If you are here, or living on this planet for that matter, you probably already know who Google is. They are the 900 pound gorilla dominating online search. If you are having a reputation problem, it’s probably also true that it lies within the Google search result pages.

Here are some current Google search statistics; in February 2010 an estimated 6.0 billion search queries were conducted at Google Search, representing 65.2 percent of all search queries conducted during the given time period.

In a month. One month. To boil that down it is over 7.5 million searches per hour. A whopping 128,000 searches per minute. An astounding 2134 searches per second. Yup, that’s power my friends. An awful lot of searches going through their system at any given second, and they are getting more and more of the search market each and every day. Projections suggest that by this time next year Google will be doing close to 10 billion searches per month.

So what does all this mean when it comes to your reputation online? The bottom line here is that people are using Google and other search engines more and more to find the products and services they want and need. If you have negative results coming up for your name, your company name, or your products in the first page of the Google results, then it is hurting your business. For this reason, Google is the primary focus of most of our reputation management campaigns for our clients.

If Google has more than 65% of the overall search traffic, then any good reputation management plan is going to focus at least 65% of the effort in any search engine optimization campaign, because that is where your potential clients are searching for you.

So here is where the rubber meets the road. Do a quick Google search for your name. The first thing you need to do is see if the auto complete feature makes any suggestions that include negative connotations. For example, if you type John Smith into the search bar, you’ll see some drop down, auto complete suggestions below the search bar. If any of these contain negative terms relating to you, click on them. Because that is what your clients and customers are doing. This feature in Google is extremely powerful, because it works. People take the suggestions, more so if they are negative, to get the dirt on the company or product they are performing the search on.

Moving on, if you don’t get any negative suggestions from the search suggestion tool, do a search for your name, or your company name. Take a long hard look at the ten listings on that page. If you see any negative listings on that page, you are in trouble. Because if you are seeing it, your customers are seeing it. If there is a Ripoff Report or a bad blog entry, people are scanning through the first page listings to see if they can find it.

Which is exactly why we build reputation management plans to control this first page of Google results. You see, Google rewards good content by listing it higher in the search results. If you create and optimize quality content for the same search terms and phrases, you can take control of that first page of Google results. Pushing that negative content down to page two or page three. Where fewer and fewer of your clients will see it. Bringing your business back to life and returning your good reputation to you.

Yes, Google is the king of search results and therein lies the keys to your online reputation. If you are having issues with your reputation in the Google search results, please give us a call at 800.818.6286 for a free reputation management consultation. We can help.