SEARCH ENGINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT

You've spent a ton of resources building up your positive online (and offline) reputation, only to have it damaged by renegade pizza makers. So, what are you to do. What are the steps that need to happen to mend your name and hopefully alienate as few customers as possible. Welcome to search engine reputation management.

Every day, someone, somewhere is talking about your business or your brand, your name, your competitors, or your industry. Are they positively endorsing your company, building momentum for your service and products? Or are they criticizing and bad mouthing your brand, complaining to others about flaws or objections they have about you? Remember the old rule that people are 10x more likely to complain if they get bad service but rarely ever commend good. Well, this exponentially applies to your search engine reputation.

A great brand can take months, if not years, and tons of resources to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious. It's what people associate with your product. The scary thing about the efficiency that the internet affords us is that your brand can be destroyed in hours by a detractor upset with your company. Once a rumor is started it tends to spread like a virus, even if it only started as a comment on a message board.

Quick Tips:

• One of the first steps we take to monitor online reputations is to setup a (free) Google Alerts feed, which will automatically contact you anytime someone mentions your name or company name anywhere on the internet, or you can specify that only News, Blogs, Web, Video, or Groups be searched.
• And if you don't have www.yourname.com, please register it today. It could up saving you tons of heartache later on.

One of the most important things we can do to control the message (positive or negative) is to go to the source and communicate directly with the publisher. However, that option isn't always available. If not, then advanced search engine marketing is required to simply outrank the bad results that are showing up. However, we not only have to outrank but we have to build potentially 10 new sites that will outrank the bad results...pushing them to be buried on the 2nd page. Sometimes you'll just have to deal with Internet meanies and grow thick skin. However, if it's too damaging then that's when search engine reputation management comes into play.