Your company’s most important asset is its reputation. You can lose partners, employees, sales, and customers once it is tarnished.
It is worth paying attention to even if it isn’t breaking news. Many businesses don’t bother to see how their company looks when they Google themselves. It is a good indicator of what type of online reputation they have.
In order to help you protect your business brand, here are some online reputation management tips.
Use Your Company Name To Optimize Your Website
Your company name is your most important keyword phrase on your website and you should use it to optimize several pages on your website.
You might be wondering why this is a good idea/. When you do so, you will be seen as the ultimate authority by Google on your company. The search engine looks for authority on a topic when it matches content on the web to search queries.
You’ll get ranked higher when someone comes looking for your company. You will keep the pages that you have optimized for your company name at the top of the search results. There are two major benefits to doing this. You will give your website more visibility and you will limit the visibility of websites that have negative things to say about your company.
Best practices include using your company name in important locations such as the URL and within the HTML title tags. Do this in particular on your About Us and Contact Us pages.
Make It LinkedIn If You Only Use One Social Network
It takes a lot of effort to manage social media. LinkedIn is the single most important social media platform to focus on if your resources are limited. The profiles on LinkedIn rank higher than other types of content on social media. If you have a B2B company, searches on LinkedIn are more common when people are looking for professional searches than searches on Google.
Contact the Creator Of Negative Content
You might find an unpleasant surprise when you Google your company one morning, even if you are proactive about monitoring your company’s reputation. You are more likely to find negative content in the top search results as your business grows larger.
Beal recommends that when you find this type of negative content that your contact the person who created the content, such as the reviewer or blogger. Ask them what you can do to make them feel better about your company. If they don’t want to talk to you, give your side of the story in a comment. Explain what your actions have been to correct the situation.
Your Offline Reputation Matters As Well
When the amount of negative content about your company rises, take time to understand why. Your behaviour in the offline world can impact your reputation in the online one. Ask people who are happy with you to leave some positive reviews for you and always treat your clients and customers well. Your online reputation will fix itself if you focus on your offline corporate reputation.
Regularly Send Out Optimized Press Releases
You can own another top spot on Google by sending out press releases that have been optimized for search. This can be a great way to help your site to the top of the SERPs and improve its reputation.
All of these things can make a notable difference to your business reputation and should be considered.
This post is Sponsored, originally appeared on Startup Dope
