Almost all the companies make sure that their name has a good reputation among their target audience whose buying behavior depends on their reputation. Any negative comments or feedback to their reputation can be very bad for the company and spoil the goodwill generated with years of hard work. In the virtual world, to maintain a good social media online reputation, you need the services of an social media online reputation management (ORM) service that has the capability to monitor and scrutinize your company and implement the right strategies so that the message reaches the customer in an efficient manner. To maintain your online reputation and protect your brand you have to be proactive and your content should be appropriately optimized. Also you have to monitor the search results regularly and take care of the negative comments and be realistic. Some of the online reputation management tips for better ranking are as follows:
Optimization of your company name:
Your company’s name is the important key word and it should be optimized in almost all the pages of your site. The best place to project your company name is in the HTML title tag and the URL especially on pages describing “about us” and “contact us.” The search engine should see your site as the ultimate authority of your company. Authoritativeness is one of the key factors the search engines consider while ranking. By projecting your company’s name, you give greater visibility and also help to push down bad contents and keep your company’s name in the top rankings.
Your presence should be diversified:
Your main aim should be to use as many key words as possible proactively to be in the top ten results of the search engine so that it shows your company’s dominance on that particular topic. The negative comments, which you have no control on, should be balanced with positive comments that are in your control.
Utilize social media sites to expand your brand presence:
To be in the top ten results you should spread your presence in different social media sites like Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and so on, so that the search engine sites recognize your company as authority of that particular brand and your ranking comes in the first page of the results.
Choose LinkedIn:
Social media marketing takes lots of time and effort and to limit your resources it is better to choose LinkedIn as the first priority. LinkedIn ranks higher than other social media sites because companies tend to search LinkedIn instead of Google for professional services.
Use anchor text to link other sites:
Anchor text hyperlinked to quality key word takes you to another web page. Search engine sites normally use anchor texts to determine the importance of the page linked and raise the ranking in the results.
Search results should be monitored once a month:
You should keep track of your company name in Google at least once a month or more often so that you will know immediately if any new content about your company hits the web. You should also check other result pages in Google to see if there are any negative comments which may end up in page one within no time. You should also track Wikipedia which presently is the top ranking in search engines and make sure that your company name is there in the top ten.
Contact the creator to counter the negative content:
Negative comments are inevitable even if you monitor the results proactively and when negative comments appear the best way is to immediately contact the creator and ask them how his feeling can be made positive. If that is not possible leave a comment to him that you have taken necessary action to make the situation right. It is very important to influence search engine results because it is very difficult to suppress negative comments when it appears.
Offline reputation also should be paid attention:
If negative contents become a regular trend you should analyze yourself because your offline reputation will catch on to the online world very fast. The best way to deal with it is to encourage your happy customers to give feedback and testimonials so that your online reputation will automatically get fixed.
Your Turn:
What is your online reputation management tips for small businesses owners?We’d love to hear your thoughts.