Flying Pig Communications

Very excited to have Cory Huff as our guest blogger today. Cory is simply amazing at what he does in SEO, Social Media, Online Reputation Management, and so on and so on…Not only that he is one of the best marketers I’ve ever met for the artistic niche, although his advice and insight carries through to every small business.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Every been a victim of a bad review?

It happened at a company that I previously worked at. A customer had a bad experience with a coworker and wrote a blog post about what happened. That blog post ended up on the front page of the Google results for a search for that company’s name. After that happened, other customers who had bad experiences left comments on the blog post, adding more content about the company and solidifying it’s standing on the first page of Google. It cost the company (and still costs them) a lot of customers, as well as good employees who see that post and decide they don’t want to work there.

You need to take care of your online reputation, and sooner is better. If you are a small business and want to take care of it in just a few hours, try some of the following steps.

Online Reputation Management: Own Your SERPs

The most important thing in your online reputation is making sure that if someone does a search for your name, they only see what you’d like them to see on the Search Engine Results Pages. You’ll want to make sure that your name is prominently displayed on several major website accounts. In most instances, this means having a website with a blog, and grabbing an account under your name with several social media sites. I recommend nabbing Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Profiles, Amazon, Flickr, Friendfeed, and any sites that are big in your business niche.

These sites will usually show up on search results after you claim them. In some instances, it’ll be necessary to update them with new content for the first couple of weeks so that they don’t get erased or discounted by the search engines. If you don’t have time to do this yourself, you can have your assistant do it or pay KnowEm.com to do it for you.

Monitor Your Reputation

Set up Google Alerts for your name. Then do a Twitter Search for your name and subscribe to the RSS feed for that search using Google Reader.

These two actions alone with save you a tremendous number of headaches if someone decides to write a bad review or simply gripe about someone else that isn’t you. Unless an influential blogger writes about you, most of these sites will easily outrank anything that they write, and it’ll never appear on the first page of Google results for your name.

You’ll want to repeat these steps for your business name, if it’s different than your personal name.

Cory Huff is an actor, director, and digital strategy troublemaker. He teaches artists about selling art online at TheAbundantArtist.com and offers search marketing & social media advice at CoryHuff.com.

Filed under: Uncategorized