Search Engine Reputation

In past generations, businesses had to worry about building a brand, providing a good product with excellent customer service, and maintaining a good reputation within their community. The same is true today, but with the prominence of ecommerce, businesses have to work doubly hard to make sure they preserve their reputation. The dissemination of information, particularly negative press, is lightning fast and can damage a business seemingly overnight. Search engine reputation is the new form of word-of-mouth, and it is vital that businesses actively monitor what is being written about them.

Worldwide, over 1.5 billion people use the internet, and millions of searches are conducted each day. Many of these are for products and services. Because so many people's first impression of your business will come from a search engine, it is important that they receive an appropriate message as to your product and that the message comes from you. Seeing negative press in the first and most prominent search results can turn away valuable traffic and potential customers. Here are some ways you can easily monitor your search engine reputation:

• Regularly Google your businesses name to see what shows up in the search results. Positive listings should be first. You can also search sites like Technorati and BlogPatrol to monitor what blogs write about you.
• Sign up to receive Google alerts so you are notified each time something is published online regarding your business.
• Put up profiles on Facebook and MySpace, which have wide audiences.
• Be careful what you put up about your personal life through social networking sites, though. If someone Googles your name, you don't want an embarrassing picture popping up to deter customers from buying your product.
• Work with bloggers instead of trying to fight them. Bloggers have a lot of pressure to produce fresh content day after day. If your business has been a target of negative blog posts, or to keep that from happening, contact individual bloggers and send them press releases. Most will be happy to have the information to post.
• Start your own blog and post information about your company and/or product.
• Repeat the above steps regularly.

If you are still not sold on the idea of monitoring your search engine reputation, consider the case of FaceBook. FaceBook launched a Polls option for its users. Technology blog, TechCrunch, noticed that when writing a poll, you couldn't mention any competitor's names, such as MySpace or Friendster. As this was a form of censorship, many people were rightly outraged. FaceBook, through proactive search engine reputation monitoring, was aware of the blog and took immediate steps to rectify the problem. A representative commented on the blog post and said a bug had been causing the problem, but it had been fixed. What could have been a PR nightmare for FaceBook became a non-issue.

It is worth the time and effort involved to make sure that your reputation remains unsullied. If you don't monitor your business's search engine reputation, you could be losing traffic and customers. It pays to be active and proactive in preserving your business's name.

Need some help with your search engine reputation? Take a moment to contact us today.