Reputation management is a great way to expand an existing business, or to create a whole new one. It can be quite difficult to obtain a good number of customers if you are not ready to do the work required. Fortunately, a little knowledge is all you need to overcome this problem. Keep reading to learn how to make your website hop with visitors.
Remember that Google is not the only search engine out there. While it does dominate the search market, Yahoo, Bing, and many others are still widely used. By not ensuring that your website is not displayed on these sites you are giving up valuable visitors for no good reason. When looking at your next ad campaign, they may also be the best place to go. There will be less competition, and you will often get more visitors for your money.
Make sure you have a collection of positive reviews on your site. As your reputation management builds, you may also want to start linking to the various review sites that contain a large portion of your positive reviews. This will give your business credibility. If they are independently verifiable even better- this will prove that you did not write them yourself. Look for reviews that talk about their specific experience to make them sound more genuine.
In the same vein, you will want to turn negative reviews to your advantage. How you respond to an upset customer will hold great weight with the people who read the review. If you apologize, are polite and offer to assist the upset customer with their issue you can actually improve your reputation management, especially if it is obvious that the negative was written by someone who is less than reasonable.
Keep updating and tweaking your site. Search engines don’t like stale content. Even if the information on your site is still perfectly relevant, if you don’t change anything for months on end search engines will start pushing your site back as abandoned. Most sites now handle these updates through a blog or news page. If you aren’t the best writer have no fear. There are plenty of places where you can hire a competent freelance writer for reasonable rates. Never use recycled content. Even if you have the correct rights to use the material, you will punished for having content is not unique enough.
Where ever it is appropriate, make sure to link to external pages as much as possible. There are two reasons for this. First it will give your site an anchor in the mass of sites available on the web. Search engines will use this to figure out where your site should rank on various keywords. Second, this will encourage others to return the favor. Again, this will help your ranking, but it can also help drive traffic to your site all on its own.
Reputation management is hard at first, but it is never impossible. With a little effort and study, you can rank your site among the very best. Keep trying, changing and tweaking- you can get there!