Many businesses don’t think about reputation management until a crisis has actually occurred. Waiting until your business is swamped with bad publicity is simply too late for effective management of your online reputation. Every business needs an online reputation management plan and they need one as soon as humanly possible.

If you don’t already have a reputation management plan in place before you approach search engine optimisation, while you SEO is a great time to start. You should find that your search engine optimisation company can provide a lot of guidance for your strategy. Our experts will be able to discuss this with you at SEO Consult.

The internet is a big place (if you hadn’t noticed) and bad publicity can turn up on the search engine results pages from almost anywhere. On the other hand, no business can monitor the entire net. Even Google has to take internet crawling in stages. A usable internet reputation management strategy will define prime areas to monitor, and set out coping strategies for each one:

• Regular news channels. These are still the first stop for most people when it comes to news, no matter what the industry. Most businesses still consider regular news channels their main reputation threats, as well. Keep an eye on the news, and engage news agencies with the occasional press release as part of your regular reputation management. This can help you to develop a relationship with journalists, which is helpful when bad news breaks

• Review sites and industry forums. Online reviews are increasingly important to online business, as they seem to be replacing old-fashioned word-of-mouth. A bad review posted by a disgruntled customer can actually do more damage than a big news report. For this reason, review sites that apply to your industry need to be monitored constantly

• Influential blogs. There’s not much you can do to change the opinion of prominent industry bloggers, but developing a relationship with them is a good way to ensure that they will treat you fairly. Most companies approach influential bloggers in order to gain inbound links. Keep building your relationship with these bloggers and they may well give you a heads-up before any bad publicity comes your way

• Social media sites. Social media networks are the social centres of the net. Just as the general pubic will gossip and spread word about your business in real life, the social media networks are usually the source of gossip spread on the net. The difference is, gossip on the social media networks is spread far more efficiently. Monitoring these networks regularly is an absolute must for any online reputation management strategy

The best kind of online reputation management is pre-emptive, rather than reactive. The absolute optimum way to manage your online reputation is to work reputation management into your main SEO plan. By including this element in your SEO, you can pre-emptively take control of the top ten search engine spots for your brand keywords, enabling you to nip any bad news in the bud. Obviously, the scale of your reputation management will reflect the size of your operation.

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