3 tips to managing your online reputation

Reputation management is important to both an individual and business alike. With businesses focusing heavily on the digital sphere, managing your reputation is important. Some misconceptions about online reputation management is that it is only limited to social media, while others limit it to public relations. Social media and PR are different dimensions of reputation management.

With the exponential growth of online marketing channels, we present 3 tips to managing your online reputation.

1.  Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

The main purpose of SEO is to provide exceptional user experience and connect with search engines clearly to pave way for favourable rankings. Ranking high in search results shows higher credibility level of your brand as people’s tendency to trust Google (or any other search engine) is high. Higher credibility is directly correlated to a favourable reputation.

Matt Cutts, Head of Search Spam at Google, addresses the following 5 SEO mistakes.

–  Not having a website that can easily be indexed by search engines
–  Not using the right set of words (according to how people search)
–  Focusing on building links instead of fresh relevant and compelling content
–  Not creating a great title and description of your important pages
–  Refraining from using webmaster resources to learn about SEO and how Google works

 2.  Content

One of the most important parts of reputation management is having fresh, relevant content in the right place. Start off by securing a domain name that reflects your business name (it only costs a few dollars but pay huge dividends in terms of building your online reputation). Your website is the first point of contact between you and your customer. As a result it is essential to create an accurate impression of your business. Click here to find out how you can build an awesome website. Maintaining a blog for your website is a helpful way to ensure fresh, useful content (which your audience and search engines love). This also helps you build your online reputation as an industry specialist for the type of products/services you offer.

In an era where content is king, good content is necessary to get users to link back to your site, which helps immensely in building your online reputation.

3.  Social Media

The more people share and talk about you on social media, the more visibility you get. It is equally important that your reputation is managed on the various networks that your organisation is active in. Your content should be social media- friendly making it easily shareable. It is important to consider situations such as your products/services sparking too much criticism, employees not been social media savvy or mismanagement of online communications leading to unfavourable reputation which your competitors would be quick to take advantage of.

Providing timely responses and responding to criticism promptly are important, but at times it is also advisable to refrain on making any remark at all.

Monitoring your social media networks constantly using a reputed digital marketing agency such as solomoIT, can work wonders in managing your online reputation.

With online reputation being one of the hottest topics in today’s business world especially with the emergence of social media where good/bad about your organisation can spread fast via word of mouth, managing it properly is vital.