So there you are, checking out the SERPs for your company. All 10 on the first page look good, you feel good about life…

Unbeknown to you, at that very same moment, a disgruntled customer is blogging about the poor experience they had in your establishment that day. Mere minutes after they press ‘Publish’ on their blogging software of choice, their post is spidered, and the SERPs for your company suddenly look different.

So the answer to the question in the title is: a few minutes.  (Disclaimer: yes that last listing for Claytime Cafe is from my personal blog).

The same goes for the non-SERP visible results, such as on rating and review sites.  For example, while yellowpages.com may show in the SERPs that it has a listing for this company, there’s no notification to the company when a poor or negative review for their business is added to their site.  Again, a poor review can be added top one 0f these sites in seconds, so the company needs to have some way of finding out about these reviews, so that they can respond in the most appropriate manner.  Whether that means that they have some automated way of monitoring them, they monitor them manually, or they pay someone to do it, it needs to be done.  Nothing affects a business more than having a poor reputation.