Did you know that most people go to the internet to research local products and services before making a purchase? Not only that, but people go online all day every day to let the world know what they think about products and services after they purchase.

So what happens when other consumers come across negative information about your business? Do you think they will still call or come visit?

Monitoring and responding to what is being said about your business online is crucial. Letting bad publicity build up about your company online will definitely put a damper on things – especially if you don’t even know what’s being said. Even worse is actually knowing what’s being said, but not doing anything about it. Remember that keeping your reputation protected will help your business generate new customers, maintain existing customers, and help you profit.

Generate positive content about your business and distribute it online. Online press releases are a great way to let the world know what your business is up to and build a strong reputation. Keep consumers updated on your special offers, corporate changes, product additions, and anything else you want them to know in these press releases.

Also, be sure to get a blog if you don’t already have one. Blogging is one of the most popular forms of online communication today. Once you setup a blog, tie it into your social media accounts to create a strong source for lead generation and customer retention. These blog posts can also be used as articles and submitted to several different online article directories to give your business even more positive online exposure online.

Ensure that all information on your webpage is accurate. Nothing turns away a customer faster than inaccurate information. As much as you want to catch a potential customer’s eye, you should not over-endorse your product or skill into something that you know you can’t deliver.

What you will end up with is a disgruntled customer. The fastest news to get around is bad news, and if that customer has access to the Internet this could mean trouble for your business reputation.

Once something is placed on the Internet, it really never goes away unless specific actions are taken. So be honest about what your company is offering, therefore leaving you with satisfied customers who will be more likely to use your business in the future.

Building a positive reputation online takes work, but it is well worth it. Don’t think that because something has worked for you it always will. When it comes to the use of the internet, things are always changing. So as a business owner, you have to keep changing with it.

For instance, the Internet has become the main tool that many local consumers turn to before purchasing local products and services. While this may seem like a great opportunity to expose your business to local consumers, it can also have a negative impact if proper reputation management procedures are not put in place.

The important point is that it’s better for you to be proactive when it comes to managing your reputation online.

Repairing your reputation once the damage has already been done is much more time consuming and costly than starting before things get out of hand.

Unfortunately, many businesses are plagued by false information and slander and don’t even realize it. But if you don’t know about it, you can’t fix it.

So it’s best to actively manage and monitor your business name online to see what people are saying. Not only that, but you should implement strategies to generate more positive information about your business online.

Years ago, it was a lot easier for businesses to manage their reputations but things are different today. While reputation management for businesses may not have been a big issue in the past, a new form of technology has taken the small business world by storm – the Internet.

Just about everyone uses the Internet to research businesses these days, but it doesn’t stop there. They are also using the Internet to voice their opinions about your products and services, good and bad.

The emergence of certain online avenues – such as forums, blogs, and social networking – has created an easy way for consumers to voice their opinions about businesses. While some people do provide positive feedback online, more and more people are using the Internet to voice negative feedback as well. One negative review about you or your business can show up in hundreds of searches and major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Not only that, but many businesses are becoming victims of false information and slander online and some of them don’t even know it. Negative online feedback could mean really bad news for business owners and could cost them a fortune.

The fact is that people care a lot about what other people think when it comes to looking for local products, services, and businesses. It’s natural for people to navigate towards what other people like.

On the flip side, it’s natural for people to back away from what other people don’t like. Therefore, as a local business owner it’s in your best interest to start monitoring what is being said about you online. It’s one thing to know and do something about it… but it’s another thing to not even know what’s being said.

Online reputation management is a process of monitoring and addressing what is written about your business online. The actual managing of your reputation involves using strategic online techniques to promote positive and neutral content about your business.

Negative feedback and bad reviews are not always a bad thing. You can learn a lot about what your customers are saying about you and your business by monitoring and managing your online reputation.

1. Believable If you have 100% 5 stars rating all the time, it may actually have the opposite effect than you expected. Perfect customer reviews can make your business sound too good to be true and raise alarm bells for online surfers. They will be suspicious about your reviews and will probably think you have paid people to post favorable reviews.. When people are deciding which business to choose based on customer reviews, they will choose one where a majority of the reviews are positive and not necessarily a business that has 100% positive ratings.
2. Public Relations Negative reviews also give you as a business owner an opportunity to demonstrate your public relation skills to an online crowd. If people can see that you respond to negative reviews with a sincere, compassionate, objective and corrective attitude and approach, your business will actually be seen as more relatable and involved. It shows you are willing to go out of your way to make your customers happy and are willing to resolve problems. Everyone knows business transaction can have its hiccups and it’s comforting to know if and when it happens, the business owner will be proactive to sort it out.
3. Improvement Negative reviews also help you as a business owner to get to know things about your company that you may have never gotten to know otherwise. If customers are getting poor treatment from your employees, substandard products and services- the only thing worse than them voicing their displeasure is them keeping silent about it. Without any form of feedback, you will be confused why your sales are declining because you don’t know the root causes. So see negative reviews as a way to improve your business in areas it is currently weak and that you were not aware about. This way you will actually be thanking those negative reviewers for highlighting the problems and contributing to your company success.

There are many online places that people can talk about your business such as:

• Social Media – this includes Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. Anyone can post an update, send a tweet or upload a video on these social media networks
• Blogs- a blogger may write an article about your business or his/her followers may talk about your business in the comments section.
• Review Websites- there are lots of review websites where the public can rate a local business such as Yelp and Google Places.
• Consumer Complaint Websites – one bad review on a consumer complaint website can show up all over the search engines.

In light of this, your small business has to take measures to monitor and manage your online reputation. Think of online reputation management as the online version of Public Relations. It’s simply managing and improving the public image of your business brand in the online world.

With the world increasingly becoming within reach of our fingertips, small business owners should not ignore or wish away their online reputation management but take  proactive measures that will be a golden investment towards their long-term bottom line and success.

There are a growing number of activities involved in managing your business’s online reputation each of which must be part of your online reputation management strategy:

1. Creating your online branded image- this involves being visible online using resources under your own control such having your own website, blogs, social media accounts, business directory listings, web 2.0 sites, syndicated articles, image portfolios etc. The advantage of this is that you can control a lot of search engine listings with your own information about your business instead of having those search results being dominated by other people talking about your business.
2. Monitoring your online reputation- this involves monitoring what people are saying about your business on social media websites along with review and consumer complaint sites such as Yelp and Ripoffreport.com.
3. Managing your online reputation- this involves taking the results of your monitoring activity and taking measures to control bad reviews and to draw attention to the positive publicity about your business. This is probably the hardest part of online reputation management as it involves:
• dealing with negative reviews,
•  engaging with those who posted negative content,
•  maintaining a positive and truthful position without falling for the temptation to engage in a online word fight.
• Having the courage to apologize, admit your shortcomings and rectify a situation
• Thanking those who have contributed positive reviews and incorporating them into your online and offline marketing content.

• ONLINE SEARCH – The massive growth in online media has made it necessary for small and large businesses alike to focus on their online image. More and more people the world over look for information on just about everything and this applies to information about your local business. People are becoming more and more likely to look for businesses online through Google, Yahoo or Bing search engines rather than leafing through a massive Yellow Pages Directory book.

• SPEED – The speed at which online media operates can make or break your business in a matter of minutes or hours. A viral tweet, video, blog post or status update can be viewed by thousands if not millions of people in a span of a day creating a much more powerful effect in a shorter time than any traditional offline media. Even a small local news story can be broadcast across the nation with a YouTube video. If the news story was positive, a small business can get a lot of positive PR and increased sales, but if it was negative, it can literally destroy the business. We all know that bad news spreads faster than good news.

• EQUAL OPPORTUNITY – Online media is largely an equal playing ground for both small and large businesses, so any business no matter its size can get exposure, criticism, reviews, and comments on the internet. This means that even small businesses cannot afford to ignore online reputation management because the internet has made the world so much of a smaller place. The emphasis placed on local search by dominant web players such as Google, Facebook, Yelp and others, has given more power and opportunity for small businesses to grow their presence online. Yet this increased awareness has also made it critical for any small business to know how to handle the huge public exposure and scrutiny that is part of the package.

• ONLINE SEO – What many business owners fail to understand is how permanent a footprint bad publicity can leave on the web. Once content has been published on a website, indexed by the search engines and shows up in the search results, it is extremely difficult to have that content removed. It is not as easy as telling Google to remove the offending. It often involves contacting the webmaster of the blog or site where the content was posted and trying to convince them to delete the content, make the page invisible to search engines or to remove the page. This is often quite difficult as they have ownership rights over the site and some websites have strict guidelines and will not delete any bad reviews. Even if you resort to legal measures and they eventually remove the content, it is still difficult for that content to get totally off the internet radar especially if the content was widely circulated or went viral. Other websites probably also picked up on the same bad reviews. Online content is definitely very sticky and something that happened many years ago can haunt your business reputation for many years to come.

To start just do some searches related to your type of business, product, or service and see what the most popular keywords are. Look at the related keywords and see which keywords have larger search volume. This will help you determine which keywords should take priority in your list. For example if you run a restaurant and your keyword “restaurant in Miami” had 500 searches per month and one of the related keywords that came up was “restaurant Miami” which has 890 searches per month, then the latter keyword could be a better choice to use in your list. You can keep refining your searches to find many niche keywords to target for search engine optimization and on social media websites.

-  Always have keywords on your mind. Website keyword optimization can make a big improvement in your search engine rankings. Make sure to optimize your titles, page URLs, images, and content. Check out Google’s excellent free keyword tool. Google Keyword Tool

- Create a sitemap. A sitemap is a webpage that lists all the major pages on your site. A sitemap is simple to create and makes it a lot easier for search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing to crawl your website.

- Content! Search engines love fresh content. If you don’t have one now consider adding a blog to your website as a way of creating new content.

- Social Media. There are a lot of social media websites and you should at least create accounts for your business on the major social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. Every time you post a blog or new content make sure you let your social media followers know about it. Make sure you fill out all the profile information for your social media accounts and include a link back to your website when possible.

- Always check your spelling and grammar.

- Use a reliable web hosting service. Your website going down can effect your search engine rankings.