Visible Technologies Offers Tools to Boost Search Reputations

There’s no such thing as bad publicity, right?

The people at Visible Technologies beg to differ. The Bellevue, WA social media analysis and management company is launching a suite of services, called TruReputation, designed to help companies and individuals do everything possible to diminish negative material from the top pages spit out by search engines.

Aside from attempting to mitigate negative material, TruReputation provides tools for optimizing search results so high-ranking items are positive or better reflect the brand, said Visible Technologies SVP of Marketing Blake Cahill. “Increasingly, brands are a function of the search results that come up,” he said. “So your front door, so to speak, and the neighborhood you live in, is a collection of search engine results.”

Cahill said the first page of results from major search engines, particularly Google, essentially “is your reputation” to online viewers because “80 percent of people don’t look past the first page of results from Google.” To help people and businesses get a sense of their online image, defined by Visible Technologies as “the sentiment of online content” yielded by search engines, Visible Technologies is providing a free index representing an individual’s or a company’s Web reputation.

Visible Technologies does not offer to cleanse, or attempt to remove, negative content through methods such as threats of litigation. Instead, TruReputation works to push down the undesirable items by helping users create better content in a fashion that will be grabbed by the search engines. “If you have misaligned content, getting it off those first two pages and pushing it down is what we work with brands to do,” Cahill said. “We work with brands to outrank whatever is out there.”

Cahill said TruReputation goes beyond standard search engine optimization (SEO) practices, although it does make use of those tools. “TruReputation is a brand management and content optimization service first while using SEO principals and techniques to promote that content,” he said. To a large extent, it comes down to “creating content you want out there” and giving serious thought to the search ranking probabilities of every online posting, Cahill said.