Online Reputation Management For Dummies

Monitoring Matters

Pretend for a moment that I am a doctor and you are coming to see me because you want to be in top physical condition. If all I did was weigh you and give you a 5-minute checkup, you wouldn’t trust me, would you? Isn’t it unlikely that I could accurately assess your condition after such a brief exam?

It’s the same with assessing the health of your reputation online. You need to either hire a professional with targeted results and glowing client recommendations or use the right tools to gauge your present condition and future progress. Plus, you need to know how to use those tools accurately.

Gauging your condition and using these tools is known as monitoring, and it’s a big part of online reputation management.

Covering over unfair reviews

You can search for your name on Google or Bing and get an idea about what people are saying about you or your brand online at any given time, but it isn’t absolutely accurate. Trusting a Google search to tell you what’s being said about you online is about as effective as looking at a newspaper headline and feeling like you already know all the details to the story. The larger the reputation you’re managing the more closely you need to monitor what’s going on. Search engines have their proverbial hands full with trying to sort out information that’s relevant and top quality. They simply miss a lot of information.

This is terrific news if you’re trying to bury your one unfair review in the search engine rankings by publishing ...