"Your brand is no stronger than your reputation, and will increasingly
depend on what comes up when you are Googled." - Allan Jenkins
Have You Googled Yourself Lately?
Over 73% of the people looking to make a local purchase first research that purchase online. What this means is that your reputation with the search engines is of enormous importance.
Let's say a customer has a bad experience with one of your employees, and decides to blog about it online. Because their blog is very popular, the negative comments they post about you rank higher than your own website for a search for your company.
Not fair, you say? We agree! That's why we offer Online Reputation Management Services - to help small and medium-sized business owners manage their reputations online and avoid having negative postings ruin your good name and brand image.
Online Reputation Management is a combination of good public relations and savvy search engine optimization and marketing techniques - two marketing disciplines that require very different skill sets. This is why most organizations are not positioned to manage their online reputations effectively. Click here to learn more about Online Reputation Management for your business.
We specialize in public relations and search engine optimization and marketing for small and medium-sized businesses, so we're uniquely qualified to help you manage and protect your brand online. We offer two levels of Online Reputation Management Service:
Proactive Online Reputation Management
We highly recommend that everyone go this route. This is digging the well before you're thirsty. By that we mean, proactively establishing your reputation online with tactics such as:
- Update your website frequently with fresh content
- Start your own business blog and make keyword optimized posts regularly
- Participate in social networking communities and forums online
- Implement an article marketing strategy
- Write and issue press releases about newsworthy company events
We'll design an Online Reputation Management program for you that meets your needs in establishing and protecting your brand online, using a variety of tactics including those listed above, and many others too. Yes, someone could still post negative information about you online, regardless of how much proactive work you do. But, by being proactive, you'll make it much more difficult for anyone to post information that outranks your own website so people searching for you online will see a balanced set of search results (as opposed to the first results being negative ones)!
Reactive Online Reputation Management
Even if you've done everything you can do to proactively manage your reputation, there is always a chance that someone will create negative info about you online, however untrue it may be. If this happens to you, your first reaction will be to respond in anger, setting the record straight. Don't do it! By posting to an already popular site, you are only giving more credibility to that site with the negative info.
If you are in a situation where someone has posted negative information about you online, info that is ranking well in the search engines and causing damage to your business, you need an aggressive strategy, employed in the right manner, to combat it. Because every situation is different, we'll create a solution that is customized to fit your needs and the needs of your brand's reputation online.
