In today’s business world, where e-commerce and digital marketing dominate, your online reputation is more critical than ever. Businesses with poor online media attention (or worse, no media attention at all), can lose more customers than they would with a bad review in a business journal or local news outlet. Monitoring your online reputation for both positive and negative feedback can greatly increase your online rankings and conversions in both e-commerce and in-store sales.

You can manage your online reputation with a number of monitoring systems and free online tools. The tools listed below keep you up-to-date, and are easy to learn to use:

Free Tools

UberSuggest – This keyword research tool shows the autocomplete results of search terms related to your brand. If you type in the name of your company, it will populate the long-tail keywords that Google is likely to autopopulate, such as “‘your company’ reviews,” or “‘your company’ hours.” This can help you create content around these keywords, and see if any negative keywords are frequently searched.

IFTTT – If This Then That is a website that allows you to automate certain tasks by linking sites and creating “rules” that correlate to actions. For example, you can make a “rule” that states if you post on your company’s blog, it automatically posts to a Medium account or shares on your Facebook page. You can use it to monitor different third party sites, to get email notifications when your brand name appears in reviews or mentions across different platforms.

KnowEm.com – This site allows you to search for your brand name across 500+ social media sites. Claiming your site on these pages allows you to own your brand on as many sites as possible, and helps increase visibility. You can search for domains, social media profiles reviews sites and other places where your brand could (and should) be listed for brand protection.

Google Alerts – Google offers the most SEO and ORM tools for businesses, but Google Alerts sends alerts to keywords you’ve specified to monitor. Specify content related to branded search terms or popular industry trends, and you’ll receive email notifications. This way you can see when someone mentions your brand on your website or social pages, so you can promptly respond or share when appropriate.

Hootsuite – Hootsuite is the most common management system for social media. It allows you to schedule updates and respond to your fans, which can improve your social media presence. Not to mention, it allows for Instagram, Youtube and WordPress scheduling, which not many other platforms provide.

Paid Services

These free tools can help you monitor what’s going on, but you’ll still have to do most of the legwork yourself. Plus, you’ll have to learn enough about online reputation management techniques to manage negative feedback and suppress it in the search engines. If you don’t have the expertise or need some advice on how to create an online reputation management campaign, you may want to consider hiring an ORM and SEO consultant.

Royal Reputation can help you tackle your online reputation management goals, and boost your search engine rankings through a comprehensive SEO campaign. To learn more, send us a message or visit our ORM Services pages for details.