Your reputation in the search engines can be a key indicator of how your company is perceived by your target audience and the millions of other people in the online community. But if a handful of negative posts about your company appear somewhere, you can easily turn a negative into a positive through a variety of proactive strategies that will help your company:



Determine the cause of the negative posts and feedback.

 

Learn from and correct the problem that caused the feedback.

 

Proactively manage your reputation management in the search engines so that the impact of negative posts in the future is lessened.



 

As they say in sports, often the best defense is a good offense. It’s a cliché, but it endures because it still rings true today. Here are some easy steps that you can take to manage your company’s reputation in the search engines:

Determine Your Current Reputation – Search for your company’s name using the major search engines to see what’s being said about your firm on blogs and forums throughout the Internet.

Consult with an Internet Marketing Professional – By consulting with an Internet marketing expert, you’ll gain invaluable insight into reputation management as well as get an insider’s perspective on how to correct or turn negatives into opportunities for improvement.  

Subscribe to Google Alerts – Google has a service called Google Alerts which allows you to post both positive and negative keywords and phrases for the service to monitor. When someone posts something using those terms, Google Alerts can send you an email with results for the terms that you have chosen. This allows you to find the items quickly and easily in real time. 

Use Social Marketing to your Advantage – There are a number of social marketing strategies that you can use to your advantage, such as starting your own blog with optimized keywords and keyphrases, updating your website with fresh content and taking part in the blogs and forums where the negative posts appeared. Ask your Internet marketing consultant for more options. 

Subscribe to Online Services – There are a variety of inexpensive services on the Web which will scan the blogosphere for your company’s name and provide reports on both positive and negative blog and forum posts. 

Contact Blog and Site Administrators – It’s a long shot but it never hurts to contact blog and site administrators directly and ask them politely to remove the negative posts. Depending on your approach and their disposition, they may or may not remove the posts, but you’ll likely gain some insight into how these online communities work and how to use that to your advantage. 

Be Proactive with Press Releases – Compose and issue press releases on a regular basis to announce new products and services and important events to keep plenty of fresh and positive content about your company on the Internet.

These are just a few of the many ways that you can proactively manage your online reputation with the search engines and the wider online community. For more options and thorough explanations of these approaches, contact your Internet marketing consultant and remember that a large percentage of people use Internet research to inform their purchasing decisions. Proactively managing your company’s online reputation directly affects your bottom line.

 

Lawyers everywhere exist in a very competitive market and their reputation online and offline can make a huge difference in how successful their practices will be. Word-of-mouth advertising has a huge impact on building a client base and one negative post somewhere online can have serious repercussions. The popularity of blogs and forums makes it easy for anyone to air grievances whether they are legitimate or not and the way that lawyers handle negative feedback will be a big factor on how potential clients perceive their practice.

To that end, here are some tips for lawyers to manage their local online reputation in the search engines:



Search for yourself and your practice – Hop online and search for your name and the name of your practice in a search engine. Vary the search terms by thinking about how you would find your practice if you were a potential client. Create a bookmark folder and add the sites where you find both positive and negative feedback.

 

Read local blogs and forums – Find out how the people in your area perceive you and your practice by visiting local online directories, blogs, and forums. Note each mention of your name and start a list to track trends.

 

Participate in these communities – Register and participate in these communities and follow up on negative feedback by asking specific questions about why the poster was unhappy enough with your services to post online about it. The answers they provide will be invaluable for rectifying the situation, if possible, and prevent it from happening again.

 

Start a blog on your website – Add your own blog to your site and update it regularly with news and events, information on various aspects of the law, and anything you’d like the public to view.

 

Subscribe to Google Alerts – Google Alerts is a free service which you can use to alert you when there are changes to specific terms and phrases that you have chosen to monitor. It’s customizable and can track news, blogs, and search results. This tool is essential for online reputation management!



These tips are a great way to begin managing your online reputation and give you an outsider’s perspective on how your community views you and your practice. Even negative feedback can become a positive if you think objectively about it, learn from it, and implement appropriate adjustments so that it is less likely to occur. In the Digital Age, word-of-mouth advertising has been taken to a whole new level and as they say in sports, ‘Sometimes the best defense is a good offense.’