If you talk to someone about your business, you can guarantee that they will whip out their smartphone and Google you. They look for where your business is located, what you do, what your employees are like and, most importantly, what people think about you. If there is a negative opinion out there, then the person you were talking to will probably take their business elsewhere. This is the strength of your online reputation, and why it is vital that you engage in online reputation management.
Important Online Reputation Management Techniques
You must make efforts to stop your business from being damage. To do so, you should:
- Find out your current position. Google yourself and see what you find. If this includes negative reviews, you have to find ways to minimize their impact. You can achieve this through search engine optimization, pushing the bad deeper into Google and the good further up.
- Make sure your listed on the first page of Google. Anything after that starts to get invisible. Almost nobody looks on page 3 or beyond. Your goal is to make sure that the top 10 results are all good opinions.
- Make LinkedIn your best friend. The world is all about social media right now, and LinkedIn is one of the only ones that is all about being professional, but in a social way. You can ask partners and customers to endorse you, which is also a good search engine optimization technique. If you are a business to business (B2B) company, then LinkedIn is even more important, as this is what people will use to find you.
- Link to others and watch them link back to you. This is about building online relationships with other people, and it is very important. Once you have an established relationship, you can help each other by sharing positive content and news.
- Set up a Google alert so that you know when something new is said about you. Besides this, you should run a proper reputation audit at least once per month. Type in your name or your product, and scan Google’s first three pages to see if there are negative opinions out there. If there are, you must address them before your brand is damaged.
- Speak to those who have posted the negative opinion. Be open and publicly try to offer solutions in a respectful, professional manner. This will show others that you are trying.
- Don’t forget about your offline reputation. If you have a bad reputation on the street, it will affect you online as well.
The internet is a fantastic thing that has changed the world. It is also the world’s greatest memory bank, and it will never forget anything, even if it is something bad about you. While you can’t do anything about that, you can make sure that the positive things are much easier to find, thereby establishing an overall positive reputation and brand image that your customers can trust and rely on.
