Over time, the concept of reputation management has become more and more important for not only large businesses, but also small businesses on the web.

At it’s core, reputation management is an easy concept to understand.  As a business owner, you want to have some understanding and ability to control what people find when they search for your business online. I’ve heard it said, that quite simply in the 21st century, the first page of Google is equivalent to your business card something like a decade ago.  If you think of that as the truth, it’ll give you an idea about what you’re working toward.

Since this is how people learn about your business these days, you don’t want negative comments and articles to show up, that’s reputation management.

Here’s 5 ways to handle Reputation Management as a Small Business.

  1. First,  handle your social media accounts and handle them well. Facebook and Twitter especially will rank and rank well in Google and other search engines. Youtube and Instagram are notoriously more difficult to rank and rank well.  But, Youtube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world, so it’s worth a shot right?
  2. Create links to other pages on your site. Why?  The main reason is that you want to get the carousel for your business to be set up.  The easiest way to handle reputation management is to have control over exactly what’s shown and what better spot to do that than your own site itself? The image above is how my site shows on Google search. Those bullet points take away 2 spots that I would normally have to worry about.
  3. Write elsewhere.  I have a small feeder site, back in the day these would have been called parasites, but really, if you’re setting up a free WordPress site, like mine, you not only control it, but it tends to rank for your brand name fairly quickly. This will also help for the next bullet point in your list.
  4. Push The Rest Up: Are you working with bloggers for long tail reviews of your business?  You should be right? Part of the appeal of building those parasite sites, to me at least, is the ability to use them to push up legit, good reviews of your business. Links do a wonderful job at improving search engine rankings of long written content, so it makes sense to be ready to help when needed.
  5. Lastly, the most important take away here is simple: Do a good job at running your business.  If you do that, it isn’t the case that reputation management won’t be important.  Instead you’ll simply have the opportunity to do a good job at reputation management. More positive reviews than negative will make your job a heck of a lot easier.

Enjoy reputation management, with a good setup, it’s not as time consuming, or complicated as it seems!