all profile sections. Add high-quality pictures on your website and other professional social media profiles. And keep your contact information and hours updated.
In addition, consider writing keyword-rich biographies for you and your team.
All these actions aid in the visibility of your business. When your company appears more often, people get a stronger idea of your business. And having your company be consistent across multiple channels helps consumers trust you.
Interact With Customers
Always engage with your audience.
Too many businesses make the mistake of overlooking this. They either think that positive customer experiences can be ignored. Or they think that negative experiences are best ignored. Don’t ignore any of it.
Chat with customers online. Answer questions that they pose on public forums. And respond to both positive and negative reviews.
Make sure your responses to negative reviews are empathetic and professional. We all love reading a good snarky response from a business after a customer left a negative review. But, this doesn’t suit online reputation building. Now, I’m not saying you respond with fake politeness. Quite the opposite, actually. Be genuine. Just don’t focus so much on being snarky that you forget about professionalism.
This brings us to another point of encouraging reviews. Offer incentives that promote positive customer reviews. With a high level of positive reviews, future customers look past old and minimal negative reviews.
Share Your Achievements
As your business grows and succeeds, you will earn new achievements and awards. Share these online.
On social media, discuss that new award your business won. On your website, have a news article when you win a prestigious achievement. Sharing these is not bragging.
In our personal lives, discussing our achievements comes across as bragging. But when it’s professional? That perception is different. You aren’t bragging when you mention your company’s achievements. In fact, it makes your business come across more positively.
Why?
Well, because achievements showcase that you know what you are doing. It proves that you offer high-quality services. This helps customers trust your company. It gives them an idea of the reputation your brand already has in the professional world. Thus shaping the reputation you have in the online world.
Connect With Others
Building a successful online reputation is not a one-man show. Establish partnerships with big players in your industry. Doing so increases your reach. Which obviously increases your visibility.
When you partner with another business, the customers who already trust them, trust you, too. There isn’t a need for convincing them that you’re reliable. The company they already trust wouldn’t partner with you if you weren’t a reputable business.
Depending on your product, also consider partnering with influencers. The same concept applies. Influences have an audience who trusts their reputation, already. By partnering with them, that trust extends onto your business. And it grants you an immediate boost in online reputation.
How Do You Maintain Your Online Reputation?
Regularly Create Content
All the work you’ve done toward building your reputation won’t matter if you don’t maintain it.
Don’t abandon your social media profiles. Keep your website updated. Post content on your blog or other professional platforms regularly. This routine is essential for maintaining your visibility and your online reputation.
I understand. Life gets busy. Business operations become overwhelming. And, sooner than later, content creation takes a back seat.
This is something I did on my own website. I began posting regular blog articles at the beginning of 2026. Before that, the last time I posted was at the end of 2024. My life got too busy. I was feeling discouraged and felt my website was going nowhere. But taking this break harmed my online reputation.
Without regular content, your online reputation falls apart. You may take a break because you think you need it. Once you come back, you go through the process of building your online reputation again. Maintaining something that already exists is much easier.
Set up automatic posts, if you need to. Opt for shorter content for a bit. But whatever you do, do not abandon content creation.
Stay Consistent
This relates to the previous point, but I’m talking about activities outside of content creation.
Part of building your reputation involves interacting with clients. Don’t let that go. Continue responding whenever you get reviews. Maintain your incentives and reminders for providing a review. And continue your monitoring and responding to all types of feedback.
Maintaining your online reputation goes beyond regular content. It includes consistency in all areas. With consistency, you build trust.
Not being consistent creates an uphill battle. You must restore the trust lost by existing prospective customers. At the same time, you must build trust with new potential customers. And some of those new potentials already have low trust in your business because you have a poor online reputation.
Look, it isn’t worth the risk. Stay consistent with whatever strategies you implemented when building your online reputation. And that helps you maintain it.
Monitor Your Reputation
Even with consistent activity, your positive online reputation is not guaranteed.
Over time, monitor it. Search your business name often on Google. Evaluate the search results and your SEO. Check your responses to reviews. Match all of these to your goals. If they fall behind in any area, boost it back up and then go back to routine maintenance.
Consider employing some of the digital tools and monitoring software that exists. These monitoring tools make your life easier. Instead of checking everything manually, it checks it for you. It also aids in having more frequent reputation checks.
When doing everything manually, you can only monitor your online reputation every so often. These tools monitor it for you daily or weekly.
Create a Crisis Plan
With every precaution, things still happen. Don’t wait until they occur before responding. Be proactive about it. Set up a plan for when a crisis does occur.
A good crisis plan begins with evaluating the legitimacy of the source of the issue. Then, regardless of your determination, address the issue. Be transparent with your customers. Tell them what the issue is. And correct any factual issues you found with the issue.
Being upfront with your audience maintains the reputation you built. If you ignore the issue, your audience starts doubting you.
Once you share with your audience, start responding. Put out positive information and authoritative content. This reduces the visibility of the issue. When possible, work on getting the issue removed from visibility, altogether. For instance, file removal requests for material that you prove is defamatory.
As with most things, building and maintaining your online reputation isn’t difficult. But you can easily add obstacles in your own way. Stay conscious of your efforts. Go about things in a purposeful way. And you’ll be fine.
Are there other points about building or maintaining online reputation that I missed? Let me know about them!