5 Steps to Getting Started with Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM)

1. Monitor Your Reputation

If you’re going to protect your reputation, you have to first know how to monitor it.

Basically, you need to make sure you know what people are saying about your business. This way, you can respond to any negative comments as soon as they’re posted.

If you fail to keep an eye on what people are saying about your business, you won’t be able to address any potential issues until it’s too late. Fortunately, there are several tools that make it easy to monitor your online reputation, including The Right Hand:

• If This Then That (IFTTT): When set up using the correct recipe, this tool can scan the internet for mentions of your business and send you a daily report letting you know what’s been said.
• Me On The Web: Another tool that scans the internet. Put in the name of your business, and it’ll send you an email letting you know if your company has been mentioned anywhere online.
• Ice Rocket: This tool lets you search the major social media platforms to see what people are posting about your business.

These tools will help you keep a close watch on any mentions of your business, across tons of different channels and keywords.

Not only will this help you with your online reputation management, they can also be used to stay on top of major industry trends or spy on your competition. It’s always good to know what people are saying about your competitors, isn’t it?

2. Claim Your Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)

If you have customers making negative comments about your business, one way to prevent them from impacting your business is to make it harder for these negative comments to get attention.

Do this by optimizing the top ten search results for the name of your business.

Once you’ve locked down your SERPs, it’ll be harder for any other negative mentions to break in and people who are searching for your business online will be less likely to see a negative mention.

Your objective, therefore, should be to create several strong pages built around your brand name that all have the potential to rank.

There are a few ways you can do this:

• Create social media profiles.
• Get others to write about your company.
• Create multiple websites.
• Contribute to other online publications.

Claiming your search results is a very effective way to make sure other people’s comments aren’t found by potential visitors to your website.

You might not be able to control what people say about you, but you can control whether or not other people see it.

3. Use Social Media

Social media is one of the most important facets of online reputation management. However, it’s not enough to just have social media accounts.

You need to actually use them.

Use social media to build and maintain an engaged audience. It’s a highly effective way to interact with your customers.

Social media allows you to build influence and trust with your customers. When this happens, it’s less likely that someone will make negative comments about your business.

If someone makes a complaint -- and you discover it quickly -- you can use social media to reach out to them and figure out how to solve the problem.

Another benefit of using social media regularly is that it can make it easier to claim your SERPs positions. The more engagement there is on your social media accounts, the higher the likelihood they’ll rank for your business’s name.

4. Listen to Your Customers

When you do receive a negative comment, don’t ignore it. If you do, you miss out on an opportunity to improve your reputation and repair the relationship between you and your customer.

Most importantly, you’re robbing yourself of the chance to improve your product or service. If a customer complains, it’s not always a bad thing. They could be giving you valuable information that can make your company better.

If you receive a negative comment, don’t blow it off. Be transparent. Engage with the customer. Try to understand why they’re complaining about your business, and try to make it right by taking into consideration any useful feedback the customer gives.

In the end, you’ll build a better business, while also improving your online reputation. If prospective customers see that you’re willing to listen to customer feedback, the brand benefits can be immense.

6. Take Responsibility for Your Mistakes

One of the easiest and most powerful ways to build a positive reputation is to be willing to admit when you’re wrong. Apologies can go a long way towards mending relationships with disgruntled customers.

Nobody expects you to be perfect. Mistakes do happen, right? However, it’s not really about the mistakes you make. It’s about how you handle these mistakes.

Karthikbalan Subramanian | ekarthikbalan@gmail.com

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