Assessing your online Internet reputation is simple, really. Just search for your business online and see what you find. Make sure that when you’re searching, you check with different search engines. The search engines have different requirements for keywords and work slightly differently than the others. Because of that, you need to make sure that you’re searching not only common search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN; but also the metasearch engines such as Info.com, Dogpile, and WebCrawler.

So what should you be searching for? Your name is an obvious one, especially if you’re the CEO or the President of a company; plus you’ve probably already guessed that you should search for your company name also. But along with those, also search for your brand, your product, your employees (especially those that deal with the public a lot,) as well as your brand and any usernames that you may use in association with your business.

Additionally, keep in mind while you’re searching your company that search engines are very often personalized right now, meaning that the results you see will most likely be based on at least your location, as well as you or your company if you’re signed into that specific search engine. For instance, if you’re signed into Google and search for your own company name while you’re signed in, you may only get to see results of content you’ve written, or material that you already know is out there. What you want to find however, is the material you don’t already know about and that could be negatively affecting your business.