Since the rise of social media, businesses have become increasingly transparent, leading to possible reputation issues when customers are searching for your business, products, services or even your employees.
This means, if you are serious about building a meaningful online presence, you need to be monitoring your reputation.
Where to Start
Go to Google, type your brand name in quotes, and see what is being said. This will vary depending on the size of the company. Larger companies or those with a strong content marketing strategy will most likely own their brand name searches; however, smaller companies, with minimal content may find themselves with a negative review right away.
Take note of any negative reviews and move on to searching common terms customers search, such as a brand name search with "complaints" or "reviews" at the end.
Your goal here is create the same experience a user will encounter and establish where you stand on your current online reputation management efforts.
Claim Your Social Profiles
I've heard over and over that you should claim every social media profile and immediately set your company up and add links. While this strategy may work if you have the time to monitor and update 50 accounts, it's not plausible for those who value their time.
Matt Polsky, an organic search strategist, said it the best, "Having consistency makes it easier for brand followers to gain trust in a company".
So instead of going after every profile, claim the top social profiles in your space that you have time to monitor and update. This means, if you only have time for Facebook, Twitter and Google+, only use Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
Moreover, D William Jones had it right last April when he said to embrace Google+. Google+ may not be the most popular social network, but it does provide a great boost in the SEO department.
Create a Reviews or Complaints Page
You want pages you own or control to rank above those that don't, which means you should add a complaints and reviews page. When someone types "your company reviews", you want them to find reviews you have control over.
Another tactic can be creating an entirely separate website for your reviews. Veterans United Home Loans took this step and made Veterans United Reviews, which is a site dedicated to their customer reviews.
Listen to What is Being Said
Monitor your name. Get Google Alerts set up in your company's name and names closely associated with your company, such as the CEO, marketing campaigns or even competitors. Google Alerts has been a known tool quite some time for monitoring you reputation online in the search results; however, monitoring your reputation on social can be a little trickier.
Luckily, there's a great tool called SocialMention, which allows you to set up social media alerts. It's just like Google Alerts, but for social.
Be Proactive
There's no reason you should wait for a disaster then react. Be proactive and start boosting your properties right away. You can do this in the SERPs through SEO techniques, such as building links to the properties you want boosted or by continuously posting highly relevant, keyword-rich content.
Doing this will help ensure that negative reviews from third party sites are held lower in the results than the properties you control.
While this does help for the everyday negative comment, if your brand blows up with negative press, it's highly unlikely that this will bury the results, especially if the press catches wind.
This is why you should always be prepared and plan for the worst. The more time you are proactively preparing for the worst-case scenarios, the better you will be able to handle and avoid them.