There are plenty of snake oil services that claim they can do ORM for $69 a month. Don’t even consider it. You cannot even do a proper crowdsourcing campaign for $69. Let alone develop a good SEO strategy with proper SEO experts, or develop compelling content for that matter. The man hours involved on a weekly basis is at least 20 hours of work. Now would anyone work 80 hours for $69? Anyone with a skill set?
The moment someone quotes you a price below these standards, you have to ask yourself some serious questions. We did a write up on comparing ORM services, have a look. There are important project parameters to discuss with a reputable agency in this field. Also, it’s importation to remember, don’t let anyone with a bad reputation work on your reputation.
STANDARD COST OF ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT |
|
|---|---|
| Reputation Management Project TYPE | Cost Range |
| Suppression costs (pushing down bad search results). | Should range from $900 per month to about $3,000 per month. Limited time. |
| Complete removal of negative content | A one time free of $500 to $30,000. |
| De-Indexing negative result from search engines | A one time fee of $500 to $10,000 |
| Reputation Monitoring Services | Ranges between $100 to $ 3000 a month. |
Why are price ranges so wide?
- Suppression prices are tied to a lot of labor costs. The price can sometimes even exceed $3,000 a month if the project is particularly difficult because of the sources of the negative information or the number of results to be displaced.
- Costs for removal is typically contingency based but fees are collected upfront. Escrow services should be provided by serious projects. The range is based on the difficulty to compel certain sites to comply with the removal. Most high end publications will fight tooth and nails to keep old stories online, even if in the past, these would just end up on microfiche. There are international jurisdiction issues to overcome, this makes some projects very difficult, if at all possible.
- Sometime there is de-indexing options, the fees are quite expensive because specialized lawyers are often involved.
- Reputation Monitoring services also have a wide range on pricing because it is dependent on the complexity of the monitoring, is it just search results, news, social media or the deep web. A simple Google Alerts monitoring should no more than $100 a month but is something you should also consider doing yourself. The pricing goes up exponentially as soon as expensive software of Saas is applied. For example, Radian 6, purchased by Salesforce in 2011, helps listen more intelligently to the voice of the consumers, competitors and influencers; their monitoring dashboard, which tracks mentions on more than 120 million social media sites. The dashboard starts at $1000/month. If we add the cost of service, this option should be mid way in the range ($1500-2000/month).
We list our prices transparently. If these costs appear high, or not worth paying for, you may consider the true cost of bad reputation online:Poor Online Reputation: What It’s Really Costing Your Business. A business can earn a poor online reputation through corporate scandal, poor customer service, unhappy employees and other means. No matter how it occurs, a poor online reputation can make the business far more difficult to conduct and it can increase their cost of doing business. It becomes more difficult for the business to retain customers, employees and shareholders. But how much does it actually cost a business?
The Business Cost of a Poor Online Reputation
It is estimated that businesses across the nation lose roughly $537 billion each and every year due to poor online reputations. These poor online reputations are often caused by several different things, not the least of which is bad reviews. Customer reviews are available through a variety of review websites, as well as through the business’ own online website, and are often considered by many the most honest view of a business’ products or services. In one study by Harvard University, researchers determined that for every single star increase in a business’ Yelp rating they experienced a five to nine percent increase in revenue. The researchers further uncovered the fact that there is roughly an eighteen percent difference in revenue between a restaurant with a three star Yelp rating and a restaurant with a five star Yelp rating. Where a restaurant normally produces roughly one million dollars in annual revenue, this difference is approximately one hundred eighty million dollars in lost sales every year. This is due to the fact that about eighty percent of consumers will not buy goods or services from businesses that suffer negative reviews.
On the flip side, businesses with good online reputations tend to be the leaders in their markets, as Samsung, Apple, Microsoft and Sony have all proven. It is important to have a great abundance of positive reviews, as it takes between ten to twelve positive reviews to offset one negative review. A company that also works to honestly address negative reviews can improve in their consumers’ eyes.