Your business took years to build, and a single negative review or harmful news story at the top of search results can tear it all down in just a few seconds. Maybe you have an unhappy former employee who posted false claims, and now those lies are outranking your actual website. Or there’s an old lawsuit from ten years ago that keeps showing up each time anybody searches for your company name.
Online reputation management has become something that you absolutely need now because information spreads faster and sticks around longer than it ever has before. The ORM industry itself has grown from a $319 million market to an expected $876 million market by 2030.
WebiMax has an interesting online reputation management strategy. Their methods have evolved way past the basic crisis response into full-scale brand protection systems that monitor everything from Google results to niche industry forums. What started as a Camden-based startup is now a company with over 100 employees who work on ORM, along with other online marketing services for their big business clients.
Here’s how WebiMax’s ORM services can help protect and build up your online reputation!
How WebiMax Built Their ORM Services
WebiMax has been around since 2008, and online marketing was very different then compared to what we know today. The company started out offering only SEO and PPC services to its customers. Pretty soon, though, they realized that most of their clients actually needed help with something that was way bigger than just those two services.
The move into ORM alongside their existing services made perfect sense for lots of reasons. Most of their big business clients were already on retainer with them for help with their search rankings and paid advertising campaigns, and these same businesses had negative reviews and unflattering news articles that kept appearing whenever anyone searched for their brand name. WebiMax recognized the opportunity to solve all these interconnected problems under one roof, and it meant that their clients wouldn’t have to manage relationships with three or four different agencies anymore.
WebiMax’s reputation management strategies have had to evolve quite a bit alongside Google’s algorithm changes over the years. In the early days, if you had an exact match domain, you could own the entire first page of search results, and the content directories had enough juice to bury negative content a few pages deep. Every time Google released a big algorithm update, WebiMax had to go back to the drawing board and work out what would work next. Eventually, the team realized that shortcuts were always temporary and the only way forward that would last was to build legitimate, positive content that actually deserved to rank well.
WebiMax has always focused on large company clients, and this focus has really influenced how they’ve built out their entire service model. Big corporations have these massive organizational charts with layers upon layers of management, and each layer has multiple stakeholders who need updates and reports all the time. A Fortune 500 company requires a completely different approach for online reputation management than what would work for a local restaurant or a small retail shop. WebiMax built its whole operation around what these large businesses actually need, and it’s been doing it this way from the very beginning.
Advanced Systems That Monitor Your Brand
WebiMax has built a reputation management system that goes deeper. They monitor search engines and social media around the clock, as most reputation management services do anyway. What makes WebiMax different is the scope of their coverage – they also watch review sites, news outlets and dozens of other places where businesses can get talked about. Negative content can pop up anywhere online, and it tends to happen at the worst possible times. Their system catches these mentions across all these different channels before they become big problems for their clients.
The technology behind their system pairs automated scanning tools with human reviewers who know what they’re looking at. The software can process thousands of mentions in just a few minutes, and that’s pretty effective. The issue is that machines don’t always catch the context or those small changes in tone that matter. A human reviewer can quickly tell the difference between a person with a one-off bad experience and something that might spiral into a reputation crisis for your company. Their alert system has multiple tiers that correspond to different threat levels – it’s well-designed. Not every mention needs the same level of urgency after all. If a complaint about your business starts to gain traction on Twitter and looks like it might go viral, that alert goes straight to the top of the priority list. A single negative review buried on some obscure forum probably just gets rolled into your weekly summary report instead.
The sentiment analysis component works well because it helps separate the noise from the threats to your reputation. They’ve become very effective at telling the difference between a legitimately unhappy customer and what could be a coordinated smear campaign from a competitor trying to damage your brand. Without this analysis, you’d probably be stuck in non-stop crisis mode whenever anyone posted anything negative about your business. WebiMax actually tracks a much wider range of the places that matter. Professional forums in your industry can completely change how colleagues and competitors view your business. Glassdoor reviews can directly affect whether talented candidates will even think about your job openings. Those dusty old local business directories still matter quite a bit for smaller companies, even with everyone being obsessed with social media today.
The toughest part of reputation work is how you track the corners of the internet that aren’t accessible to standard tracking tools. Private Facebook groups, member-only forums and password-protected communities need much more effort to monitor well. The problem is that these closed spaces are right where reputation problems like to bubble up before they eventually spill over onto more public sites where everyone can see them.
Push Down Bad Content with Good Assets
The suppression side of their strategy is pretty clever from an SEO perspective. Negative content has a way of hanging around online indefinitely. The great news is that it can absolutely be pushed down to the third or fourth page of Google results, and hardly anyone scrolls that far anymore. WebiMax has mastered the art of pushing up other web pages to outrank any unflattering content that could be floating around. In some cases, they might completely revamp your company’s About page, or they’ll take those forgotten blog posts from last year and refresh them with new information that search engines can’t resist.
As for the content creation side, WebiMax goes all out across every platform that matters. Press releases about your latest accomplishments, microsites dedicated to different parts of your business and brand new social media profiles that actually look professional – they take care of everything. They also get you featured as a guest author on relevant industry websites. News articles and official company announcements are especially helpful because search engines usually give them priority placement in the results. What’s interesting is that Google is completely fine with this type of reputation management work.
You do need to manage your expectations with this process. The suppression work takes time – usually somewhere between 3 and 6 months before the search results actually start to change in your favor. Any new positive content you create needs to build its own authority and climb up through the rankings bit by bit. There’s no magic shortcut that makes it happen faster.
WebiMax also knows how to make the most of the assets you already have lying around. I see this all the time – businesses with LinkedIn profiles that they created years ago and never touched again, or great media coverage from way back that nobody ever bothered to optimize for search. Instead of building everything from scratch, they’ll take these existing pieces and turn them into something that works in your favor.
How WebiMax Manages Your Business
WebiMax has a very thorough process for reputation management, and they always get an assessment of your current online presence. They’ll comb through old news articles that have practically disappeared from search results, and they’ll track down social media posts from years ago that nobody remembers. They even pull up archived web pages from the Wayback Machine that clients don’t realize are still floating around out there.
The discovery phase is really important, and WebiMax knows how to handle it. Their team digs deep and asks those tough questions that most agencies would rather skip. Maybe an employee went rogue on social media a few years back. Maybe a product issue still surfaces in customer reviews occasionally. Or maybe somebody filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau that never got resolved. Everything matters because it shapes the entire strategy. Different industries bring their own challenges too – healthcare organizations face constant HIPAA violation issues, financial firms work through compliance minefields, and restaurants can watch their reputation crumble over a single food safety incident.
After the audit is done, WebiMax builds a completely custom campaign that’s designed specifically for what they’ve found out about your particular business and its challenges. A local restaurant chain with three locations is dealing with a very different set of problems than a national software company that has customers spread across every state. Geography matters in reputation management strategy because negative reviews in Dallas won’t necessarily hurt your Boston operations at all, and WebiMax takes all these variables into account when they design your campaign.
Communication with WebiMax is refreshingly simple from day one. Most clients start off with weekly reports so they can stay on top of their progress, and once everything calms down and the results become more predictable, those reports usually switch over to monthly updates. Every client gets paired with a dedicated account manager who takes the time to get to know your business inside and out. This person takes care of all your reputation management needs from that point forward. If an emergency pops up, they jump on it right away – there’s no need to wait around for your next scheduled check-in.
Their training covers how to respond to negative reviews, what language to stay away from in public replies and how to de-escalate situations before they spiral out of control. I’ve seen this training pay off several times when minor complaints pop up outside of normal business hours or between scheduled check-ins with the WebiMax team.
Costs and the Results You Can Expect
WebiMax doesn’t publish its exact prices online, and when you dig into how reputation management actually works, it makes plenty of sense. Every business faces very different challenges with its online reputation. A local restaurant that has a handful of negative reviews on Google needs a very different strategy than a national brand that’s watching as its reputation tanks across every big platform.
The way most businesses work with WebiMax is through monthly retainers, and that’s pretty standard for this industry. Reputation management isn’t something you can fix once and then walk away from. Your business needs someone to watch activity continuously across all the sites where customers could be talking about you, and somebody has to be ready to step in right away when new problems come up. Of course, some businesses choose to bring them in for specific projects only. Having one particular problem that needs fixing and feeling comfortable taking care of the rest yourself is definitely an option.
What you’ll actually pay depends on a few factors, and each one can significantly change the final price. Bigger businesses almost always pay more, and for valid reasons – they have more mentions to track, more sites to monitor and usually multiple locations that each need attention. Industry matters quite a bit as well. Healthcare providers and financial services businesses face much stricter laws around what they can say and how they can respond, and their audiences are usually more skeptical from the start.
What WebiMax focuses on is demonstrating how reputation improvements translate into actual business results. Are the leads that are coming in now higher quality than before? Are talented job candidates actually excited about joining your company instead of just needing a paycheck?
The timeline for seeing results depends on what your business is trying to fix or achieve. Crisis response moves fast – you can have a team in place working within hours when you need them. But trying to rebuild trust after something bad has happened is going to take much longer, and we’re talking about months or sometimes years of steady work to get back to where you were before.
Monitor and Manage Your Reputation
WebiMax has come a very long way from where it started, and the change is actually pretty remarkable if you take a step back and look at it. They used to be the company you’d call when something went wrong and you needed damage control fast. Now they’ve evolved into something far more advanced – a company that actually helps businesses build a foundation for long-term success. The whole way they work shows just how much the reputation management industry itself has matured and developed over the past decade or so.
The premium services they provide are very much built for big businesses – the ones with deep pockets and dedicated teams who can use all the bells and whistles that are in the package. Smaller operations or solo businesses will probably want to find something that’s either easier to use or easier on your budget. However, everything has changed dramatically in the past few years. Most of the business happens online now, and customers share their experiences on every platform they can find. Reputation management used to be optional. But now it’s become something you need for survival. A single viral post can spread across the internet within hours and completely change the direction of a company. The speed and scale of it all would have been unthinkable even five years ago.
Your online reputation needs regular care and attention – it’s not something you can fix once and then leave alone. A garden is probably the best comparison because you need steady work, adjustments when conditions change, and you have to watch for problems before they get out of hand. The work just continues day after day. But the payoff can be tremendous when you do it right.
For those committed to their online reputation, at Reputation.ca, we have Canada’s top experts in review management, social media strategy, public relations and crisis response. We specialize in everything from emergency situations to stronger online foundations for businesses. Contact us now for expert help that fits your goals and challenges!
