Why Google Is Your Best Friend in Online Reputation Management

One of your best friends in online reputation management is Google. Google is concerned with delivering relevant results for keyword searches. It does not matter if those keywords are for particular user based items or searches (such as searches for plumbers and Portland) for brand names. Google has made itself itself king or queen of Internet search and it is this fact that makes it your best friend when it comes to online reputation management.

Online reputation management is the ability or the process of managing a person's reputation online in the social media and SEO spaces. This activity has become more and more useful because there are a number of people online that do nothing but try to smear and destroy the lives of business people and their businesses. There are many reasons that a person would try to do this and all of them are bad. However, the business owner needs to be aware of the problems with online reputation management because online reputation management is the only way to control a person's or business's reputation online.

Google is the best friend of a person who needs online reputation management. Google is always searching for ways to index the web so they can deliver relevant results for keyword searches. This means that if someone searches for a brand, name of person, or a business then they try to deliver the most relevant results for a search. As a corollary, this means that they try to index everything that is on the web the best they can. There is a high likelihood that if something is said on the social media systems or on a webpage that you can find it in Google.

The trick to this action is to use the right tools on Google. One could use a keyword search however this takes time away from an activity that person could be doing elsewhere. Therefore, it is best to automate this as much as possible. That is where Google alerts comes into play. Google alerts allows a person to do keyword searches around a brand name, individual, or business name to find out who is talking about that particular keyword without the user having to do the search manually every single time. Google alerts also can manage alerts for other such a keywords but it is outside of the scope of this article. What we are interested in is its ability to find and report back any uses of a business's name or associated brand names.

Google alerts also will send (upon a user's request) a summary of everything that was said on the Internet in a daily e-mail. The user can get less or more of these e-mail alerts however if a person does not want to fill up their inbox quickly they should set this to a daily alert. A daily alert will allow a business to react quickly instead of waiting and letting a property age on the Internet. This is very important because if something is allowed to age on the Internet than it will be very tough for that specific asset to be removed from the first page of a brand name search.

The take away from this article is to use Google alerts the search for your business name, your name, or any brands associated with your business. This would give you the best chance to deal with any problems that arise from online reputation attacks (which are far more frequent than anyone would believe.) Therefore, go to Google.com to search for Google alerts and set up your alerts today.