The reputation of your business is the most important thing for your success, but with the accessibility of the Internet, it’s often difficult to control your reputation online and how others speak about you on other websites, blogs and forums.
When a potential client or customer researches your business online, what do they find? If they find forums, blogs and other websites that contain harmful information to your brand, such as people being critical of your products and services, you need to do something about it.
So what do I do about reputation management?
The reaction of most people in this instance is to sign up to the blog or forum and immediately post a rebuttal. Some SEO companies even advise that you sign up with different accounts and post positive reviews of your own company.
This is the last thing you should do. By commenting on the blogs and forums yourself you are merely adding to the content on the page, improving its rankings within the search engines, ensuring that more people will read it.
Instead, you should leave the negative comments well alone. You need to control your online reputation so that customers find only positive information regarding your business, not an Internet ‘flame war’ between you and your detractors.
How do I control my reputation online?
Reputation management involves controlling the search engine results pages (SERPs) for searches on keywords such as your company name, or website address. You need to ensure that the first page of results in Google (as this is where approximately 80% of searches will be made) do not feature any negative results for your company.
This can be done by using a series of advanced SEO techniques, techniques that we at StuckOn have devised over the years. We can aid your reputation management in such ways as:
- Optimising websites, blogs and forums that WE control for your company name
- Using high powered websites to create profiles for your company name
- Promoting already ranking neutral websites for your company name
- Using video to rank for your company name
- … and many more techniques
For more information on reputation management, and how it could benefit you, speak to StuckOn now.