What You Need to Know About Internet Reputation Management

In today's business world it's not out of line to say that most consumers just assume that a business has a website or at least has some sort of online reputation. It's also been shown that even a large percent of your offline marketing campaigns tend to end up online. That said, the consumers receiving your offline promotions either go online to investigate or simply go online out of convenience.

In the real world there will always be disgruntled customers, it's just how it is. However, as the popularity of blogging is growing these disgruntled customers can be heard loud and clear on the internet regardless of the validity of their complaints. To make things worse, Google tends to rank blogs very high in the search engines. It's not just blogs either, forums, social networking, and social bookmarking sites become an issue as well.

As a business owner, losing business over blog posts, forums, and social media does not sound fun at all. So, what can we do? Sure, you may think it's a good idea to hop into the conversation and stick up for yourself and your business. However, this is actually one of the worst things you can do. Not only do you put yourself in a position to further instigate problems, but you also risk upsetting the original disgruntled customer causing them to inflict even more damage. Another fact that may not seem so obvious is that search engines look for updated content, so when you are joining the conversation you are only adding to it's search engine rankings which will hurt you even more.

The bottom line is that internet reputation should have been a priority since day one of launching your business. This would have given you time to fill up more positions on page one of Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. This would have also given you more time to build up a solid back link profile to keep your search engine rankings high and above all the negative entries.

The damage has been done, now what can you do? Well, you need to start implementing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics. That goes for on page SEO and off page SEO, both being very important to help you rank above the negative entries in the search engines.

If you have built your website correctly then on page SEO will not be too much of an issue. However, your off page SEO is a very large and never ending task. You need to build massive back links and create multiple entries on the first page of the search engines for your main keywords. Typically in internet reputation your main keywords will be your business name, domain name, and variations thereof. Depending on the type of business, your business phone number may even be a factor in internet reputation. Websites like whocallsme.com have spawned a whole new way for consumers to post complaints. Since a phone number is very specific you better believe once a consumer posts something bad about your business with your company name and phone number it has a pretty good chance of showing up in the search engines. It's also unfortunate that consumers will even attack your personal name and family members' names in an effort to get revenge for whatever caused them to be disgruntled in the first place. If you own a business then you need to sit down and think of every possible scenario on how a disgruntled customer could attack you or your business online and start implementing preventative measures.

Another precaution that is often over looked is privacy for your domain name. Consumers are getting smarter and do know how to use these tools to find your information online. Without domain privacy a lot of your personal information may be floating around on the internet including your home address, personal phone numbers, and much more. Domain privacy is only about five dollars and is well worth the investment for anyone that owns a domain.

The bottom line with internet reputation is that you need to implement on and off page search engine optimization. Often times search engine optimization is too big of a task for one person to handle. You will need to hire in house staff, outsource it, or find a company that specializes in it. Internet reputation management is search engine optimization and should be a part of every business.