Today I wanted to go over ten tips for improving the online reputation I get a lot of questions about what are the basic things that people can do to make their either their company's reputation be better or their personal reputation so I'd like to go over those today so tip number one you want to own the first page of Google results and that means if you're in a business it's your company website and perhaps some other websites that are associated with your company you definitely want all your social profiles such as LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter and have perhaps a YouTube channel or a YouTube video.
You may have some personal blogs and things of it's your own personal name you're taking care of and another great thing to get on there is some press releases press release is almost always rank high the second tip for online reputation management is to be social and that means acquiring as many of the social profiles for both your company and if you're doing your own reputation for yourself as you can the reason you want to do that is you want to do that so nobody else can get those profiles and also if it's your personal name.
Same issue if you have a fairly unique name you probably have a good chance of getting all your social profiles but if you have a more common name that will be more difficult and so you want to secure those and the reason you secure those is because whether the social profile is for Facebook or for LinkedIn page generally it will have the URL of the website and then after that would be your name or your company name and Google looks at those and as they manage the search engine results and many of those will rank very high so the most important ones to have of course are Facebook Twitter Google+ and a YouTube channel
The third tip I want to talk about today is unique websites or perhaps even blogs and these are websites that you can have for your company and sometimes they are a executive blog or a blog about trade shows different areas like that.
They can also be if it's your personal website a website about your industry that you're working in and some of your thoughts and your professional advancement and career objectives things like that. You want to own as many of these as you can excuse me I don't need a whole lot of them but it's nice to if you have a company to own two or three.
Even just one can help you on those first page Google rankings if it's your personal website there's definitely a great opportunity to get some of these blogs to rank high
The fourth tip I'd like to talk about is press releases and many times in the search engine optimization industry people did press releases solely to get backlinks to pages but it turns out that press releases on their own will rank very high in Google.
You want to create some links from your social sites or perhaps from your blog to your corporate sites to these press releases to help them move higher in the rankings and when you make the press release you want to be sure that use your name if the press release is about you or your company name because that's one of the most important parts is to have the actual name of the company or your personal name on the top of that press release in the title of the press release.
The fifth tip is to encourage reviews and this is be for a small business especially it could be a large business also but many times small businesses say for instance a restaurant or a contractor they may be plagued with just a few negative reviews and so one of the best things to do is after someone is use your services or received one of your products. That's a great time to ask them to write a review about the company or write a review about the product that they received and what you want is many good reviews as you can.
It'll be fine if there's one or two negative reviews and everybody understands that but if you only have one or two negative reviews and nothing else then eventually you're going to start losing customers due to those negative reviews.
Some of the websites that you focus on are the four those are Yelp the Google reviews and Citysearch. All of these do well in the Google rankings.
The sixth tip is don't argue this means if your company is mentioned in a forum and there are some negative views about your products the last thing you should do is spend numerous posts in writing rebuttals about why your company is doing a good job or why your service is good or why you are good or things like that. What happens over time is these posts accumulate and I've seen companies that have had as many as a hundred and fifty pages of kind of a firestorm back and forth of reviews and and internal company people saying that they don't understand and things like that.
These almost always rank high in Google so my recommendation is if you have a bad if somebody has a bad experience with the services of your company or a product that you respond one time and that you move that response to another website, perhaps a website that you own or a customer service site or something like that.
That way you then take control and can help out the customer in a better manner by using your own personal website.
The seventh tip is YouTube. Many times companies will think that well YouTube videos we don't have any commercials we don't have things like that so how can we use YouTube? but one of the great things about YouTube is that there's all kinds of things you can do on it.
It could be as simple as putting up a slideshow on YouTube or a training video or perhaps some customer testimonials but YouTube videos almost always rank very high in Google results. So what you want to do is make sure that you title your video with a name of your company and then whatever else it's about or if it's your personal name makes you make sure you use your personal name in the title of the video and the description.
Put in a nice description that explains what the video is about if the videos for a search term related to your industry then use that search term in the title of the video and that will also help it rank well.
Ihe eighth tip is having yourself or a representative from your company included in an article and what you want is to be able to get a journalist to talk to you about your product or services or about your expertise. Hopefully you'll be in an article and many times those articles will do very well in the Google rankings. I know that for a long time I was featured in an article in The New York Times and for a number of months I received many calls just from that single mention in the New York Times article.
In fact it didn't even have a link to my website or anything. It was just my name in the name of my company but just from that major publication I received a lot of traffic and potential new clients from that.
The ninth tip is mobile and it's just a very simple and just make sure that your website works very well in a mobile environment and that means the website should load quickly. It should be easy to see on a smartphone and that it's easy to navigate. Google looks at the ability of mobile websites and how fast they load and if you had a website that was very slow to load on a mobile device generally that website would not rank as high as other websites because they want to give the customers the best service possible when they view those results in Google.
And the final tip is just to be active and that would mean be active in online forums and in your industry if you speak at conferences be sure to put up a slideshow of your presentation on SlideShare. It's a great website it's owned by LinkedIn. It's a great place to put up your slideshows from both your personal work and company work and industries and be sure to title it with the name of your company or a personal name and that will help it do very well because SlideShare always ranks very high in the Google rankings.
See more here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOP89L3g_48