People are talking about you online, but do you know what they’re saying? Online reputation management starts with your ability to track customer sentiment by monitoring your reputation. That means keeping a close eye on social media profiles, consumer review websites and the results in the search engine pages. Taking a proactive approach is important for your future success, so let’s start now with a reputation assessment.
Evaluating your online reputation is quite straightforward, but there’s still a little more to it than simply typing your brand or product name into Google and hitting enter. It’s also important to obtain accurate results and evaluate your standing on social media, consumer reviews sites and any other sites that might be relevant to your business. A quick search on Google will only give you a very broad overview and isn’t likely to help you pinpoint specific issues.
Evaluating Your Reputation with the Search Engines
Most people first find out about a company after entering a search engine query, so it stands to reason that that’s also where you should start your quest to evaluate your reputation. However, you also need to remember that modern search engines offer personalized results and autocomplete suggestions based on things like browsing habits, geographical location and user preferences. That’s why you’ll need to become anonymous to put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer searching for your business. This will give you a better overview of the general sentiment concerning your organization. An easy way to do this is to enable private browsing mode or, better still, connect through a VPN. Using a VPN is especially important if you want to see how your business appears in the search results in different countries and regions.
Once you’re ready to start searching, you’ll want to use organic search queries not only to search for the name of your business, but also for related keywords and phrases that people are most likely to enter when they’re looking for a business like yours. For example, if you run a real estate agency, you’ll want to run queries such as ‘houses for sale’ in the geographical region you serve. If your company doesn’t appear in the results when you enter the sort of queries you’re trying to target, it could mean that your search engine optimization and online marketing strategies need some work. Furthermore, if a company develops a bad reputation, it might also end up getting pushed out of the top of the search results to make way for those with better ratings and reviews.
For local brick-and-mortar businesses, Google also displays ratings and reviews in the search results. These can give you a clear and immediate indication of your current standing. However, when searching for online businesses, you’ll often need to type in the name of the business followed by ‘review’, which should display any reviews and ratings of your company on websites like Trustpilot.
When conducting your investigation into your search engine standing, you’ll also want to search for the names of key employees and business partners. After all, if an employee or high-profile business partner has developed a bad reputation, then it could reflect badly on you as well.
Finally, don’t just stick to Google! Although it might be by far the most popular search engine, Bing and Yahoo still warrant an investigation too. Alternatively, you can save time by using a metasearch engine like Dogpile, which draws results from all the major search engines simultaneously.
Monitoring Social Media Mentions
People increasingly turn directly to social media to learn more about the companies they’re looking to do business with. In fact, social platforms have become such an important part of the marketing mix that no business can afford to ignore them, and that’s why you need to maintain a consistently active presence on all the major social media outlets. In addition, there are many social review sites that are designed specifically to give consumers a place to voice their opinions.
Although the most influential mentions of your brand should appear in the search results as well, they won’t do so immediately. That’s why it’s so important to directly monitor social media and review websites as well, since doing so should give you a chance to isolate and mitigate any damage caused by negative feedback.
Because there are so many social media platforms and consumer review websites, some of which are industry-specific, it’s highly impractical to try to monitor everything manually. While examining the search results and taking a quick glance through your social media profiles and listings on review websites will give you a reasonable overview of your current situation, it’s not an adequate long-term solution. That’s why you’ll need an automated system for monitoring your reputation around the clock and sending you alerts whenever anyone mentions your brand or product online.
Reputation Resolutions helps businesses protect their online reputations with their Brand Intelligence Center, a complete reputation-monitoring system that ensures you’re always one step ahead.