Tips for Managing Your Online Search Engine Reputation

It's the nightmare of every small business: one unfair online review on Yelp!, Citysearch, TripAdvisor or some other site that tarnishes your reputation. The scariest part? You will never know how much business you may have lost as a result of people reading that bad review.

Consumers don't buy so much as a toothbrush anymore without Googling the brand online. Therefore, it's become essential for businesses of all types to manage their online reputations. Michael Fertik, president and founder of ReputationDefender, an online reputation management company, offers these tips to help keep your business's online search presence as positive as possible:

1. Collect positive reviews from customers you know are satisfied. Have a laptop opened in front of customers and ask them to write a review right there in front of you on Yelp! or Citysearch, or any other relevant review site. This could work easily for any kind of retail store or even a law or real estate office.
2. Optimize your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is an essential business tool. Make sure your profile has your business name in it, including all possible abbreviations, and is complete and open to the Internet.
3. Have a Twitter handle that has your proper business name in it and is open to followers.
4. Make sure your corporate website recognizes how customers refer to your business, even if it's not your exact corporate name, and use that less formal but more common name in your content. You can test to find out how customers are referring to you by implementing a short-term Google Ad Words campaign using different derivations of your company name and seeing which are searched more often to find your site.
5. Don't copy and paste content from one part of your site to another. Exact repetition of copy from page to page can diminish your search engine rankings.
6. Update content on your business's website once or twice a month, as well as on your Facebook fan page, Twitter, your blog's homepage and other sites you maintain. Leaving your sites dormant will diminish their rankings on Google.
7. Try to avoid getting into battles with people reviewing your business negatively, unless those reviews are objectively wrong (for example, stating you are closed on Sundays when in fact you're open) or if a review is getting a lot of attention. Also, if someone is dissatisfied, publicly apologize and ask for a second chance so that prospective customers can see you are well-intentioned.

In addition to these do-it-yourself methods, you can also enlist ReputationDefender and other firms to help. ReputationDefender's MyEdge Pro system includes software that optimizes the content you control so that it appears higher in search engine rankings (thus surpressing negative content), and professional advisors who create copy for your business aimed at the same result. However, ReputationDefender will not create fake reviews of your business or post attacks on your competitors.

Even if your business isn't being attacked by bad reviews, using a reputation management provider can be beneficial. John Colegrove, head of financial planning firm John Colegrove, Inc. Norcross GA, enlisted ReputationDefender not to to defend his reputation, but to help create awareness about his services. "I want people in my backyard to know where to find me. I think there's a window of two to four years where financial planners are not going to be highly competitive on the Internet." During that time, Colgrove plans to aggressively managing his online presence and search engine rankings to get the maximum exposure. So far the results are encouraging. He's had inquiries from people finding his website -- something that never happened before he started with ReputationDefender.

ReputationDefender is offering a special discount for About.com readers.

via entrepreneurs.about.com