Blogs and the effects they have on your Reputation

Blogs are a useful tool for Online Reputation Management whether you’re looking to remove unwelcome content from page one of search engines, or whether you’re just looking to take a more proactive approach to your online reputation.

While the majority of results cannot be removed from Google, you can still push them down in the rankings if they appear on page one. Negative reviews or comments that appear on page one of search engines can reduce traffic and sales. A good way to push the negative content down is to use your online assets, such as your website and your social media online reputation, to help push the negative comments down. Creating and maintaining a blog means that you have another online asset that you can use as needed to help remove the negative content.

When setting up a blog, it may be a good idea to put it under a different domain, or use a subdomain, for example yourcompanynameblog.com or blog.yourcompanyname.com. This ensures it will rank separately. You must make sure to update the blog regularly with high quality content to help it rank and to provide quality content for customers. This content would ideally contain a few mentions of your brand name or keywords to help rank for those phrases, but make sure it doesn’t appear spammy at all.

When posting content, what and how you post is entirely up to you, as long as it is appropriate. You could post about your company and its latest products or services, or you could write posts on the industry in general, providing you make sure it is relevant to you and your customers.

A blog can also be used as a means of communication, creating another channel that customers can use to contact your company and review the products and service provided. It would be a good idea to reactively monitor comments. This will give you the chance to respond to customers, which will show that your company has good customer service and cares about what the customers have to say. It will also give you a chance to respond to any negative comments and try to resolve the issue, if possible.

Once you have produced some quality content for your blog, you could start to think about offering content to other blogs related to your industry. It’s often useful to write guides, how-to posts or top tips as these are more versatile when offering to other sites. This can help to improve your online reputation as people will relate back to your company if looking for certain information, and if the post includes a link you could potentially gain more traffic.