Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

Just how good it is when an Organization says that ‘Employees are their assets’, well let’s keep this debate aside for now. But here we are going to highlight how employees’ reputation creates a huge impact on those who look at you from the other side and just how critical it is for the reputation of your company..

Your employees’ carries the attitude and brand of your company. Have you ever noticed when visiting any office and waiting at the front office. I think this is the best place to analyze how true the employees carry the brand. You can feel the elements of the company culture and values coming through in the way people speak to each other and how they greet you. After all, employees are the caretakers of a company’s brand.

Employees and corporate reputation goes hand in hand. Though company reputation is vital, but employees are also the key factor that link to manage it. This generates positive performance and ultimately cements a place for you in this competitive era. So how to keep a positive reputation of your organization is about recognizing the significant role employees’ play in the overall positioning of corporate reputation.

However, to encourage employees to ‘live the brand’ are not much practiced. It is further suggested that to highlight your brand through your employees there has to be solid strategies in place. So when employees are trained to do their part perfectly the battle is half won. Let the employees know what actions are effective in return that successfully portray your strong brand.

In my opinion a brief training exercise and the know-how of the company and its regulation will go a long way in shaping employee reputation. Apprise them of the various vulnerability that could sabotage their reputation; for example ‘A tech savvy employee when comes across some website that has negative thing about the organization, what he should be doing? Persuade them to take advantage of the situation and come up with better solution to counter that after all it’s reputation at stake.

2010 is going to be an interesting year for SEO, Reputation Management and Online PR, there could not of been a better example of how the communication world is changing, with this years Christmas number 1. TV vs Facebook;  X Factor vs  Rage Against The Machine.  2010 will see a real shift towards groups of people on social sites really making a difference and having access to many tools to shout out even louder.  Tools like Facebook, Twitter to name a few are only part of it, with the introduction of Google’s sidewiki which allows people, customers, competition to write remarks about a website without any control.  There is no opt out of sidewiki, customers will love it, businesses who have a bad track record of customer service will hate it.

Many companies will need to allow for Reputation Management to be in their marketing budget for 2010, but this is not a negative, far from it.  In the last 5 years there has been a massive shift from traditional advertising to online advertising because, if done correctly the returns on investment can be far greater than traditional advertising.  Plus if you focus some of your efforts on organic SEO and RM you will see them as an investment rather than just a cost.  Compare that to a TV advert, once you’ve spent you budget the advert is gone, unless someone has recorded off the TV, but even then most people just fast forward through the adverts.

How Reputation Management Works

So you’ve decided you want to focus your efforts on improving your position online and spent a wee fortune on SEO, what happens next?

The customer finds your site and now knows your company name, it is at this point that Reputation Management and Online PR play their roll, because if the customer has not bookmarked your website they will put your company name in instead.  It only then takes one negative comment on a forum to start effecting your sales and the reason for this, if that negative comment appears on the first page of the search results and starts to attract more negative comments it doesn’t take long for it to rise up the search results and ultimately be sitting directly below your own site.   Having a negative result directly below your own company website can attract up to 70% of your potential customers to click on it first rather than click on your site.  Pushing the negative forum down the SERP’s is where RM and SEO come into play.

If personalised search results are here to stay, then click through rates could be one of the determining factors for which site will show for your company name.  Maybe PPC campaigns will help with CTR and make certain sites perform better, but the jury is still out on this.

If 2010 for your business is about converting more of the right customers then reputation management has to be up there in the marketing budget.  There is no point spending 1000’s on advertising only to loose all those potential sales because of negative things being said about your business.  So here is our top tips for 2010.

Quite often a  company will only find out if there is negative pages or comments on the Internet when a customer remarks on it or says they have decided to go else where because of what they have read on the net.

It’s humans nature to write about a negative experience, it allows you to get it off your  chest when they feel hard done by.  The bigger problem is, customers who have had a fantastic experience very rarely write about it.  Because of this the Internet can become very one sided towards the negative end not because of what you have done, but because of how human nature is.

More often than not, businesses don’t know how much negative results appearing in the search engines is costing them, they can only take a stab at the losses.  Reputation Management is best seen as an investment that will pay back dividends.  Towns in previous centuries would build a defence wall to protect themselves rather than wait until they were attacked Reputation Management is exactly the same.

So you can spend a small fortune on SEO, only to be totally undermined by having negative results for your company name.  So for example lets say my company name is BB Widgets Suppliers and I sell blue widgets, I’ve focused my SEO on ranking highly for the keywords Blue Widgets.  Now that the customer has found me if they don’t bookmark my site then they are likely to google BB Widgets Suppliers as they now know your company name.  It is at this point that if negative content is ranking highly for your company name then all that SEO work has gone out the window.

How Do Negative Search Results Hurt You

Weapons of mass destruction to your company’s reputation…  so often we talk about the doom and gloom of reputation management and how sites like scam.com, ripoffreport.com, facebook.com to name a few can be used to attack your brand, company or individual’s name.  We have to talk about the negative side of not taking action all the time because businesses and celebrities just don’t get it.  Even if they do they quite often don’t allocate resources or funding to help prevent attacks on-line until its to late and the damage has been done.  You only have to look at what happened after the France – Ireland game with Thierry Henry’s hand ball, people are already saying they will boycott Gillette products on facebook and twitter, one profile has already generated over 50,000 followers in less than 24 hours, amazing.

So being Friday, thanks giving and also a new moon, I thought I should talk about all the positives of reputation management and how it can help drive traffic to your site.

So by developing a reputation management strategy, what you’re really doing is taking advantage of all the different sites and channels out there.  Sites like the BBC.co.uk are great example of taking advantage of technology, they were one of the first to take advantage of blogging and podcasts.  Putting out lots of positive content across all the available mediums not only helps prevent negative content but also allows you to attract more potential customers when they see positive customer feedback and stories.

Social network sites are a fantastic way to get news out quickly and effectively, many developers have been quick to take advantage and build applications for almost everything from your laptop to your iphone.  One of our clients next week is going to the RSNA  which is the largest conference in the world, the sales guys can walk around taking photos, interviews and general feedback instantly.   Anyone can become a journalist nowadays.

Creating pages on Facebook and allowing people to become a member is another great way to build a following of your product or service.  Cool applications that allow you to twitter can then be publish to your site and facebook at the same time.  There are 1000’s of great widgets and applications to choose from.  Blogs are also another great tool, again providers like wordpress have tools you can download to your phone so when you are sitting in the airport bored and feeling like you are wasting time you can bang up a post.

In today’s world where customers expect things to be instant its critical you keep your on-line presence up to date.  What’s almost as bad of course is if you don’t keep content up to date, I know I have to really get into a strict routine each morning to make sure I keep my blogs, twitter etc up to date.  If a customer finds a blog that has not been touched for 6 months, it can send out a negative message, is the company still running?  Do they not care about keeping information up to date? And so on.

The internet is becoming a really noisy place, so it’s important you use every tool possible to shout the loudest, much of the work we provide for our clients is daily posting and writing news articles and so on, the benefit of this is just how much traffic this can generate to your site.  You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand the more nets you throw out the more fish you will catch.

Using on-line PR sites is another fantastic way to also get stories to the top of search engines, often these types of services offer links to your own site, so more often or not if it’s an interesting enough story you can also get traffic.  If your really lucky and people start to Digg it, reddit, tweet it etc then it can really take off and generate a lot of traffic.

It’s very easy now quickly to generate over 50 plus urls all promoting your company and publishing articles and press releases you have written, ultimately you have more control and more of a chance at keep positive stories at the top of the search results as well as attracting more traffic and ultimately generating more sales.

Reputation management in my eyes is advanced search engine optimisation (SEO), its about developing a online presence which attracts more customers and at the same time control the content.  In very simplistic terms when ever you type in a search result there is always at least 10 results on the first page of Google, if you only have one website (and assuming it is optimised) then when someone searches your business you have absolutely no control what the other 9 results will show.  It’s a bit like owning a shop front but only using 1 tenth of the window and allowing anybody else to use the rest of the window for what ever they like.

Reputation management must be part of a companies strategy going forward the old ways or going out the door no longer can you rely on the traditional PR ways and damage limitation solutions, of course they have a part to play, but a shrinking part.

In business and in life, reputation is everything. So it goes on the web as well. Your web site is considered one of the representations of your reputation of your business. You and your business together forms your web site. When disatisfied customers complain about your company in discussion forums, and chat rooms around the web, that is another representation of your reputation.

You are what people are saying about you. The blogs convey the public thoughts and moods to express good or bad points and emotions. To minimize damages due to inflammatory websites and weblogs launched by consumers, some use the same reactive tactics. Given the increasing popularity and development of search engines, these tactics have become more important than ever.

In the years ahead, reputation will become even more important on the web. To be successful, you will need to manage your reputation on and off your web site. Software services are emerging nowadays that measure and record reputation in quantitative and qualitative ways. Search Engine Reputation Management tactics are often employed by companies and increasingly by individuals who seek to proactively shield their reputations or brands from damaging contents.
These tactics have become more important than ever due to the increasing popularity and development of search engines. We can help your company develop a reputation management strategy by assessing high-level analysis of the business, industry, competition, and customers. That is the analysis of the key phrases, web site visitors,source of prospective customers and competitiveness of the search results for those phrases.

I wrote a post back in 2007 called PR – Be Careful which was my first real insight into how pr companies work.  A few years on and a bit more experience, has shown me how PR, SEO and Reputation Management should be a combined strategy.

I have seen the best and the worst of PR so here are some healthy tips going forward:

1. PR companies would normally take 2 different stances when it come to damage limitation either respond positively to the story or ignore it and hope it goes away.   Both can be a dangerous game on the Internet, if you react to a story or someone’s comments on a forum directly then quite often than not it will attract more negative comments.  If you ignore it, then again it can attract even more negative comments if it appears high in the search results.
2. Using a PR company to create press releases is a great way to get positive stories out there, make sure you use online channels as well.
3. SEO, make sure your own website and or blogs can be found, a customer should be able to find your site easily and quickly so ranking number one for your own site is critical.
4. Reputation  management is a combination of content, SEO and PR by filling the net with positive stories that rank highly for your company is how best to protect your reputation online.

SEO (search engine optimisation) , PR and Reputation Management services all play a significant roll to protect you name, company or brand.  We have built a working relationship with many of these types of companies over the years and have achieved great success with it.

We do provide a article and content service, but do find it very useful if clients can also provide content which we can use to fill the Internet with positive stories and feedback, customer reviews are also a great source for stories.

SEO Online Marketing

So often when a company is looking to hire somebody for the intenet to help with marketing they will hand it over as an IT issue rather than a marketing issue.  This is often because companies still don’t get and understand how the Internet can help or hinder a company.  When you talk about advertising in a newspaper they get what quarter of a page looks like, SEO on the other hand is very subtle and often not obvious.

So many times I’ve heard in the past people saying I am getting my cousin, brother, friend to do our website, or our graphics designer is building our new site and so on.  One thing runs true no matter whether we are talking about online or ofline business, Location, Location, Location.  If I ran a large department store, would I build it on some little housing estate on the outskirts of town, or would I build it in the the prime shopping areas where the footfall would be 1000’s of times greater.

So taking that same attitude, would you get someone who has never ran a successful website online to help you with your online marketing, build your website and ultimately control you reputation online?  I hope your answer would be no.

When do you start your online marketing?

Again one of the biggest mistakes is to wait until your product or business launch and wonder why nothing is coming through your website.  We like to plan at least 6 months ahead to get the ball rolling, work on our marketing strategies,  start our SEO campaign and build good quality content.  Don’t leave it till the day you open for business as you will be dissapointed.  Of course you can also use Adwords to get the ball rolling but rlying on just this form of marketing can be costly.

Make sure to leave a budget for your online marketing, I remember talking with a developer who had built 200 serviced apartments to rent out as holiday lets.  They had spent £30,000 on towels and allocated £1,000 for online marketing and website….  Need i say more.

SEO and Reputation Management has to be part of your marketing strategy, there is only 10 places available on the first page, make sure you are planning to take one of those spots.

Some industries bring inevitably more challengers for reputation management, much of it depends on how active the industry is online.  Take software, web design or SEO these industries naturally do a lot of their business and work on the net.  With loads of forums and groups it’s very easy to get a negative or bad reputation with so many people writing content and pages on line.

It’s because of this that we will often need to do some research into a company or industry before we price up SEO or reputation management.

Another big influence is how many customers your business has, if you run a hotel you are more likely to have a lot more customers talking about you than say a garage does.  Because of this, there is more likely just because of the law of averages to be negative content on the net.

Another big factor is how competitive is the market, often negative driven websites make money through advertising so they encourage people to right negative content.  Sites like wiki and Rip Off Report make it very easy for people to get pages ranking well in Google.

We can do reputation management in different steps. The first part is identifying and evaluating all negative search results and establishing a plan. We cannot delete negative publicity from the search engines but the negative notices can be moved down and most probably removed from the first page. Moving it from the first page itself can be very effective as most search engine users will look on to the first page of results.

The second part of our service is to give positive impression through positive content. And bring that to the top of the search engines. As these can be controlled by the clients itself, it will definitely enhance and expand their online reputation.

In addition to creating new positive impressions to be posted on the Internet, we can promote positive results so these results will rank higher in the search engines. The success of this process do depends on the works of writing, promotion, public relation and search engine optimization skills. If you need effective results, then these steps need to be performed on an ongoing basis until the objectives are achieved depending upon the severity of the bad publicity. Sometimes the results can take many months to achieve.

Go here for more in-depth Steps for Reputation Management

For more information, give us a call +44 (0)871 789 6200   or mail us at: info@reputationmanagementfor.com

It is very much evident that how the first page result from a search has gained more and more importance and now it is treated to be most valued searches. Usually human resources departments try to get apt persons by searching the net in order to see whether there are any job applicants who meet their criterias.

Many job searchers do not succeed in getting persons whom they require because of the negative search results. On the other hand job seekers are also disqualified because of unflattering results. For a job searcher, search engine results are more important than the resumes of the candidates which they distribute to potential employers. We analyse the Internet to dig up every possible piece of information about you and then we present it to you and enables you to review everything that’s available about you online. If there is unwanted content about you on the Internet, our expert team will work to diminish the value of that information.

Everyone has an online reputation, whether they realise it or not. You cannot leave your reputation unattended for another day!For more information, give us a call on +44 (0)871 789 6200  or mail us at: info@reputationmanagementfor.com