How Much Should Agencies Charge for a Reputation Management Package?

This is the best way to approach a RepMan (reputation management) package.

First look at the number of negative results, the power of the negative results, and how many results there are for that person’s name or company name: We want to figure out how much effort it will be to push these all past the first page on this query and related queries.

To assess power, we can look at the domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA) of each result we want to push down. For example, this article on the Wall Street Journal has a page authority of 45 and a domain authority of 94:

So you can see that Forbes is high, Entrepreneurs on Fire is medium-high, and StriveNGrind is low:

A DA (domain authority) above 80 is going to be at least $5K a month (could be a lot more with a high PA, too) and probably take 3-6 months to push down and keep it down.

Double that if there are more than one negative results. We have to build a lot of links across a lot of domains to get search results past these negative ones.

If there are no negative items above 30 DA and 40 PA, then charge them $2,500 a month for 3-6 months if there’s only one item and double that if more than one.

These are approximate numbers, since we can’t force Google to do what we want, we only use techniques that won’t get us banned (meaning that our work sticks), and we produce high-quality content.

Note that when there are new results that pop up, then we have additional work to do. It would generally be less effort (and cost) than if we hadn’t started, since we have our existing base from which to work. But if we had been working on pushing down some medium-powered bloggers, but then there is a CNN article about their felony conviction, it will be more effort.

You won’t see reputation management firms give out package pricing because:

• Every situation is different— we have to analyze the negative results for power, figure out a specific link and content plan to push them down, and Google changes often in response to our techniques.
  
• Successful clients won’t talk about what happened— for obvious reasons. Privately, I’ll tell you one, Sebastian Rametta.  He’s the actual Soup Nazi (from Seinfeld), who opened up 60+ locations as the Original Soupman and also sold his soup in grocery stores nationwide.  He was busted in the largest SEC fraud bust ever with mob connections. The mob money part was really nasty to push down, but you can find it if you search hard enough. That was 13 years ago and our work still is holding up.

As you know, RepMan’s work is basically personal branding + SEO on steroids, since we have to get bigger and more powerful in Google’s eyes than the media, mugshot sites, blogs, social media, and whatever.

And even if they don’t have negative results to push down, it’s better to build that base now than be in emergency mode later.

These jobs are highly profitable because not many people know how to do them, especially for high profile people who have a lot of money to pay.  Add in 30% for your take and then you have a strong package.

If they shop around, they’ll see similar pricing at reputation.com and various SEOs. But they’ll be talking to an account rep who is on the phone all day, as opposed to pros like you and me who actually have personal brands and are personally connected to high-profile clients.

They can certainly go there and then come back to us to fix what happened later. 

We do only a few of these a year since we don’t take on just anyone and we have only a few people who work on RepMan projects– folks who have been with us for over a dozen years– the same small team that worked on the Soup Man and some other folks we can’t name. 

They are full-time on our team, so they’re not doing SEO anywhere else. And few RepMan or SEO folks have people who worked at a search engine, oddly enough.