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 an all-around reputation management powerhouse, creating a custom approach for each of their clients. Get your free quote today.

NetReputation is a great choice for organizations that need to go on the offensive against negative results and sentiment about their brand. Schedule a free consultation to learn how they can help you.

InternetReputation.com helps customers through a blend of review management, reputation monitoring, and personal brand services. Reach out to them today to get a consultation.

When it Makes Sense to Invest Into Online Reputation Management

Many startups and businesses expanding into new markets use online reputation management providers to build a positive reputation from scratch. It’s a lot like credit–no online reputation can send a bad message.

Online reputation companies help put more information about your brands on the web through new reviews and positive PR.

On the other hand, it can also be a good idea if a specific incident, bad reviews, a scandal, or something else entirely is creating a distrusting narrative. Maybe your company had a credit card breach, your CEO was arrested, or a viral post spun out of control.

Good news: reputation management companies have the experience and skills to react swiftly, get ahead of negative narratives, and reshape the conversation in your favor.

They know how to 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.

Leaning on an online reputation management service if you aren’t worried about your reputation is little less common. Most of you who fall into this category can continue what you’re doing. If you’re confident in your product, services, customer service, and branding strategy, you probably don’t need an online reputation management company just yet.

But some larger businesses with a well-established reputation gain a lot of value using firms proactively to ensure their online reputation remains undamaged.

#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

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.

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

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

One lapse in judgment and your rep online is in the toilet.

That 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.

So protect your brand from day one.

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

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.

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 – 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.

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.

You’ll need to reach out to Podium for a free consultation and custom quote. 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.

#5 – 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

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

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.

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

When you think of a business that has stood the test of time, how do you think it’s done? 

It was done with a plan and a long-term approach towards brand supremacy. Big Leap is the provider you want to build a relationship with if you are starting your journey and want to move towards this promised land of customer loyalty and reliability.

Big Leap creates and improves your reputation through content and social media like many other providers, but with an eye on the long haul. Their slogan is “Digital Marketing Built on Trust” which is something that only happens over time with a consistent plan. 

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. 

Their reputation management process can be simplified into three simple steps:

• Scour the web for information about your brand
• Bury the negative results
• Grow the positive information

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 will begin to implement its plan for driving the positive messages and the messages you control toward the top of your brand’s search results. Big Leap generates 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.

But, again, where they shine is in strategizing and expanding this plan for the long-term future of your company. No matter how ambitious your goals are, Big Leap is capable of helping you chart a course to the top. And, with their service offerings beyond reputation management, they can help you achieve customers that are loyal for life.

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.

#7 – 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.

#8 – 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.

#9 – 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

When you go to a restaurant, you know exactly what dish will arrive after you order it. It’s quite simple in that example, but that’s also how it should be with an online reputation management company. It should be crystal clear what steps it takes to repair your reputation.

You don’t want to guess at what you’re getting—you want clear performance indicators and procedures with checks and balances. You also want to ask for what tangible metrics they provide and what results will look like when the provider is doing what they say they are. 

REQ, for example, 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. 

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.  

If you think you are getting a content strategy that builds your reputation organically over time with podcasts, and blog posts (the way Big Leap does), but instead you are getting a search engine result improvement strategy, which takes the approach of suppressing negative reviews already existing online, you’re going to be disappointed with the ultimate result. 

That’s because a search engine-oriented approach is not building your brand loyalty or enticing more leads because of excellent content at all.

It’s not necessarily Big Leap’s fault. That’s simply their pet approach to reputation management.

But this is a good example of how a lack of clarity can 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. 

They will do research, yes, but they might not know your customers the way you do, or where they spend most of their time online. So, having a clear view of what key targets you want to start with can give your provider a launchpad for testing their approach.

Ultimately, you don’t want to simply read through some of a reputation management service’s website and sign up immediately. You should reach out to the service and explain the kinds of problems you are having to get an idea of whether they can help (and how much). 

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.

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.