In today’s era, the internet is a medium which makes it quite easy for just about anyone to voice their opinions. Not to mention, people today tend to do much more research online before making a purchasing decision and as a result, online reputation management is becoming more important today than it has ever been in the past. Online reputation management is the process of monitoring and protecting your brand online.
It takes years to build a brand, but it can take online moments to destroy a brand. All you need are a few bad reviews online, or some bad press to taint your overall brand and reputation online. However, there are a number of ways which can help you manage and mitigate the damaging effects of a bad review or press release online.
Create Multiple Branded Business Profiles
For any type of business, it’s a very good idea to create social media profiles such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram and more. If you’re a local business, it’s also a good idea to setup accounts on Yelp, HomeStars, YellowPages, and various other types of local service directories.
Setting up multiple branded social media and local service directory profiles helps to give your business a nice branded presence in the search results. Profiles on these websites will generally rank easily for your business’s name because of the preexisting domain authority and ideally, you want the top ten results that show up for you business name to be properties you have total control of.
Periodically Check Your Business Profiles
Managing and monitoring many online profiles for your business can be time consuming to monitor especially if you’re a business owner that’s already busy focusing on managing the business. This is where it might be a good idea to hire an SEO expert such as Plumber SEO Gurus to manage your online reputation for you.
When you have multiple business profiles it’s important to monitor each and every one periodically and respond to any negative reviews in a timely manner. Many people who leave a bad review just want to have their voice heard and by quickly responding to any clients and customers who may have had a bad experience, it helps you quickly mitigate the issue.
Setup Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a great free tool that can monitor old and new mentions of your brand across the web. This is a very powerful tool in Online Reputation Management because it will immediately send you an update when a new mention of your brand occurs online. This gives you the opportunity to quickly address the issue whether it may be positive or negative.
Keeping Things Fresh
With a new web property, you want to keep things fresh. This lets search engines know that the property is up to date and still relevant to your business. Every so often, you want to be creating posts or links to articles on your website. Moreover, to add to the overall credibility of those profiles, you should also get involved in link building. Blog comments work very well to let search engines know that your business is active in its industry online.
Summary
Today, online reputation management is more important than it’s ever been in the past. We live in the information age and today, people are doing much more research before they make a purchasing decision and many more people are voicing their opinions online about the quality of service received by businesses. This makes very important for business owners to start monitoring and managing their brand online.
