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Health & Fitness

How to Protect Your Online Business Reputation

As a business owner, you need to know when people are talking about your business online — and doing so can be easy.

As business owners, we want our customers to talk about us.  We want them to say positive things about our business and refer new business to us.

Unfortunately, there are times when people may decide they need to share negative information about your company or your employees. In this age of the internet and social media, it is very easy for negative comments to be made and to become viral, where they spread across the internet incredibly fast.

That is where Online Reputation Management comes in. "Online reputation management is the practice of monitoring the internet reputation of a person, brand or business, with the goal of suppressing negative mentions entirely, or pushing them lower on search engine results pages to decrease their visibility," according to Wikipedia.

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Google summarizes it well when they state "Your online identity is determined not only by what you post, but also by what others post about you — whether a mention in a blog post, a photo tag or a reply to a public status update. When someone searches for your name on a search engine like Google, the results that appear are probably a combination of information you’ve posted and information published by others."

There are a number of items that you should be monitoring on a regular basis. These include:

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  • Your company name or brand name;
  • Your products;
  • All domain names you own;
  • Personnel (owner and key management people);
  • Industry keywords;
  • Your competition.

So what can you do as a business owner to control your online business reputation?  You need to monitor what is being said about you and your company online. There are a number of ways to monitor your online reputation, but one of the easiest is through Google Alerts. (And the bonus is that their service is free!)

Setting up a Google Alert is very simple to do.  Simply go to the website and fill in the boxes to create an alert.  This alert will be emailed to you so you can monitor what is being said out on the internet about your company. (A short step-by-step guide to setting up Google Alerts is attached to this post)

In this way, you can easily track what is being said about your company — both positive and negative — and you will have the opportunity to respond to that feedback.

Do you need more tips for managing your Online Reputation? Post your question in the comments area below and I will do my best to answer it.

To your success!

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