SEO is
an ongoing process and, if you invest the necessary resources and time, it can
bring the expected benefits. You can grow your popularity and brand in the
online environment and, what’s most important for your business; it can increase
sales or obtain contracts for the services that you provide.
However,
this is not the only advantage that you can obtain through the SEO process. You
can manage your online reputation,
a very important thing nowadays, considering the great development of social
networks and the amount of information you can learn about a person only by
searching their brand name on Google.
Here are 10 professional
tips for your online reputation management.
1. Create
A Presence On Any And All Relevant Web Properties
Your
company should already have Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ accounts, at
minimum. If you’re in a highly competitive market and vertical, you may need to
be active on some additional social media sites, as well — there are dozens
available, some of which may be specific to your industry. For many B2B,
high-tech and/or professional types of businesses, having executives and
employees integrate with LinkedIn may be valuable. For visually-oriented
products, using Pinterest, Instagram and Flickr may be needed. And, most
businesses will benefit from some number of videos shared through sites such as
YouTube and Vimeo.
2. Don’t
Neglect Your Social Media Accounts
It’s
important to build out your social media accounts. Merely having a Twitter,
Facebook and Google+ account/page for your business is insufficient — you need
to develop your audience on them, too. With ongoing development, you can build
your social media accounts in order to interact with customers and to increase
your influence and engagement scores. If you don’t do this, those accounts may
not be strong enough to outrank the postings if someone begins to post negative
things. While we don’t know precisely how Google and Bing may assess the
strength of social media accounts, you can use some independent scoring
utilities to assess whether you’re achieving growth. Two of the better-known
ones are Klout and Kred.
3. Consider Your
Brands and Products
You
may need to build out online materials and social profiles for more than just
your company name. If you have brand and product names beyond your company
name, you likely ought to develop content to rank for those names as well. You
may need to develop websites, web pages, social media profiles and collateral
materials just to claim and reserve each brand name.
4. Protect
Individuals Associated With The Business
Develop
a strong social media presence for your founders’, owners’, or executives’ names,
particularly if they are distinctive. As I described above, keeping a low
online profile to preserve your privacy just leaves you wide open for any
drive-by defamers! There are quite a few businesses where the company’s
identity is fairly entangled with their executives, and a solid reputation
management strategy is vital for these. Consumers often search by name for
doctors, dentists, and lawyers (to name a few), so create collateral to rank
for these individuals if they don’t already have any.
5. Implement
Authorship Where Applicable
I
declared Authorship to be my top marketing tactic of 2013, and it’s still a
significant advantage when done properly. This is primarily for businesses
where a founder/proprietor is closely associated with the business’s identity.
Google requires authors to be individuals; thus, the author tag must be
associated with an individual Google+ profile, not with a business page. Using
the author tag assumes you’ll be doing some ongoing publishing of articles or
blog posts over time or else it’s not worthwhile — which leads us to the next
point.
6. Blog
I’m
serious! I’ve called blogging a secret weapon for local SEO because it helps
with a site’s rankings on good keywords (if done properly) and provides fodder
for one’s social media accounts. For reputation purposes, it not only can rank
for your name, it can give you a solid “home court” ground where you can
directly respond to any major assertions made about your company if necessary.
7. Listen
When
responding to online complaints or bad reviews, seriously consider that there
may be some weaknesses in your process that need to be addressed — particularly
if you get frequent negative feedback about a specific thing. Remember the
adage that “the customer is always right”? Don’t be inflexible; come up with a
creative way to give customers what they’re wanting without creating friction.
I’ve seen business processes that just seemed dumb, or service fees that just
made customers feel like they’ve been gouged. Just because you can pressure
people into paying more doesn’t mean that you should. Consider that you could
be driving existing or potential customers into the arms of your competitor.
The extra money you make on that annoying fee could be cancelled out by
business lost from those who see numerous complaints about it online.
8.
Apologize
If
you or your company messes up, fails or otherwise does something wrong, own up
to it — and make a genuine apology to those who have been affected. Being real
and transparent in apologizing can go far toward diffusing a situation and
moving the process along toward reconciliation or, at least, toward making a
crisis situation come to a close. If you do it, make sure the apology is
authentic — don’t do one of those weaselly, “I’m sorry you allowed my actions
to make you feel bad” statements that are disingenuous nonsense. Also, try to
make amends in some way, unconditionally.
9. Don’t
Get Into Online Arguments
It’s
very easy to get sucked into this — but even if you’re technically right, you
might lose out overall by just coming across as petty, harsh or unprofessional.
Worse yet, you might actually be wrong… and once you get emotionally riled up,
you could end up saying and doing things that damage your reputation. (For a
dramatic example, read about the epic Facebook meltdown of a husband-wife
restaurateur team.) The best approach is to diffuse situations and take
communications offline to try to reconcile. Be nicer in your online
interactions than you even think you need to be. Your professional responses
may win more customers than being “right” in an online disagreement. Feel
yourself getting drawn into escalating conflict? Walk away from your computer.
10. Make
The Investment
Reputation
development requires an investment, both in time and money. Most small, local
businesses are either ignoring proactive reputation management or they are
doing it themselves, on a shoestring, and on an as-needed and
as-they-have-time-to-do-it basis. I’d argue that social media and proactive
reputation management should be considered vital elements, not nice-to-haves.
Further, if you don’t have experience in interacting with online communities,
doing it yourself may not be good enough or may exacerbate any issues that can
arise. So, make the investment — and if you don’t have the time to do it, don’t
know how, or just aren’t getting the job done, hire someone to handle it for
you.
