Google Yourself


Google yourself.  Five years ago if you told someone to do that, you might get a strange look (or slapped).  Nowadays, it’s very important for people, especially business owners and their businesses, to be aware of what has been said about them online.  One way to become familiar with your online reputation is to go to Google, type in your name and your business name, and see what comes up in the search results.  Hopefully, there’s nothing negative in the results, and that is frequently the case.  But what if something negative does come up?

There are a lot of ways to protect your online reputation, but if someone wants to write a negative review of your business, or post negative comments about you, there’s not much you can do to stop them.  One way to counter negative online comments is to be proactive and create positive content for you and your business.  This positive content can take many forms, like blog posts, social media posts, and setting up online business profiles.  Once the positive content is on the web, it may prevent future negative content from making its way to the first page of Google.  Positive content can “bury” any future negative content in search results.  It won’t eliminate the negative content from the web, but it may push it to the 5th page of search results, which means it is practically invisible to the person searching for you and your business.

So what if a negative comment has already been posted about you or your company?  Often negative reviews are an opportunity to respond and interact with the online community.  Responding is something you should do as soon as possible, but respond in a positive way and try to resolve the issue.  Hopefully the person who posted the negative comment will post a positive review about how you handled the situation. 

There are many other ways to protect your online reputation and manage your online presence, but these items should help you get started.

Tags: , , , , ,

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 at 10:43 am and is filed under Internet Marketing, online reputation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

«

»


Leave a Reply