What is Reputation Score? 6 Key Factors of Reputation Score

This post was most recently updated on July 17, 2023

Understanding your brand’s reputation can be a challenge as it is really defined by how you are viewed by others rather than your own perceptions. When a person searches for you online, they will develop a first impression based on what they find, especially on the first pages of search results. This all adds up when considering your “reputation score.”

What is Reputation Score

With this first impression in mind, a person will determine whether or not to interact with you further or continue to develop a relationship, whether it’s business or personal.

However, there are steps you can take to control the way your brand and reputation are perceived by actively monitoring and managing your Reputation Score and taking direct action in the areas you may need to improve upon to increase your score, credibility, and accessibility while cleaning up your online profile.

The first step to developing a successful personal reputation management or business reputation management strategy is to fully understand your reputation score and how it’s calculated. You’ll also learn how to check your reputation score, and what is considered a good reputation.

Contents:

  • First, What is a Reputation Score?
  • Why is Your Reputation Score Important?
  • Where Can I Check My Reputation Score?
  • Key Factors That Make Up Your Reputation Score
  • What is a Good Reputation Score?

First, What is a Reputation Score?

What is meant by “reputation score” anyways? A reputation score is a metric that helps businesses and individuals measure their online reputation. Scores are based on a variety of important online factors and data including: reviews, social, surveys, reach, visibility, etc.

Think of your reputation score to be much like a credit score for your online reputation. You can easily check your reputation score, much like you would with a credit score, and it can change over time.

Why is Your Reputation Score Important?

As noted below, there are a wide variety of factors to consider when determining your score with the use of online reputation management. Why does a good reputation score matter so much? It affects others’ opinions based on your Google search results. 

Who is Searching for You?

Since your online reputation represents how you are viewed by people and businesses all around the world, it holds a high impact on nearly every aspect of your life or career including:

  • Whether a potential client decides to do business with you versus a competitor.
  • Whether an employer chooses to hire you or offer you a job interview over another qualified candidate.
  • Whether or not you receive a promotion, bonus, raise, higher title, etc.
  • Whether or not your application will be considered for a college or university.
  • Whether or not someone agrees to a first or second date.
  • Whether or not an individual decides to vote for you in the next election.
  • Whether or not someone will want to invest in your new business or startup.

If you have a strong knowledge and understanding of how you appear online, you will find it much easier to gain success in the above mentioned scenarios and other related situations that come up in our daily lives.

What is Reputation Score - Search Volume

Individuals, companies, and corporations everywhere are now taking reputation score into higher consideration with search volume trends increasing drastically from 590 searches in September of 2018 to over 3,600 searches for the term in February 2019.

Reputation Score Search Volume - Updated

*UPDATE* Throughout the year 2019, we have seen searches for “reputation score” continue to grow even higher from around 5,400 searches in March to nearly 13,000 in the month of August.

These rising search trends show that this concept is becoming more and more of a concern holding a high level of significance in all different types of industries from colleges and universities, to grocery stores, to social media companies, and beyond.

Where Can I Check My Reputation Score?

Online platforms like MyLife and Latium have even begun to establish their own versions of these scoring systems to help users establish trust and credibility both on and offline.

The MyLife site that has approximately 300 million public pages says that almost everyone in America believes a poor reputation score can hurt you. 

*UPDATE* As of 2019, the Federal Trade Commission and the Better Business Bureau report they’ve received nearly 30,000 complaints from consumers combined about the Mylife site and reputation scores according to a recent story published on GMA.

Key Factors That Make Up Your Reputation Score

Your reputation score is based on several factors. Here are the factors for how your reputation score is calculated.

Search Results

One of the most important factors in determining your Rep Score is analyzing how you currently appear online in search results that you are associated with. For individuals, this is typically a search of your name while businesses may be interested in additional search queries such as “motorcycle repairs in (specific city or location)” or “best Italian restaurants in (specific city or location)”

While analyzing these search results, there are a variety of aspects to consider including:

  • Uniqueness of your name
  • Search volume and traffic
  • Search impressions
  • Level of competition for given search term
  • Searches related
  • Page and domain authority of listed sites for given search term
  • Number of sites on first page that are related to you vs. someone else
  • Number of sites on first page that are positive vs negative and/or neutral

Learn more about how to analyze your first page search results in our blog series about protecting your online reputation.

Content

After collecting data about your search results, the next step is to analyze the content within top ranked sites as well as content on all sites, pages, blogs, forums, etc. that relate to you or mention you in any way (positive, negative, or neutral).

Some specific areas of content that are considered in determining your score include:

  • Quality and relevance
  • Duplicate content vs unique content
  • Diversity of content (different formats including long form and short form – blogs, social media posts, website pages, press releases, interviews, news articles, etc.)
  • Keyword strength and relevance
  • Keywords connecting negative content with your positive content

Images and Video

While written content is one of the most important factors in determining your reputation score, images, video and other forms of visual content are also highly considered.

In today’s world where people want their information fast and easily accessible, visual content has become increasingly popular and utilized online. Positive images and videos can do wonders to your score while negative images and videos can easily leave you without a job or without a first date.

When determining one’s rep score, some image related factors to consider include:

  • Quality and relevance
  • Appropriateness
  • Original and custom images vs stock photos or images taken from other sources
  • Tagged photos on Facebook, Instagram, and other photo sharing sites
  • Profile photos
  • Mugshots
  • Infographics
  • Alt text and title tags

Social Media

Social media platforms can be great tools to increase engagement, build connections, and contribute to important conversations with people all over the world. However, there are also many ways social media users can slip up and fall into a personal reputation crisis with the click of a button – in which case crisis management is needed to repair your reputation.

Areas of social media that can contribute to one’s score include:

  • Number and type of social media platforms you are active on
  • How often you are posting
  • Type of content you are posting
  • Engagement with other users (how and how often)
  • Engagement on your own posts from other users (likes, shares, replies, etc.)
  • Handles and usernames (do they match your name or search term, are they all different, etc.)
  • Correct use of hashtags
  • Quality, appropriateness, and relevance of content

Links

Having an effective linking strategy is essential to building authority on your sites and profiles while also helping users find your content. When you are able to build links from outside sources such as guest blogs, news articles, directories, and more, you are building trust and credibility for your brand or business while increasing your rep score.

At the same time, building links on low quality, spammy sites or sites unrelated to your industry can penalize your sites and cause them to drop in rankings, effectively lowering your reputation score.

A few different ways links are considered in determining Reputation Score include:

  • Internal links
  • External links and backlinks
  • Nofollow links
  • Quality and relevance of links vs spammy links
  • Authority of sites where you are getting links (.edu, .gov, .org, etc.)
  • Anchor texts
  • Click-through rate

Public Sentiment & Online Reviews

Many of the above mentioned factors are elements that you can have some if not total control over when developing your online reputation. You are able to control the content and images you put out there as well as the way you behave on social media.

One thing that is nearly entirely out of your control is what others are saying and posting about you online. Things to look out for in this area include:

  • News stories
  • Online reviews
  • Comments on blogs, forums, articles, etc.
  • Content published by competitors, dissatisfied customers, disgruntled employees, etc.
  • Recency and volume of content

In many circumstances, there are ways to remove and suppress these negative sites and publications, however while they are present, they will leave a daunting impact on your overall reputation.

It is important to always be on the lookout for mentions of your brand or name with online monitoring tools such as Google Alerts so that you can attack potential problems head on before they become something bigger.

What is a Good Reputation Score?

A good reputation score varies depending on who analyzes your online reputation. For example, while a score of 5 is considered perfect on MyLife.com, that same score might be terrible on another reputation services site.

No matter where it comes from, a good score typically shows a clean, consistent presence on Google’s first page. Positive SERP rankings help highlight your best qualities whenever a friend, boss or coworker searches your name online.

Conversely, a bad reputation score is detrimental to your online reputation. It can hinder you from future opportunities professionally and potentially stifle lifetime milestones.

You can find your reputation score using MyLife.com.

In Closing

Determining your reputation score will help you discover any potential risk factors so that you know how close you may be to a crisis or how protected you are from avoiding a crisis. Remember that your score will only stay high and improve with continuous monitoring and managing of your content, sites, links, and beyond.

Reputation scores are now starting to be factored into every aspect of one’s  life from financial institutions assessing your character for loan applications to hiring managers for job interviews. The importance of a good online reputation is clearly being taken into account. 

Contact us today for a free consultation to learn more about your Reputation Score and how to improve your online presence. We provide both personal reputation services and business reputation services with a customized SEO strategy built for your unique needs.

Learn more about how our online reputation management services can improve your reputation score.

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About Reputation911

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