What is online reputation management?
Online reputation management is the practice of monitoring, influencing and responding to what people find when they look a business up. For a local business that means reviews, star ratings, business listings and public replies across Google, Trustpilot, Yelp, Tripadvisor and the sites specific to its trade.
Also called: ORM, reputation management.
For a company with a sales team, reputation management is a marketing function. For an owner-run business it is closer to admin: someone has to notice the new review, decide whether it needs an answer, write the answer, and keep the opening hours right in four places at once. The work is not hard. It is relentless, and it happens on evenings and weekends.
That is why the category has consolidated around software rather than agencies. The job splits cleanly into things a tool does well (watching every source, alerting, drafting, keeping listings in sync) and things only the owner can do (deciding what is true, and what tone to take with an unhappy customer).
The measurable outcomes are narrow and worth stating plainly: how many reviews arrive, how quickly they get a reply, what the average rating does over time, and whether the business details people find are actually correct.
Common questions
Is online reputation management the same as SEO?
No. SEO is about ranking a page in search results. Reputation management is about what those results say once someone finds them. They overlap on local search, where review count and rating are among the signals that decide local ranking.
Can you remove a bad review?
Only if it breaks the platform's own policy, for example spam, a personal attack, or a review of the wrong business. A truthful negative review cannot be removed, and any service promising otherwise is selling something that does not exist. The realistic move is a good public reply.