Search Engine Optimization

Are there negative things being said about your business on the internet? If you aren’t sure, the first thing you need to do is set up Google Alerts. It’s free and emails you periodically to let you know when your name or company name is mentioned by someone on the internet.

Knowing what is being said about your company on the web is important because it allows you to react quickly to negative feedback, as well as resolve issues that could cost you business. Think about it: when prospects search for information about your company and find negative results, they may choose to go with one of your competitors instead. The easiest and fastest way to control your online reputation is via social media.

Social media websites have lots of authority on the web and therefore rank well in the search engines. So, whether you want to prevent negative results from appearing in the first place or push some negative results off of the first page, creating profiles for your company on various social media websites is an effective strategy for controlling what prospects see when they search for your business’s name on major search engines.

Getting Started

First things first, you should make sure that you have a corporate website that ranks for your company name and any other trade names you’d like to protect. Then, you should start a company blog on your website so that you have a way to engage with your customers and provide positive information about your company that ranks well in the search engines. By doing these two things, you will theoretically be able to control what shows up in the first and second slots in the search engine results.

In order to control the search engine results that follow, start out by creating profiles on the four big social media sites: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace. Make sure that you use the exact name that you would like to rank for in these profiles. There are hundreds of other social media sites out there that you can sign up for, but these are the most important ones. If you’d like to develop a presence on other networks to decrease the likelihood of negative search results appearing on the first page of results for your target keyword, then creating profiles on several other social media sites is a good idea. To save you time and hassle, there are companies, such as Knowem.com, that will register you on a number of social media sites for around 50 cents per site.

Make Sure That Your Profiles Are Complete

If you want your social media profiles to make a positive contribution to your online reputation, make sure that they include avatars, bios, etc. The more information you provide, the better because then the search engines will have more text to crawl. Don’t just create an account and let it sit there collecting dust. Interact and engage with your community to give your profiles a meaningful presence.

Use tools like the aforementioned Google Alerts to monitor what people are saying about your brand in social media. Also, you’ll have to figure out how you’re going to deal with negative commentary about your brand besides through “controlling” search engine results with online reputation management tactics. Generally, the best way to deal with negative feedback is to go directly to the person who made the negative comment and politely ask them to withdraw it and find out if there is anything you can do to fix the problem.

Creating and managing your presence in social media is not the only aspect of online reputation management, but it’s an important one. Even if your business is very small or your company still doesn’t have any negative search results to speak of, it’s a good idea to start building your social media profiles now to prevent online reputation management problems in the future.