Online reputation statistics change regularly. This guide was last updated December 2019.

If you’re like many brand management professionals you might lie awake at night wondering when the next emergency will upset your well laid plans. We understand. The online reputation management world smolders with tales of tragedy, falls from grace, and salacious rumors that can destroy careers and entire businesses. As with any threat, a little knowledge can go a long way. These facts and statistics should help. 

Are you the only person in the world with your name? Probably not. We work too hard maintaining our reputations to fall victim to someone else’s mistakes. This can happen if someone with the same name as you or your company is involved in a scandal or some type of negative publicity. The reputational downfall associated with their name can affect you since you share the same name and, as a result, the same search results.

Sometimes the actions that other people take can affect your own reputation in a very serious way.

• What do you do when someone with the same name as you is involved in a scandal?
• How do you distinguish yourself if you have a very common name?
• What tools can you use to monitor what is being said about your name online?

People will compare your brand with that of your competitors long before they contact you. Sentiment analysis allows you to track the opinions that people are expressing about your brand online, whether they are positive, negative, or neutral. Sentiment monitoring and analysis tools and techniques will give you a solid understanding of the status of your reputation online and help you to target your own content plan to either improve negative sentiment or to reinforce positive sentiment.

Think about the last time you bought something online. How did you decide what to buy? You probably searched for whatever you wanted and read a few reviews. Maybe you found a negative review and that was your cue to move on to the next option.

Every additional 1-star improvement can increase business 9%. Think about that. 

Whether you own a coffee shop or an auto body repair, chances are one of your main sources of business is from your Yelp page. By this point, you’ve surely put the time and effort into making your profile stand out from the rest of the crowd.

However, the work doesn’t end there. You must continue to manage your Yelp reviews to make sure the right people are leaving reviews, the positive reviews outnumber the negative, and that any issues are being addressed.

Reputation capital is the value of the intangible assets of a business. Anything from reviews to brand identity can build reputation capital, and it all boils down to one word: trust. How much do people trust your business? The more trust there is in your business, the greater its reputation capital.

• A positive reputation enables you to better control your prices, and achieve industry recognition and thought leadership.
• Businesses with a strong reputation capital can overcome a crisis easier than those with negative reputations.
• Reputation capital is both one of the most important aspects of any business and the most difficult to quantify.

If you're here, you probably know exactly why reputation's such a big deal in 2019. You want you or your company to have access to the best opportunities, and a bad reputation can prevent that. A great reputation will open doors to fantastic opportunities and (if you're a business) unhindered access to your ideal client base. Here are just a few other benefits of a good reputation:

• More business opportunities
• A better selection of prospective employees
• Higher company value
• Lower marketing costs

Why does it take six months for a website to rank? We get asked this quite a bit. For the most part, it's because there is a lag time of between 10 and 20 weeks before listings start to improve in search results. The exception to the rule is viral content—if users signal content is of superior value, and they do so quickly, search listings can improve in hours. Unfortunately, not every piece of content is going to go viral. Spammy, low-quality SEO can have a quick effect, but it tends to rapidly off again and will more often than not make things worse.

An online reputation management (ORM) firm isn't a public relations firm. PR firms tend to be more relationship-based, whereas ORM firms tend to be more technical and content-oriented. The best online reputation agencies use PR firms as a go-between with publishers while they work their magic behind the scenes. ORM firms also tend to operate in stealth mode, often quietly supporting PR campaigns in the background.

Reputation management and public relations (PR) are often confused. Although the two share similarities and may be used in conjunction with one another, PR is more forward facing and visible to members of the public. Online reputation management (ORM) services often occur behind the scenes and are not as obvious to casual observers. Think of reputation agencies as the "man behind the curtain."

Want to remove images from Google? Sometimes negative search results take the form of images. Most often negative images cannot be removed from the internet. When they can be removed it is usually from the blog post, mugshot site, or article on which they reside and they must be removed by the publisher. Google will remove some images from search results under certain circumstances, but it is rare. Here's what to do when an image cannot be removed from the source or from search results.