Online reputation management requires lots of attention to detail. Managing content, measuring online sentiment, staying on top of alerts, reviews, and more can get unorganized quickly. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of online reputation management tools for removing unwanted search results from Google.
We’ve asked other professionals who use online reputation management tools every day to share their favorites. They told us about social monitoring, alerts, and email solutions. This is a short list of tools that every individual and company should consider using.
Want to know which online reputation management tools the pros use? Read on and find out. If you’d rather leave the work to us, explore our reputation management service offering.
BrightLocal
Bryan Clayton is CEO of GreenPal, an Uber for lawn care. They manage five offices in six different states. That means they have to manage reviews and reviews and ratings across several different sites for each office.
To stay on top of this, Clayton’s favorite tool is BrightLocal. He notes it’s a comprehensive suite of tools that handles local SEO and review acquisition and management. It’s critical to hire pros to handle search engine reputation management because mistakes can make your situation worse.
The best part: “Since we started monitoring and being proactive about our online reputation, we have grown our Yelp ratings by 300% in our major offices,” says Clayton.
Google Alerts
A perennial favorite for reputation management, Google Alerts makes it easy to stay on top of what’s being said about you or your brand online. It’s no surprise that it’s Lisa Chu’s favorite reputation management tool as well.
Chu is owner of Black N Bianco Kids Apparel. She uses Google Alerts to maintain reviews, customer feedback, and social media.
“The service is very effective at notifying me and my employees of all the latest relevant Google results regarding my business,” says Chu, noting that it gives her the ability to address any issues with her business before it becomes a viral social media nightmare.
“You can’t respond to a concern or complaint if you are are unaware of it,” she says. “Google Alerts allow my business to stay proactive in helping and addressing all of our negative customer feedback.”
Chu finds Google Alerts and monitoring the online reputation of her business as especially crucial, as their number one priority is customer service. She notes its strengths, sharing that it’s simple to set up, easy to maintain, and free.
“Every business should use this tool as one of their key elements to maintaining their reputation online,” she says.
Serpwoo
Mike Terry, digital marketing manager with 80 Proof Digital, loves to use Serpwoo to quickly assess results for online reputation management clients. He says the tool makes it easy for him to see at a glance the top 10 search results for a client’s name or company keywords.
Terry also notes that he can use Serpwoo to wade through and sort the results. It’s easy to tag URLs as positive or negative and quickly see the current positions for each link in the results. That way, it’s easy to monitor the progress of an online reputation management campaign.
Rank Tracking Software
Online reputation management is all about controlling the websites that rank for branded keywords. So, it’s vital to know which sites are on the first page of Google, and how your efforts impact their rankings.
Since you’ll most likely need to monitor thousands of keyword variations, it’s much more efficient to use automated software than to perform manual searches several times per day. Here’s a breakdown of the top rank tracking software to help you find one that fits your needs
YouTube
McKeen recommends using YouTube to post review videos. “Review videos are a great way for businesses to compete with sites like Yelp,” says McKeen. “You can feature your positive reviews and if you point enough links to them, they can rank on the first page, pushing down negative results.
Why it works: “Google loves their own properties,” he says, “so putting reviews on YouTube and Google+ is a great way to occupy spots on the first page.”
SuretyMail
One often-forgotten part of online reputation is email reputation management. Anne P. Mitchell, CEO and president of SuretyMail says that’s a mistake. Email management is critical, says Mitchell, because if if people can’t receive your email because of poor email reputation, you’re pretty much sunk.
Mitchell recommends both her company, SuretyMail, and competitor ReturnPath as effective email reputation management solutions. With email optimization, email fraud protection, and consumer insights, leading companies can use data smarter for promotion and reputation protection.
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