Reputation Management is one of those areas that can be extremely difficult to handle. The following tips may help prevent negative pages from appearing at the top of the SERP’s. I do however feel that other areas of your business are more important in the short term.

Negative comments about your business will generally only surface if individuals, normally customers, have had a poor experience. Prevent that poor experience using great customer service skills and you will find that your business may actually grow. Reputation management by name assumes you are going to receive negative publicity – while you cannot prevent all negatives – you should be working towards it.

Some times customers are simply unhappy no matter what you do. These steps will not erase the bad publicity but if performed successfully, may help to prevent any of it reaching the front pages.

Subscribe to Google Alerts. This will send you an email whenever your keyword or phrase is found by Google. Use your business name, your brand and your website name if it is slightly different. You may get an email every day – this is a great tool not only for reputation management, but for general gossip as well.

Create a blog and optimize it fully. Ensure there is good quality content on it and update it regularly. Blogs rank well and it can often be quite easy to get to the top of the SERP’s with a blog.

Get social. Promote your brand, business or web site on as many social sites as possible. Learn to listen to what is being said around you. These sites can often be where bad publicity often starts. If you are then you may be able to nip in the bud before it gets out of hand.

Accurate content. Write useful and accurate content. If bad publicity starts you can always refer people to any of the relevant pages. If the content is not accurate, it will only reinforce the negatives.

Reputation management starts with customer service. If things get out of hand you need to be able to respond immediately to rectify any problems – perceived or actual. Being at the top of the SERP’s will at least help to keep the negatives from appearing there.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Reputation Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.