What is Online Reputation Management (ORM)?
Most of us pay attention to the news these days whether we want to or not. It’s in our faces 24/7 from every angle including television news, online news sites and social media. The importance of a positive online presence becomes exceedingly evident as we witness the making and breaking of individuals, their business and their brand. Now more than ever it’s important for online businesses to focus on positive brand image and improved SEO rankings.
Identifying any negative material synonymous with your name or brand is crucial to correcting your ORM. Working with your SEO consultant can help you pinpoint misrepresentations of your brand or any attempts at defaming your name. Keep in mind, you can overcome negative results you discover and build the reputation you are looking for to attract the people who are looking for you.
Some strategies for overcoming a negative ORM
If you have haven’t done this lately, try Googling your business name (and your name) and see what pops up in the first-page results. If what you see is credible and positive in nature, congratulations. If what you see isn’t so great and perhaps defaming, you can get to work fixing the damage. Here are some steps to create and keep a positive online presence:
- Create Google Alerts for your company and products
- Have an online forum and be diligent about monitoring what is posted
- Create a YouTube channel and post often
- Have a strategy going forward to manage your public relations
- Ask your satisfied customers to give reviews about your business
Another great tool is Googles Sitelinks. These add depth to your search results by adding credibility to your site. Below is an example of how Google displays sitelinks
Keep in mind Google adds these Sitelinks at their own discretion but you can increase the chances Google will add these for your business by following these practices on your site:
- Ensure you have clear navigation to those subpages on your site
- Develop unique titles on pages that have your brand name
- Use internal linking that search engine bots can crawl
- Keep your site map updated
- Continue to increase your brand visibility by using social media and contributing to forums
- Create relevant podcasts
Now, be aware that ORM strategies won’t create success overnight. It will take some time for all this new activity to be crawled by the search engine bots. If you are starting to see a need for ORM, focus on some of the suggestions provided here. Be consistent with your positive branding, monitor your website diligently and you will notice the search engines catching up to your hard work. Work with your SEO consultant or if you are a small operation, you may want to tackle ORM yourself. Remember, overcoming a negative reputation is not the end of your businesses online presence and with a little know how and using the right tools you will be on your way to creating high ranking search results that represent your business and your brand in a positive light.