Managing Your Online Reputation
Posted by Yvette | Under Online Marketing Tuesday Mar 16, 2010
As business owners we’ve all been there. An employee makes an honest mistake. We do all that we can to rectify the situation, but sometimes we simply can’t get back for the customer what they lost, be it time, a special occasion, or a hard to find product. The truth of the matter is that being willing to bend over backwards to please customers isn’t always enough.
Years ago, small business owners didn’t really have to worry too much about one dissatisfied customer. The customer might tell their friends and even their family about their disappointment with your company, but they probably weren’t going to take out a full page ad in the New York Times or find some other way to share their woes with the world. Until now….
Fast forward to the new millennium where consumer generated media is all the rave. People use their blogs, twitter accounts, and customer feedback sites to seek their revenge on companies they feel have done them wrong. According to Wikipedia, “if a company website has a negative result directly below it then up to 70% of surfers will click the negative result first rather than the company website.” Ouch! A full page ad in the New York Times might actually do less damage than an angry blog post with consistently strong SEO.
Now, let’s talk about the good news. While you can’t erase blog posts that paint your company in a negative light, you can work to ensure that those posts do not appear on the first page of search results when people search for your company name.
First and foremost, you need to know what’s being said about you. A simple way to do this is to sign up for Google Alerts or use Trackur. Either of these programs will alert you when something gets posted on the web about your company or even your key personnel.
Second, do all that you can to get high rankings for your company name, best blog posts, press releases, and news stories that mention your organization. For the basics on how to get high rankings, check out our free guide, “6 Tips on How SEO Can Help You Grow Your Business.”
The goal is that when people search for your company name, they get several pages of positive results. If the negative results are on page three or four, chances are that few will ever find them. In a world where anyone can create media that’s read by millions, it’s important to take an active approach to managing your online reputation.
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