Your small business’s online presence is critical to attracting customers. That’s why it’s so important to make sure your online reputation is spotless. To protect your image, take these steps to keep abreast of what people are saying about your business on social media, ratings and reviews sites and more.
So far, we’ve mentioned piecemeal approaches to monitoring your online reputation. To save time, consider a simple solution: an all-in-one online reputation monitoring service like Web.com’s ReputationAlert. ReputationAlert tracks mentions of your business across thousands of places online, including social networking sites, ratings and reviews sites, blogs and news sites, so you don’t have to use a bunch of different tools to stay up to date. As soon as either positive or negative comments are made about your business, you’ll automatically receive an alert so you can take action right away to protect your reputation if needed.
Despite all of your best efforts, sometimes monitoring isn’t enough. If you see what looks like a fake review of your business by the competition, contact the review site immediately to report it. If the post is determined to be fake, or if it’s libelous or defamatory, the review site should remove it or at least downgrade it if warranted.
It’s every business owner’s nightmare to have a horrible review go viral or get into a battle with an online troll that damages your online reputation. If worse comes to worst, you may need to turn to an online reputation management consultant. These companies will first try to get false/damaging information removed from the Internet (not an easy task). If they can’t accomplish that, they will use SEO to add more positive mentions of your business and push the negative mentions lower and lower in search results, so that very few people will ever see it.