You have almost certainly worked very hard to build up your brand and ensure that it is recognised in your industry. This could be a personal brand for you as an individual, or a corporate brand, or even a product brand. You want people to be searching for you, your company, or your products by brand names. What you don’t want is for people to do a search for your brand and find other companies, or worse still, they find negative reviews about you, your products, or your company.

To protect your online reputation, ideally, you need to put in place a solid reputation management strategy before you experience problems that may damage your personal or your company’s reputation.

The role of reputation management is a two-pronged approach:

1. Positively influencing the perception of your brand and monitoring how it is being mentioned
2. Addressing negative mentions or reviews.

What might your Reputation Management Strategy include?

•  Creation of a positive presence on all the major internet channels
•  Monitor the online world for mentions of your brand
•  Strategically increase the value and placement of positive content
•  Aggressively move negative content out of the way
•  Diversify your brand’s online presence to maximise positive content and reviews
•  Give customers a place to vent their complaints, which you can control and respond to
•  Keep online information fresh and up-to-date.

tation please book an initial chat by pressing the button below. The initial chat is free and without any further obligation.

Creating a Positive Brand Presence

If you have not already built a strong brand, you might like to consider doing so. The online world is a great place to start your brand-building journey.
Start by looking up a few of the brands most famous on Google, such as Apple, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Microsoft or Samsung.

Notice that the first page of Google search results are dominated by pages from their own websites or other web properties they own. The only exceptions tend to be Wikipedia pages or news pages. Ideally, we would not like to see either of those types of pages on the first page of Google, as the companies in question do not own and control these pages, which could lead to negative items creeping there.

When setting up our reputation management strategy, our first aim should be to own as many web properties as we can with our brand name in them and then rank them on the first and potentially the second page of Google.

The starting point for this is to make sure you have claimed and fully built out your key social properties, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Stumbled and Reddit.

There are many more properties you can claim and own. A great resource for finding these is https://knowem.com.

The advantage of owning these properties is you can rank them on the first page of Google and Bing. This will help you control what is being said about your company and stop other people from exploiting your brand name to damage your business.

At Effective Business Growth, this is only the first stage of building your brand. We have a number of more advanced strategies to help build and protect your brand, so please reach out to us if you need help in this area.

Click on the button below. The initial chat is free and without any further obligation.

Controlling Your Reputation and Brand Management

Once you have established your brand, it is important to monitor and control how your brand and your reputation are being impacted by other online messaging.
It is important that you respond to all comments, both positive and negative, always addressing concerns and complaints in a constructive manner, but before you can do this, you need to put in place a system that notifies you every time your brand is mentioned online.

A quick search on reputation management software will show you the likely contenders.
A great way of dealing with both negative and positive feedback is to try to corral it all in one place. Give your customers a very visible way of leaving comments and feedback on your own website. Make this feedback channel highly responsive and ensure that it deals with every issue quickly and efficiently. In this way, disgruntled customers are less likely to turn to external websites to complain, which will minimise the chances of bad press appearing online.

Online Reputation Repair – Getting Rid Of Bad Reviews and Press

Unfortunately, the online world still allows internet trolls to post entirely fictitious reviews that can completely ruin your business. If one or two of these get onto the first page of Google or Bing, they could at very least have an extremely negative effect on your online reputation, your brand and your sales.

Recently, news about the British Prince Andrew hit the news: if you Google Prince Andrew, there is nothing but scandal and speculation on the front pages of Google. Previous news about royal visits, charitable works and good deeds now live in the lower-ranked search results and will never be seen. We will not even speculate about whether this is deserved or not. I use this example purely to illustrate the impact that the internet can have on a person’s—or a company’s—reputation.

People often ask us, “Can I get rid of bad reviews on the internet?” Many previous clients have come to us after spending vast sums of money on litigation against internet properties. and in over 90% of the cases, we have seen they have had no effect what so ever.

The reviews are people’s opinions and thus can be published as just that, and there is little you can do about getting them removed.

There is more bad news if you are suffering from bad online reviews or internet trolls: there is no magic bullet to get rid of them, despite what some reputation management companies might tell you.

The only thing you can do is ensure that they get demoted down the search engine rankings and are made more difficult to find. This is done by a combination of promoting more complimentary content to such a level that people will be bored before they find negative content.

At Effective Business Growth, we have proven techniques and processes in place to help you recover your online reputation quickly and efficently.

To have an initial discussion and find out how we can you you recover or build your online reputation please book an initial chat by pressing the button below. The initial chat is free and without any further obligation.