To safeguard your online reputation, you need to regularly Google your name and/or your company’s name. It is then that you will know what people are saying online about your brand (good, bad and the oftentimes inaccurate).
Online reputation makes all the difference when it comes to gaining or losing customers. You should be vigilantly monitoring all mentions about your company and react suitably to constantly improve your company’s online reputation.
If you fail to watch your online reputation, you could be sending prospective customers to your competitors and your existing customers may also desert you.
Of course, you can’t control what others say about your brand online, but you can certainly manage how your business generally comes across on the internet with a few helpful tools and techniques.
You can effortlessly find out what people are saying about your brand online. Start by simply searching for your company’s name and the names of your products and services — on Google and other major search engines. See what types of information come up.
Search your name along with common misspellings of it. You can also run an image search using your company’s name.
Ideally speaking, your business’s actual website along with some favorable news and reviews, should dominate the majority of the first page of search engine results.
You should be notified whenever your company is mentioned online. All you have to do is create a Google Alert. They are free, real-time email alerts that are automatically sent to your email address when mentions about your company happen online.
You can set up multiple keyword-based alerts to notify you when relevant new web content is published about your products, services and events as also those of your competitors.
It is just as crucial to monitor your competitors’ online reputations for you to stay on top of your own search results.
“Pay close attention to what people say your competitors are doing right that you might not be doing right and what they are doing wrong that you are doing right.”
The whole idea is to learn about your competitor’s online reputation to correct your own flaws and gain a competitive edge.
Your company website should represent your business in the best possible way. Remember that your company’s own website is your first line of defense when it comes to your online reputation. Your website must contain compelling brand messaging that clearly demonstrates what your company does.