Best Practices for Search Engine Marketing

 

Monitoring your Reputation Online

 There is not much in contemporary business that trades on more equity than your business reputation. Stock prices fluctuate because of it, and the media boiling point is reached at disconcerting speed for either good and bad praise or hostility about businesses globally. The first step to managing your online business reputation is to be able to monitor what is being said about you, by whom, and how often. If it’s all great, it’s all good friends. Business worldwide both large and small duel daily using the double-edged, sword of Internet power. You need to know about the poison comments too, and of course, if nothing is being said about your business online, well, that is a problem all in itself.

From a marketing viewpoint, businesses have the capacity to reach more people in remote corners of the world than ever before -- leveraging the incredible reach of the Internet to connect with our blogs, videos, and shopping carts that have no geographical limitations. The other side of that coin is that anonymous people can go for their 15 minutes of fame as ad hoc writers, video producers and critics, which can spell trouble for any business.

Google, Yahoo and other search engines give huge validity to sites like Wikipedia and RipOffReport.com in the spirit of full disclosure, especially for businesses. Reviews by people affect positioning in the Search Engines and can provide an increase in sales because of the visibility provided.  The sting of acrimonious haters can also cost sales. 

To keep track of your online reputation, keywords are plugged into tools to find out what is being said about a company. The easy way to do this is to Google your company name. You will find your website and all the links to it to include the negative remarks as well. 

Here are three devices you can use to effortlessly investigate the real-time chatter.

Google Alerts

Google alerts enable you to choose keywords relative to your business name and Google will email you instances when they come up online as indexed by the Google search engine. Go to www.google.com/alerts to set this up. Depending on the size and online reputation of your organization, you can adjust the frequency of these email alerts from daily to weekly. There are a couple of refining options. Picking type = ‘Everything’ will keep track of the entire buzz about whatever keywords you type in, comma delimited. For most small businesses, a weekly notification should be adequate.

Here are some tips for what you might want to monitor to see what your customers might find:

* Your business name, including any partitions or alternative names as applicable
* Your competition
* Various misspellings of your organization name
* Your flagship product names, part numbers and trade names
* Your key executive names– bad juju on your top people will reflect poorly on your company

Social Oomph

Google Alerts monitors the Google database. Social Oomph allows you to track tweets. You
need to create a free account and then go to Monitors/Keyword Alert Emails on the left hand menu. You are allowed to set up to 50 keywords or phrases to filter the tweet-o-sphere and the software will email you recaps either daily or every twelve hours.

The keyword tips are the same as for Google Alerts. The cool thing about monitoring Twitter chatter is that it has a very real-time element to it. If ill will is being spread, you may have the capability to join the ongoing conversation and correct the record or counter the conversation when it is just beginning

LinkedIn Signal

Signal is a tool presently under development by LinkedIn in conjunction with Twitter, using a similar search on discussions groups, shares and posted answers. Access it by logging into LinkedIn and going to www.linkedin.com/signal. This is a bit clunky with the filters and for most results, look up your name and company without the filters box selected. This is especially useful for product launches or branding efforts you might have to see if there is a buzz on LinkedIn among professionals. Unfortunately, the search box appears to have no Boolean capability to add multiple search words separated by commas or expressions like ‘+’ or ‘OR’.

If you’re in the consulting or professional services field this may be one where you save your searches and check regularly back, as these are folks who traffic LinkedIn. This is still in beta and isn’t particularly advertised by LinkedIn, and has a limited universe of professionals (those in LinkedIn who allow public view of their discussions) and will tell you more about trending topics than give you an overall overview about what is being said regarding your business. I’d recommend playing with it to see if it is useful to you, but use the alerts in Google and Social Oomph to monitor the majority of chatter.

Now that you’ve set up ways to more simply monitor the online discussion about your company, you need to develop a strategy with Advantix Marketing to develop a stellar reputation and to displace and counter negative reviews.