Use SEO to Keep Your Online Reputation in Check

When people get your business card or hear of your business from another person, it's likely they might type your name into a search engine. If that search engine gives them something that reflects on your business negatively, your online reputation can be damaged and affect your business while a new customer walks away.

There are simple techniques that can help you control how you are viewed online. You cannot always remove the damaging content but there are ways to minimize the blow. Steps to do this are quite simple.

Assess the situation

The first thing that everyone should do is type your name into a search engine and find out the results. If something negative comes up, figure out if it is information that you have put online yourself that can be easily removed. Is this something I can remove from somewhere or use a privacy setting so that not all can view it.

Add Positive Postings

If there is some information coming up in searches that is negative and you cannot remove it from the original site you may try to change the amount of times it is viewed by publishing more positive information online about your business. If you add positive content chances are it will minimize the effect of the negative information by lowering the relevance of it during searches. A great way to build positive content is with using profiles on the social networks because they can have more SEO power than a blog or a single post.

Get your own Identity Hub

You should create a hub that will link all of your content together. Start by getting your own domain name and start talking about yourself. You backlinks so that the more links you have the more credible your site looks in search results. Posting to your site or blog is also a great way to keep fresh content and stay higher in the ranking.

Hire a Pro

If you do not feel that you can clean up some negative content that reflects on your business there is always someone else willing to do it for a fee. Some of these other companies will keep track of what content is popping up in SEO results for you and try to clean it up as it appears. They may even help you create positive content to help you.