When people search for your business, they should ideally find all positive comments/reviews about your company and no adverse criticisms. If there are negative comments, it must be your endeavor to push them into oblivion. Use these simple tips to manage your online reputation.
Please understand that your company’s reputation is your biggest asset. If it’s tarnished in any way, you can lose prospective customers, sales, employees and even existing customers.
If you do not pay requisite attention to your online reputation—bad reviews about your business will show up in search results.
The key to protecting your brand is simple – be proactive, optimize your content suitably, monitor your search results regularly and be quick to act if something negative shows up.
Optimize your site with your company name. Optimize several pages on your website using what’s probably your most important keyword phrase—your company’s name. Search engines should see your site as the ultimate authority of the industry to which you belong.
Authority on a topic is one of few key signals the search engine considers when matching content to a search query and then ranking that content among other results. By optimizing more than one page for your company name, you will keep those pages very near the top of search results.
Diversify your web presence. Your aim should be to proactively own as many slots in the Google top 10 search results for the keywords you create. Simply stated, your company should dominate on any topic related to your industry.
To achieve this type of dominance, your Web presence should be spread out among your company’s site, your blogs, and all major social media networks.
Use social media to expand your brand. Ideally if your company has a truly unique name and there’s absolutely nothing similar on the Web, then it is easy to dominate.
Get other sites to link to yours with anchor text—but avoid overdoing. (Anchor text is a hyperlinked word or phrase, that when clicked takes you to another Web page). Getting quality keyword-rich anchor text links from other sites pointing to yours is difficult.
Proactively monitor your search results at least once n three weeks. Set up Google Alerts for important keywords so you know instantly when new content about you hits the Web.
When negative comments appear, contact the creator and explain the situation. In 90 percent of cases, the creator will delete the content. If the mistake is on your part and the complaint is authentic, then publicly apologize for the mistake and make amends.