Online reputation is today critically important as any stray negative search results (if not timely attended) can irreparably hurt your business. Same is also true if your company lacks any presence in the search results at all. Regardless of the issues you encounter, having consistent control of your online reputation is the only right solution.
You must learn some of the most effective online reputation management tips to stay and survive and protect your business.
Online reputation management (ORM) can be simply explained thus. Go to Google or any major search engine, do a search for your name, your company’s name or your product’s name and view what shows up in the search results.
If you see something negative or see only a couple, or nil results for a website or blog that you control – then you have to do some serious online reputation management work.
Online reputation management – simply stated – is all about establishing yourself as a credible, authoritative resource for whatever you do and keeping the most relevant, useful results about you or your business on the first page of the search engines.
Imagine a prospective or current client sees something negative about you or your business as a top result, and then you are incurring a huge risk of losing sales to competition.
With the advent of the internet, reputation management has assumed tremendous importance for many businesses as mobile applications and websites allow competitors and other unscrupulous elements to litter the Internet with whatever they please.
This transparency is a welcome sign as it gives power back to the consumers. But, unfortunately, there will always be that one stray competitor or some rogue element that harbours the bad intention to bring down your company because of some bad mistake you might have made.
However, an impregnable reputation management campaign can help your business not only suppress negative or damaging search results, but it can place your most important business news, web assets and client interactions at the top of search results pages.
The key step to managing your online reputation is to protect and preserve your brand name online. Whether your brand is your name itself, your business name or your product name, you need to make sure that none can misrepresent you online by controlling a piece of your brand.