If you are interested in finding out what others are saying about you online, starting your own online reputation management (ORM) strategy is easy. To start you can search for your company or brand name on Google and see what information you can find. Even though Google is the top search engine around, do some research on the other popular search engines as well such as Bing and Yahoo. The different search engines have different algorithms for keywords and they don’t all work exactly the same. You can also search on metasearch engines such asWebCrawler and Info.com.

So how should you search and what should you search for regarding your online reputation? Well, you can start with your business name, the owner, CEO or even key employees as well. Along with searching through those names, also search for your brand name, and any relevant products and services that you offer. You can also search for names related to and in association with your business. Lots of data to research.

What information can affect your business?

While you are doing your research and searching for your company name on the search engines, remember that most of the popular search engines displays personalized search results. The personalized search results will be based on your last location, as well as your company or personal results if you are signed into that search engine for example – with your Gmail account. If you are signed into Google and you are using their search engine, there is a chance of the content you have written, or the content that were shared by your social circles on Google+ will be displayed. What you want to find when you are searching for is information you don’t already know is online and that could negatively affect your business.

Keep track of your reputation online

Once you have completed all your research and found results on all the search engines, what are you going to do with your findings? You need to track them! Create a spreadsheet that you can reference to and add the positive and negative mentions on the sheet. To summarize the spreadsheet, add the following information to your sheet; date, position on the search engines, the URL of the mentions, the type of mention (was it negative or good?).

When you are doing your research and searching for mentions of your company or brand name on the search engines, record the first 30 results that you have found, regardless if the results are positive or negative. Once you have those results, it is just a simple task of finding all the positive results and checking how you can use those to your full advantage, and finding the negative ones and checking how you can fix those results.

Use online reputation management to build your reputation

Online reputation management is becoming vital in today’s digital marketing business world. Take note that the method above is just a simple way on how you can monitor your online reputation for negative feedback, online reputation management can also be used to start building your reputation online.

Source: Online reputation management starts with search