In this digital age, people invariably rush to the internet to find background details about a person or a business. This obviously leads to the question whether you have Googled your name or the name of your company to ascertain what results come up.
Ideally, if you are a self-employed professional, you would want the first page of results to accurately reflect your personal/professional details. But this is more easily said than done.
To find positive reviews about yourself/your company, you need to take control of your online reputation.
Sadly, if there is negative comment about you out there, it can be difficult to delete it. However, if you take steps to increase your online presence and flood the internet with positive reviews about your company you can effectively suppress any negative information by pushing it down to lower search result pages.
To take fuller control of your online reputation, it is necessary that you create strategic online profiles. Build a unique website that will command attention. Spend time developing your website content in conformity with your brand image.
Create a blog and actively participate in the social media channels. Search engines index your blog entries as also your social media activities. Thus, the more you can effectively utilize these programs, the better chance your blog and social media entries will appear in search results associated with your name.
Make it a point to constantly monitor your blog comments, LinkedIn recommendations, and review sites. You should know what people are posting about you or your business.
If it is unsavory, reach out to the commenter and have a personal conversation. This may very well lead the commentor to withdraw his/her negative comment.
You can monitor what people might be saying about you on the Internet by setting up Google alerts based on your name or the name of your company.
Do not post anything online that would be even remotely damaging to your reputation. When you use social media platforms, proceed with caution and be sure to check and double check that the privacy settings are set accordingly.
When negative reviews or complaints appear, you need to take them very seriously and take prompt countermeasures to reduce the negative impact. If the complaint is authentic, do not hesitate to publicly apologize and then set matters right.