Reputation matters, both for your company and you as an individual. Maintaining your good name is essential both in person and online, but it can be more challenging to manage on the internet. People can say anything online, and you or your company can fall victim to trolls or unreasonable customers and clients. And mistakes, errors, and accidents happen and can damage your standing online forever if not addressed. Here are some ways to maintain or repair a reputation online.
Optimize Your Optimization by Managing Your SEO
Search engine optimization is your go-to tool for reputation management. You may not be able to control what someone else has posted about your company, but you do have some control over where that content appears in search results when a new customer, client, or potential employer is searching for you. Of course, the better your SEO, the further down the results list the harmful content will go. And we all know that very few people check the search results beyond the top two or three items.
Put Out Content
In keeping with your SEO efforts, you need to make sure you put a lot of positive or neutral content online. That can mean stepping up your blogging efforts, putting out press releases to interest media in stories that might show you in a positive light, posting on social media, or anything else that shows you or your company doing things you want the world to see.
Claim Your Listings
Make sure you or your company creates an official page or account on the larger social media platforms, as well as claiming your listings on Yelp and Google My Business. People are going to review your products and services, and sometimes those reviews will be negative. The trick here is to make sure you respond to negative reviews, correct the problem or misunderstanding if possible, or move the conversation to a private channel. Of course, the rules of customer service apply, and just as you wouldn’t ignore a customer complaining in person, you shouldn’t ignore them online. The other benefit here is that since Facebook pages and some other social content appear in Google searches, you will create search results with content that you can control.
Call In the Professionals
Sometimes after a scandal, a recall, a controversy, or a mistake, the damage to your or your company’s reputation is extensive. A reputation management firm can help with guaranteed removals of things like negative blog posts, bad reviews, personal information that has been doxxed, or arrest records. They can also work proactively to monitor your online reputation and strategize with you to cultivate positive reviews, blog posts, articles, and other content.
Cultivate a Positive Reputation
Your best insulation against damage to your reputation is to have a great one, to begin with. If a company is seen as very strong in customer service, negative reviews are more likely to be dismissed as aberrant. If you are consistently a kind and thoughtful person who is conscientious at work, people will be more understanding when you make a mistake. Demonstrating sincere good faith regularly, both personally and as a company, can help you weather almost any reputational crisis.
Walter Guevara is a software engineer, startup founder and currently teaches programming for a coding bootcamp. He is currently building things that don't yet exist.
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