What is Online reputation management?

For a local business, reputation management is mostly review management. It has three components: monitoring what is being said across Google, Facebook and whichever industry platforms matter in your category; generating a steady flow of new reviews from real customers; and responding to what comes in, particularly the negative reviews.

It is worth separating from crisis communications, which is a different service that also gets called reputation management. Crisis work — search suppression, media response, handling a serious public problem — is priced in the thousands per month and is not what a local business with a 4.2 rating and too few reviews needs.

The mechanism is unusually direct. Review volume and recency are local ranking factors, so the work affects where you appear; and the review profile is what a customer reads before choosing between the three businesses in the map pack, so it affects whether you are chosen. Few marketing activities influence both halves of that sequence.