Monitoring and maintaining your online reputation can be a challenging task. With the digital age and the increase in online engagement, it seems to be getting harder and harder to manage what is being said about you and your business online.
Because reputation is such a vital measure of success, it’s important to incorporate reputation management into your marketing strategy and budget.
Luckily, many tools and professionals are ready to assist you with your online reputation management. This article will list several tools to help you and your company stay up to date with your reputation online.
Tools For Managing Your Online Reputation
1. Your Web Browser
Now, this may not be the first thing you think of when it comes to reputation tools, but if you don’t know how to use your web browser or how it can help you in your reputation management, then this is an excellent palace to start.
No matter what web browser you use, it is your first defense tool for your reputation. Gathering information is one of the first things you want to do when starting your online reputation journey.
First, type in the name of your business and other keywords that apply to your company in a search engine. Scan the first few pages, but focus most of your attention on page one as not many people look past pages one and two of the search results.
It may be beneficial to search in incognito mode as some search engines customize results, or if you search yourself while signed in on your account, you may not get accurate results.
While sifting through results, if there is anything out of sorts or alarming, this may be something you want to fix. But, if you have all positive content and reviews, keep up the good work and continue to look at your results from time to time to ensure what is being said about your business remains positive.
You may also want to do a more in-depth sorting of information, so you could start by looking at content and sorting it into one of these categories.
Positive Results
These are search results you most definitely want to highlight and keep track of because they paint your business in the best light possible. Without positive results, it’s hard to eliminate any negatives that may be ranking.
Results About Someone Else
It’s relatively common to have search results that are not all about you and your business. Especially if you have a more typical business name. If you are searching for your personal name, it is more likely that others will have the same name as you, and the results won’t show everything about you.
It’s still important to monitor these kinds of results because they could influence your reputation. If you want more of the search results to be about your business instead of someone else’s, then SEO experts at BRANDefenders can help you filter these other results out.
Neutral Results
Neutral search results are the ones that neither help nor hurt your reputation. This might be something like a position you played on a sports team in high school or your name on a list for a local book club you participated in.
These results are less important than the negative or the positive results. These don’t do much other than take up a spot on the search results, so if you don’t want them there, you can work to replace them with positive content.
Negative Results
Negative results are never good for your online reputation. Obviously, anything about a criminal record, court case, or others like it will not look suitable for your reputation, but many other things could look negative on your search results as well.
These include negative comments on social media, a photo you were tagged in on Facebook that may not be the most professional, a rant from an ex-business partner, and even negative reviews about your business.
Many things can contribute to negative search results, but don’t lose hope as these can be fixed with online tools and reputation management experts at BRANDefenders.
2. Google Alerts
Your web browser plays a significant role in defending your brand, but there are other tools to help manage the search results and help you be aware of your reputation online.
One of those tools is Google Alerts. This tool is pretty self-explanatory. The internet can change in an instant, so there could be many things that you miss being said about you or your business online.
Google has a built-in alert system that you can set up to alert you when something is said about your name or your business. Also, so you are not flooded with emails from Google, you can change your preferences to alert you however often you want, whether every day or once a week.
Google will alert you with an email when your name is mentioned in something like an article, whether it’s positive or negative. This is an easy and complimentary way to monitor what is being said about you online, allowing you to combat whatever the search result is right away.
3. SEMRush
SEMRush is a vital SEO tool with a free version with limited use and a paid version that allows you to track mentions about your business and so many other things.
Many SEO experts and professionals use this tool to help them strategize content, improve marketing tactics, and manage their search results online.
SEMRush is an all-in-one tool for improving the visibility of your business online and discovering market insights. Although it is a vital SEO tool, many other professionals use it daily to help them gain insights into their business.
Some other things that are trackable with SEMRush are:
- Finding mentions without backlinks
- Content marketing and topic research
- Spotting industry leaders and influences
- Measuring your company’s estimated reach online
- Tracking referral traffic from mentions
- Analyzing mention resource authority
- Identifying mention sentiments
SEMRush has many tools to help you monitor and manage your online reputation, and it is one of the best tools to invest in if you want to improve your visibility online and strengthen your brand’s presence.
4. Review Push
Reviews are an essential part of online reputation management. Unfortunately, customers are more likely to publish a bad experience with a company online than a good one, so make sure you notice negative reviews is the first step to improving.
Negative reviews may not look good for your reputation, but these reviews give you valuable feedback and can help you improve your business. One of the worst things you can do for your online reputation is responding to negative reviews in a defensive or argumentative manner.
You can reply, thanking the customer for the review and mentioning what you are doing to improve, but getting defensive is never a good look.
Review Push is a great tool to use to collect all of your reviews online in one place. There are many review sites to keep track of, from Google My Business to Trustpilot, and others like YELP, SiteJabber, Consumer Affairs, Indeed, and so many more. Looking for every review online can be tedious and time-consuming.
Investing in a tool like Review Push makes managing it much easier and allows you to focus on the sites generating negative reviews instead of checking all the sites.
This tool is also beneficial for companies with multiple store locations as it allows you to compare multiple store location reviews to see which stores need improvement.
Whenever you receive a new review online, Review Push sends you an email notification and allows you to respond to the review right away.
Reviews are critical to your online reputation, and finding a tool like Review Push that makes it easier to monitor them will significantly improve your ability to manage your online presence.
Hiring Reputation Management Experts at BRANDefenders
You can use many tools and resources to monitor your online reputation. It may be overwhelming at first, but finding the right processes that work for your business will help it to be more manageable.
Many business owners don’t want to worry about their reputation online, so they hire experts to help them monitor and improve their search results.
Hiring SEO experts and online reputation management professionals at BRANDefenders and agencies like it allows you to have peace of mind, knowing that your reputation is being taken care of. It frees up your time and energy to focus on other parts of your business.
If you find that your reputation needs work, or you want to ensure that you maintain positive search engine rankings, contact one of our experts today to talk about how we can help.