Managing your online reputation - The four types of search results
1. Good results
These are great - good reviews, directories, your website, Facebook, etc... This is what you want and every good result occupies a search spot that is going to be difficult for negative information to replace.
2. No results
No results isnt a great result because all sorts of things can go on; youre not controlling your online space. It means no one else has started controlling the space. In fact, theres very few doctors with no results even left out there. No results means you need to get out there and think about how to improve and control your results.
3. Indifferent results
There are many sites that are just endless lists of doctors and addresses and they come up pretty darn well under searches for your name. You cant control that content and its pretty frustrating when the address is wrong - and that happens all the time. Most of those databases were compiled in 1999 and then the websites have just been abandoned out there. While not negative, you should try to push this uncontrollable information down the page with better, more positive, and manageable info.
4. Negative results
If youre getting a negative result on a third party site, it can resonate for years within your practice. We have seen hundreds of examples of negative websites and reviews where a patient has had a bad outcome and they build a negative page (or pages) addressing it. Theyre protected by the First Amendment to do it and these text heavy pages come up amazingly well. It can be a real problem and theres not a whole lot you can do about it after the fact. As we move on in this series of articles on reputation management well look at how to stop this situation BEFORE it escalates into a full blown negative result.
