An Important Part of Your Web Marketing Strategy

Online reputation management is a component of internet marketing that combines public relations with a positive online visibility. Knowing how your company is represented online and knowing how these representations affect you is essential to the health of your web marketing efforts.

The goal of online reputation management is to have positive information about your business rank high in search engine results. When a potential customer conducts a Google, Bing or other search engine inquiry about a business and sees negative feedback from blogs, social media websites and review sites, it makes things difficult for a business attempting to grow its client base and strengthen its market share.

It takes only one irate customer, one unscrupulous competitor or angry ex-employee to effectively cripple a company’s online standing. Consumers routinely use the internet as the first stop when considering the purchase of a new product or service from a company or individual. Companies that do not keep track or bother to manage their online reputation may be leaving themselves open to a rash of negative publicity and a loss of revenue.

Your online reputation is shaped by mentions about you in various places, including:

• Local search directories
• Business directories
• Social networks
• Review sites
• Forums
• Blogs

Mentions about your company on any of these places can appear in search results when customers search for your name. Because of this, there’s a very good chance that positive (or negative) mentions will be noticed and noted by others.

The most important aspect of managing your online reputation is to be prepared. This means having a plan to not only control what others read about your company, but also having a plan to deal with negative situations. Negative publicity can pop up seemingly without warning. Being aware of online mentions as they happen is important so they can be addressed quickly.

We can help you craft an online reputation management campaign to monitor and actively manage your online presence. This can be done as a stand-alone project, or as part of an overall web marketing campaign.

Contact us for more information.