Repairing Your Online Reputation
How does online reputation management work?
Most Internet reputation management tools are built on the foundation of search engine optimisation, or SEO.
SEO combines observations of how search engines work with careful content building and timing to get the maximum results from new content. This can ensure that it’s widely read and shared, leading it to rank higher and push content you control up the list of your search results.
However, there’s a lot more to fixing your online reputation than just pushing some results up and the rest downward.
Maintaining a positive online reputation involves three steps:
Assessment
Repair
Monitoring
Here’s a quick overview of how each process works.
Assessing your reputation.
If you want to know your reputation online, start by running your name through a search engine. For a faster and more professional detailed approach, grab your free reputation report card, and let us do the work for you.
For many people, the things they find in the search results for your name (whether they’re positive reviews or negative comments) are what they’ll believe about you.
However, you have to ask a few questions to get a full sense of what the results are telling you:
What links are at the top of your search results?
Are they links you control, such as your blog, your social media presence, or your business’s website?
Are they links that have factually accurate statements about you?
Are the links you find actually about you, or are they about somebody else?
For example, if you’ve got a business that has a good website tied to your name, and the first handful of results are news articles about your business, that’s not bad, but it’s still not great.
Nearly one-third of all searchers click on the first link, ignoring the rest. So, you want that link to be your business’ official site.
If negative comments appear at the top of your search results, then you should focus on the next part of this article.
Repair.
Nearly half of internet users worry about whether something they say online could cause them problems in the future. As a result, repairing your reputation is really big business.
Your online image can affect your business reputation or your personal reputation score.
So, your next steps should be to repair your results so that they properly reflect who you really are.
The exact process to do so may vary depending on your situation.
However, reputation repair almost always involves publishing new materials, overriding harmful statements, managing social media effectively and diligently taking corrective action on a daily basis to bring your internet reputation back to life.
The key thing to keep in mind is that you’ll need to create content that is better than what’s out there already. This means personalized and laser-focused blog posts or video content.
You want to give search engines a reason to rank your new materials above the existing ones. So, informative, relevant, actionable content creation is the key, depending on your situation.
This isn’t entirely about the words on the page or good customer reviews. It’s also about good search engine optimisation.
You want to have links from reputable third-party sources and see that people are clicking on your content and interacting with it.
None of these steps are overly complicated. It’s really about the insights and techniques you use. Do you know what to do or what to look for?
These things require expertise like understanding sentiment scores, crafting an action plan, creating social posts people want to interact with, or even finding high-value keywords from Google autocomplete. All of these things help you show the search engine algorithms who you really are.
Monitoring.
Finally, there’s the most important step in the process: monitoring your reputation.
It also happens to be the most exciting.
That’s because nowadays you have access to social listening tools, real-time notifications and online performance resources that make your reputation easier to track and manage. For example, you can pop into a discussion forum after being alerted and respond to issues right away.
It’s almost like you’re the all-seeing eye, knowing what’s going on everywhere at any moment.
And shouldn’t you be?
Once you put the time and effort into repairing your reputation, you need to keep a constant eye on it.
It’s especially important to keep tabs on social media sites and major blogs that review services and products in your industry.
If your reputation has taken a hit, give us a call at Digital Advantage and we will rebuild the monument for you - digitaladvantage.me
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