Do’s and Don’ts of Online reputation management

With over one billion searches on Google every day, there is lot of online hustle and bustle to look for things that people relate to, for elevating their business margins. 94% of people for a perception about you based on what they see on first page of Google results and this is not a casual thing to joke about.

Online reputation management or ORM is a failsafe procedure to make sure that nothing irrelevant, unwanted, false or negative about you comes up on your first landing page because that certainly doesn’t add up to your business credibility. ORM mainly does – Removal of negative reviews and branding revival.

But, before you dig deeper in this, you must know some of the do’s and don’ts of this practice.

Do’s

1- Start by being true about your brand or about your online information. Leave no space for vagueness. Be transparent and crystal clear. You can use customized tools for managing your identity like Garlik.com, claimId.com etc.

2 – An initial analysis about your online position to gauge where you stand, how good is your impression and then plan for a Reverse SEO wherever necessary. The steps involved are-

• Identifying bad reputation sites,
• Analyzing their set up,
• Building on keywords using offsite SEO,
• Building on SEO of web properties and your site, interlinking sites and your properties,
• Pointing backlinks of bad reputation page to your site, if things get out of control.

3 – Have a domain name that sells, gets recognized, has an impact and cannot be imitated easily by opportunity seekers to benefit from your name.

4 – Don’t just manage your online reputation but also of your employees. That helps!

5 – Give due importance to reviews and images online. Reviews shape the buying mentality of the prospective customers (up to 88% as reported). Similarly, having irrelevant and degrading pictures about you or your brand must not show up in top search engine results. Get them buried and focus on fulfilling promises of your product rather than shoving your market spiels in the mind of consumers.

6 – Monitor your ORM, keep blogging and commenting on relevant info and keep everything updated.

Similarly,

Don’ts

1 – Engage in negative comment bashing with haters.

2 – Don’t try to become Hercules, your ORM needs professional cure at times and you must accept that.

3 – Don’t underestimate third party credibility and PR for your business. It’s not always about blowing your own trumpet. It’s also about being credible enough to get recommendations from other sites and being seen as an expert, when you contribute expert information to those well established sites.

4 – Don’t skip timely communication with your customers. The worse you can do is not replying to consumer queries at all and get a full-fledged blog dedicated to why-not-to-choose-you as a brand.

With that said, don’t think ORM is a one day cure method. It takes time, effort and a well planned strategy for reaping long term benefits.