If you are just starting out your online business, even if you have a strong offline business, you’ll soon get lost into the sea of the Internet – there are thousands of people competing to be on the first page of Google because there is where the competition is.
But ranking on the first page of Google isn’t an easy walk in the park. You need to set yourself as an industry expert in your niche so that people will trust you, visit your site often, order what you have to offer, which ultimately contributes into setting up a strong online brand.
So you see, you simply cannot overlook the online reputation of your business, but here are few tips.
Reputation Management for Small Business Owners:
1. Optimize Everything
Your potential customers won’t go beyond the first page to find the information, products, and services your offer.
So, if you’re NOT in the first page for brand keywords, no one will find you on the Internet. As a result, few people will know who you are and what you represent.
In order to build a strong online reputation, you have to rank on the first for at least some of the major niche-related keywords.
To rank for keywords, learn the basics of SEO or hire a professional SEO consultant to look after your site.
Follow these 3 simple steps to optimize and promote your site.
Do a keyword research to know which keywords people use to search what you’re offering
Optimize your site and content based on those keywords
Get backlinks from wide variety of sources to generate free traffic to your site (backlinks)
2. Be Active Online
Next you’ll have to take charge of your online business as online reputation doesn’t come out of a thin air. You have to be active online, but it doesn’t mean spending hours on the Internet either.
Simply post a fresh content once or twice a week, offer customer support on your social profiles, and you’re done!
Over time, you’ll have more useful content than your competitors. As a result, you’ll stand out in the eyes of your potential customers.
Once you start to get a decent number of traffic, Google and other search engines will see this as a positive sign (you have something valuable at your site), and hence, they’ll display your website content over others.
Bingo! You have a strong online reputation than your competitors. All your hard work pays at the end, though.
So start a blog, share your ideas, thoughts, product offers on social media sites like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn etc. Make sure to keep things fresh, fun and balanced!
3. Focus on Providing Genuine Services
People may say anything about your business as you don’t have control over it. But you have total control over one thing – i.e. the quality of your services and products.
So, focus on offering products and services that will help solve people’s problems and enhance their life. When you have more happy customers, their positive reviews and feedbacks will help create a strong online reputation for your business.
4. Encourage others to Post Positive Reviews
Ask each of your happy customers to write honest reviews about you (if you want to become an expert), your business and its products. Most entrepreneurs sigh away from asking their customers thinking they’re too busy, but in fact, your customers will be more than happy to share their positive experience using your products and services if it truly helped them solve their problems.
5. Know How/When to Respond
If you find some negative comments about your business for valid reasons, contact them personally and apologize. Issue a refund for their losses, and follow back with emails as how their problems are taken care of.
However, if the negative reviews are totally “invalid,” do not get angry at them, even if it was a fake post written by your competitor. Instead, contact them personally, and send an email regarding how you could take positive steps to ensure better customer service.
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Most newbie entrepreneurs make an often repeated mistake of focusing their time, money, and efforts on driving visitors to their website, while failing to keep their online credibility clean.
For a moment, step in the shoes of your customers and think about what you would look for in a business whose product and services you will most likely order?
The bad news is that many people are cautious when making their purchase decisions and will do extensive research online on the company, brand or product before making their final decision.
However, you can choose to see this as an invaluable opportunity by understanding the psyche of human behavior, using this to build up your reputation online.
In order to stay in business by converting visitors into long-term paying customers, you’ll need to prove them that you are reliable, trustworthy, and most importantly, you deliver what you promise.
Here are 7 USEFUL ways to keep your online credibility clean:
#1: Check Search Engines for Negative Reviews
The first step to keep your online credibility clean is to actually do a quick search for all major keyword phrases to see what pops up on search engines result pages (SERPs). If there are any hint of negative reviews about you, or your business and its products and services, then you’ll need to take appropriate action to remove it immediately before search engine robots pick them up!
This strategy is quite simple: If you can remove negative reviews from the 1st and 2nd page of search engines, you’ll likely keep your online credibility clean as people often do NOT click beyond those pages.
#3: Ensure No Negative Comments are on Social Media/Forums
In addition to SERPs, make sure there aren’t any negative reviews or comments on social media sites and forums. Most people spend a LOT of time on social media sites like Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, and recently, it’s been found that people trust companies that have social profile as it’s very easy to get in touch if they run into any problems down the line.
That means people are always checking out your social profiles!
So keeping it clean from negative reviews and comments is extremely important as rumors can spread in a matter of seconds through these social media sites. Do yourself a favor – check comments, status, and content on your social profiles and remove negative information about you and company, immediately.
#3: Post Positive Content/Reviews about You and Your Company
Once you’ve removed negative reviews and comments from SERPs, it’s time to replace it with fresh, useful, and informative content. Your target audiences are always looking for those positive reviews/success stories of you and your company’s products and services from others to ensure if you are “trustworthy.”
Why not give what they are asking for?
Post past success stories, helpful blog posts, and solution to their pressing question on your site’s blog. For best result, include client testimonials, or even, ask a professional reviewer to write an honest review for your business.
#4: Make Your Business MORE Transparent
Negative reviews and rumors about you company travels in a blazing speed when there’s lack of transparency/information about you and your business. Most site fail to include the following pages on their site and NOT only lose a potential client as a result, but also encourage bad rumors to spread throughout the net.
Lack of contact information such as email address, phone number, location
No money back guarantee/ return policy page
No privacy policy and terms of use page
If you do NOT have these pages, people will have reasons to be suspicious about you and your business. But it’s easy to set up these pages. Do it once and forget about it, and make your business authentic in the eyes of your potential clients!
#5: Become Active Online, Become a Blogger (If need be)
If you want to stay in the business, you’ll need to be active, both offline and online. That means, you’ll have to promote your business, products, and services by providing informative content on your blog that highlights the benefits, features, pros and cons of your products and services so that people can actually make a wise decision before making a purchase from you.
Becoming active online no way means spending hours online!
You could spend half an hour daily and do most of the things, daily. Post blogs regularly (3 to 5 times a week), respond to comments, email queries, and questions immediately to show that you’re alive and actually care about people’s concerns.
In addition, post useful, easy to grasp, and helpful contents that your visitors will love and you’ll have them keep coming back to your business, over and over again.
Start a blog, today!
#6: Make Your Site Simple Yet Responsive
You do NOT need to have a flashy and complex site with ads and banners all over the place to impress your clients. Just an easy to navigate place where your visitors can quickly and easily find the information they’re looking for will be sufficient!
Remember, if you offer a great user experience by making everything transparent and easy for your visitors, they’ll always have positive views about your business, and in return, help keep your online credibility clean.
Keep your home page fresh, make it easy to contact you, and if possible, link your site to social media sites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
And yes, do NOT forget to correct typos!
#7 Take a Legal Action against Rumors and False Negative Reviews
If you still find negative reviews displaying on SERPs after going through all these steps, make sure to contact the person directly and deal with the issue. If the claim is NOT genuine, ask them to remove all the content and links politely. But if they still do not listen to you, it’s time to get even and ask for a legal advice. You’ll need to be extremely cautious in this step as your online brand is already in dangerous territory.
Forcing people to remove the negative comments by threats (using legal action) would only back-fire you and your business. The best way is to respond positively to the reviewer by telling them how you’ll help solve their problem by taking appropriate action.
But you won’t be able to keep track of all negative reviews online. You’ll also need a healthy number of positive reviews for your business. Encourage your happy customers write more positive reviews about your business.
An important aspect of building your online reputation is to keep track of what is already been said!
Here are few tools designed to assist you in keeping track of important happenings around your business so that you can handle small problems before they grow out of control, identify opportunities to get involved, and locate people whom you want to engage.
Tools you can use to keep track of your online reputation
Setting up alerts is the best way to keep track of every mention of your name, business, brand, domain, employees, on the internet. In other words, you want to receive alerts before any problems blow out of controls and enter the search engine result pages.
And there are plenty of tools that can assist you in monitoring your online reputation, but if you’re just a small business owner or an individual, here are the most complete as well as user-friendly tools we have found for you.
Top 10 Tools YOU Can Use to Monitor Your Reputation Online
1. Feed Reader –
It’ WISE to set up a feed reader to assist you in viewing custom feeds that you will be monitoring for your specific set of keyword phrases. The reader can be something as simple as a gadget on your iGoogle page or a feed service like Google reader.
Sign up for Yahoo Alerts (free) to keep track of stocks, news by keyword, local news and feeds, and must more. You can get notifications either via email or through Yahoo Messenger, or through mobile.
4. Twitter Search –
This tool makes it extremely simple to search Twitter for any particular keyword phrase. Plus, the advanced search options lets you search by dates, location, links, sentiment, and by person, and more.
5. Technorati –
You can also search Technorati to find if someone mentions anything related with your business, blog, or any other specific keywords across wide variety of blogs. Simply subscribe to their search results feed and get instant notification of new mentions.
6. BackType –
It is probably one of the best comment solutions available on the internet because with it, you can find comments that mention a keyword, claim your comments on blogs, and view conversations through a post or article and subscribe to them.
7. Social Mention –
Like Google Alerts, Social Mention is very powerful and the results are particularly customized for social media. As Google Alerts often seems to be buggy, Social Mention, on the other hand, can immediately catch conversations pertaining to a particular keyword.
Simply subscribe to their feed, and get email notifications or you may download the report on the Excel file too.
8. BoardReader –
With this tool, you can easily track conversations across various message boards and forums. You can even filter out results by a particular domain, or by date, or even by relevance.
9. Q&A Tracking –
If anyone is talking about you, or asking questions about your company, or a particular keyword, you can easily sign up at Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers and then keep track of those conversations.
Plus, perform an advanced search for any particular keyword in your niche and don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed that is at the bottom of the page so that you can keep track of future mentions.
10. Trackur –
Finally, Trackur grabs all those keywords mentions from wide variety of sources, not only from Google Alerts. The biggest usually comes from the ability to tag, share, save, and subscribe to particular feeds.
It only cost less than $20 a month and an ultimate online reputation monitoring tool for small businesses.
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“Gossip” spreads everywhere and so quickly that it is impossible to keep track of what people are saying about you and your brand.
An irritated former employee may want to get revenge by talking negative things about your business, or your ex-girlfriend who’s bitter over the break-up, one day decides to smear your reputation.
Follow these 5 simple steps to recover your damaged online reputation:
1. Perform an online routine search –
Remember the old saying, “First impression is the last impression?” People often visit your site/blog or Google your brand to know more about you, and you don’t want them to see any negative comments, reviews, and posts about you, would you?
Well, of course, you would not!
That is why, it’s crucial to perform a routine check of your name, brand name, all product names, and anything related with your brand.
Visit each page; follow up with any comments or reviews; remove negative comments; respond them by shedding positive light on them. Remember to promote yourself as caring, respectful, and professional people.
2. Start Business Blogging –
It’s unwise to always leave outside bloggers and media to cover your business events, product reviews, press releases, and brand ideas for you.
You will not have 100% control over what they say about your brand. Their reviews and comments could be either making or breaking your business.
It could be an ideal place where you can add positive information about your business more often, update content easily, and bury past negative comments quickly before Google search engine robot index them, and recover back from damaged online reputation.
Join groups and start posting helpful content related with your niche/industry to set yourself as an industry “expert.” In addition, address any questions, concerns, and comments about your products and services.
Social networking sites are an ideal place to engage and interact with your targeted audience, and build up a strong online presence.
4. Post MORE positive content –
To help bury your damaged online reputation, you need to add MORE positive things about your business and fast. Online reputation management is all about managing how other people look at your business.
And the best way to do that is to add positive, helpful, and unique content about your business using variety of media channels such as press release sites, guest post on other blogs, article directories, YouTube, etc.
Make sure your content is highly relevant and genuine to your target audience.
5. Encourage customer reviews –
If you have a GREAT product or service (we’re sure you do), then why don’t you encourage more customer reviews?
Most of your customers will be more than happy to leave a positive review about your brand. For those who won’t, you can address them personally to think otherwise.
Depending on your niche, try to list your business on Foursquare, Yelp, Zagat, and more recent services like Raved. Focus on building a business you’ll be proud of, and your reputation will likely grow.
Damaged online reputation: Develop the business you envision!
Developing a STRONG and LASTING online reputation of your business may take some time, and you need to constantly nurture it from the ground up so that it doesn’t crash down easily.
If your online reputation is damaged and think that your situation is unpromising, do not give up. Instead, contact companies like GetYourSiteRank.com.
Even if it’s a worst case scenario, they can HELP!
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