Quick Guide to Online Reputation Upgrade: Part I

Search Engine Ranking & Online Reputation
Online reputation management isn’t social media monitoring and it has absolutely nothing to do with public relations. It is a concept that people really don’t know about and hardly understand. And whether you understand its underlying concepts or not, your online reputation plays a key role in your business, sales and benefits you and your professional life greatly (no matter what’s the size of your company and what its specific requirements are). However, all these benefits come to you only when you have a clear outline of its main concepts. Read on….

Online reputation management has many dimensions but put simply, it is the process of controlling what shows up when someone searches you in a Search Engine such as Google, Yahoo or Bing.  It makes way for promotion of positive content to the top of your search results whilst suppressing the unwanted content (negative or irrelevant) to ensure that when you are searched, the results are relevant enough to put you in a positive light.

As your Search Engine ranking determines what corrective action you need to take for online reputation upgrade, we’ll help you find your ranking and what shows up in the search results for your name and in what order they appear.

Step 1: Search Yourself: The Right Approach

Take the following approach for best results:

#Sign out of your personal (Google/Yahoo/Bing) account

When you are signed into your account, search engines employ personalized local searches slightly altering your results to make them more relevant to you based on your location and information that they have about you. On the other hand, the person searching you won't have exactly similar customization. So sign out of your personal accounts prior to searching to get a true picture of how your results look to others.

#Search for the same name people will actually use to search you

The key to get consistent good results is to use the same name on all your online profiles, including- social media, website, blog, resume etc. Avoid using your middle name or initials or a nickname on any of your online profiles to repeatedly attain positive search results whenever you are searched online.

And when you begin your online search, search using the name that people are going to use taking your name variations and common misspellings into consideration.

Step 2: Identify Your Ranking Category – Negative, Irrelevant, Positive or Combination of any of these there of
As you might be knowing, 93% of searchers never go past the first page and use only the first 10 search results to form their impression about you. So you should rather focus here as the category you land in can have a big impact on the impression you make with people searching for you online. No matter which category you fall in, we help you with negative reputation management and get to the positive search result category.

# Negative

It is the worst search result category representing you that can tarnish your reputation irrevocably. It is a direct consequence of any tagged photo, status update, negative feedback or a blog post.

#Irrelevant

Either these results are not about you or these are completely outdated, so they don't really help or hurt you. However, these may prevent the searcher from finding anything meaningful about you or someone might mistake you for someone else who has a negative online reputation.

# Positive

Relevant search results are formed by positive and relevant content that is actually about you.

Step 3: Plan To Improve Your Search Engine Ranking & Online Reputation

To fill your first search page results with as many positive results as possible, you need to adopt a proactive approach. We'll cover how to tackle each situation in our forthcoming articles, however, do the following for a start.

# Build Web Presence

Start writing positive & relevant content to build your online presence. It is simple - if you have any positive content, it will gradually show up on your first page. This is an essential step even for burying negative content/reviews.

#Push Content Higher

However, if you already have a website, a LinkedIn profile, a twitter account or an article/blog written about you that you want people to find, but that isn’t showing up high in search results, you need to push this content higher. There are specific steps you can take to boost this dormant content higher in search results for your name.

Conclusion

It takes years to build a good reputation. In the digital world, it is ruined in minutes. People quickly turn to Internet and use a search engine like Google to look for anyone or anything. So it's certain that someone else has searched something about you – may be your resume or your website. Ultimately, it's important that you make a good impression when someone searches you. No matter to which profession you belong – you need to know how to safely and efficiently manage your online reputation. We will keep exploring (in our upcoming set of articles) and enlightening you about all those tactics, basic to advanced, that you can adopt for your negative review management and overall online reputation management.