An Introduction To Reputation Management

Internet marketing skills are not only useful for promoting your website and bringing more attention to your business. One of the other great uses of internet marketing is to craft your image and reputation to ensure that the general public see your business the way you want them too. This is what’s known as ‘reputation management’.

What is Reputation Management?

The general idea behind reputation management is to ensure that your business is perceived online in the way you want it to be.

This is something that will always be an aspect of SEO to an extent. For instance, the moment you create a website for your company, you will be dealing with reputation management to an extent. That’s because a website is going to contain copy that promotes your products and services and which thereby improve the reputation of your company. As you then promote your site, more people will see it, and your business will gain more positive exposure.

But in some cases, reputation management can mean a bit more than this. For instance, it may be that another website or blog is making an effort to try and undermine your business: perhaps they have published a bad review, or maybe they’re spreading false information. What’s worse, is that in some cases, their content might rank higher on Google than yours. In such a scenario, you might then find that someone searching for your business would then be greeted by bad reviews/and or misinformation. It might even bring up a campaign from your competition!

The basic aim of reputation management then is to ensure that the ‘loudest’ message online regarding your business, is the message that you want to perpetuate.

How Reputation Management Works

In order to ensure this, there are many different strategies you can use for reputation management. One option would be to simply try and use SEO in order to promote your own site and content above any negative or misleading content. You could also ensure to address any issues people are taking with your business directly on your site. This way, even if someone is searching for controversy surrounding your business, it’s your side of the story that will be prominent.

You can also perform SEO on other sites and blogs that are helping spread the message you want to spread. Perhaps you receive 90% positive reviews, but for some reason that negative 10% are ranking more highly. With SEO, you could then promote the other 90% such that those other sites were at least as visible, creating a more balanced view.

Another option is to address any concerns that customers may have directly. If you come across a bad review for instance, then you could comment in the comments section in order to address the matter head on and show that you care about your customers’ experience.

Be careful though to only use ethical online reputation management. While it’s only right that you should want to help positive reviews and comments to gain visibility, effectively ‘silencing’ criticism is not playing fair and ironically could damage your reputation in the long run.

Oh, and do you know what truly is the best way to improve your reputation? To continue to provide great value and services!