If you own or operate a business or maintain a personal profile on social media, you’re likely familiar with the concept of online reputation. How you and your brand are perceived online has a tremendous effect on customer loyalty, sales, the success of your digital marketing campaigns, and just about every other aspect of running your business.

The rules and algorithms that inform what we see and react to constantly change in the online world. So how can you effectively keep track of your online reputation?

Outsourcing your online reputation assessments to a professional agency like The Reputation Management Company is a great way to ensure you have cohesive, up-to-date information about how you and your brand are perceived on the internet. Here are some additional ways you can monitor and measure your online reputation.

Benefits of Monitoring Your Online Reputation

Keeping track of how you and your brand are viewed online is essential to manage a business. It’s a mistake to think that running a Google search of your business every now and then is all you need to do to know what people are saying about you on the internet. A single positive review of your company or brand in a popular publication can be capitalized to astronomically increase your reach. However, if you aren’t aware of the good press immediately, the opportunity could pass you by.

Conversely, suppose your brand receives a negative review, and you don’t catch it immediately. That negativity could spiral and prevent potential customers from your business before you can remedy the situation.

Here are some concrete benefits of using The Reputation Management Company and a combination of online resources to track and monitor your online reputation.

1. See What Potential Employers See

Monitoring your reviews and mentions online is important for individuals and businesses. Even if you’re not currently job searching, keeping track of your online reputation is an important way to ensure you’ll be a strong candidate for opportunities in the future. It’s never good to be blindsided in an interview by questions relating to something you weren’t aware was made public on the internet.

2. Address Problems Promptly

Suppose you’re in the habit of regularly assessing your online reputation. In that case, you’ll be in a good position to spot and address bad reviews or other types of negative content before they can damage your image. Recent research by professors at Colgate University suggests that consumers are much more swayed by negative reviews than by positive ones, so responding swiftly to bad press is essential to monitoring and maintaining your online reputation.

Having an agency like The Reputation Management Company on your team is a smart way to ensure any problem areas with your online reputation are caught and dealt with in a timely manner. With a dedicated reputation agent keeping track of things for you, you’ll be free to focus on other aspects of running your business.

3. Boost Confidence and Security

Knowing exactly how you and your business are perceived online takes the mystery and guesswork out of marketing your brand. Monitoring positive reviews will give you confidence and a sense of pride while catching and responding to negative reviews immediately will help you feel solid and in control of your public image.

Additionally, you’ll be more likely to be aware of any potential security breaches or threats before they occur if you keep track of what people say about you.

Tools for Assessing Your Online Reputation

In addition to working with The Reputation Management Company, there are a number of online tools and programs you can use to measure and monitor your online reputation. These tools come in various styles and focus, and many have settings you can adjust to suit your specific needs. Some programs are free, and some require a fee or subscription, but all of them are extremely useful for helping you stay on top of your mentions on the internet.

1. Google Alerts

Google maintains an impressive suite of free tools and software to help businesses with their SEO and tracking needs. One of these is Google Alerts, a program that lets you keep track of keywords and names by letting you know when those words are mentioned in new posts.

All you have to do is enter the search terms you want to save – for instance, the name of your company or brand – and you’ll receive email notifications when those keywords receive mentions. You can set the frequency with which you receive these alerts, with the options being: every time they happen, once a day, and once per week.

2. Social Mention

If you want to track references to your company or brand on social media, Social Mention is a terrific program to use. This site combs through major platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook to find references to the search words you enter. 

Social Mention also offers additional information that can help you analyze and develop your online reputation. This data includes how often your brand is discussed, how positive the comments are, how invested people are in discussing your brand, and how many posters are talking about your brand.

Findings by the Pew Research Center indicate that nearly 76% of all internet users have social media profiles, so using a reputation tracker that focuses specifically on those platforms is definitely a good move. Plus, like Google Alerts, Social Mention is completely free to use. 

3. Reputology

Do you run a business that has multiple brick-and-mortar locations? Reputology might be the mentions tracker for you. This platform focuses its energy on reviews since the types of businesses that have physical stores tend to be more concerned about customer reviews than any other type of content.

Reputology isn’t free, but it does provide services for multi-location businesses that make it worth budgeting for. You can adjust the settings to focus on review sites that are specific to your industry, whether you’re in hospitality, fitness, dining, healthcare, or some other field. This freedom to fine-tune your results and the tool’s ability to track different locations for the same business makes Reputology a worthwhile investment for larger businesses and chains.

4. SEMrush

This is another program that can be used to keep track of the mentions your brand or business receives online. SEMrush provides scores that estimate how people feel about your business and can also measure your reach and authority.

One drawback of this program is that while some of its features are free, the full suite needs to be purchased to get all of the benefits. However, if you’re interested in trying out a reputation tracker before going all-in with a full-time agency such as The Reputation Management Company, SEMrush could be a good option.

5. RankRanger

RankRanger also has a solid reputation management tool most commonly utilized for search engine optimization. The program allows you to filter search results for negative mentions and provide data demonstrating how your efforts in reputation management are affecting your image.

6. Reputation Health

The online reputation tools listed above have broad applications and can be used by just about any type of business. However, several platforms are designed to help business owners in specific fields. Reputation Health, for instance, is an online reputation and review monitoring service dedicated to physicians and other professionals in the medical field.

While medical professionals are generally among the most highly valued workers in the United States – in fact, nurses were recently rated the most-trusted professionals for the 20th year in a row – it’s still important for physicians to keep track of their online reputations and customers reviews. Reputation Health does that by focusing its monitoring efforts on review sites that are dedicated to medical practitioners, including DrScore, Vitals, UCompareHealthcare, and HealthGrades.

Working in medicine is extremely taxing, with late nights and long hours a common occurrence across every discipline in the medical field. Finding time beyond those hours is nearly impossible to monitor the reviews your practice receives online. That’s yet another reason why using a tool like Reputation Health or working with an agency such as The Reputation Management Company is so crucial.

Professional Reputation Assessment from The Reputation Management Company

Free tools and internet platforms are great resources for small business owners and people just starting to manage and monitor their online presence. However, you’ll have to use multiple programs to ensure you’re effectively tracking your business on all the relevant websites, which can add untenable stress to your already-busy workload.

In order to get some peace of mind, consider outsourcing your online reputation tracking to a full-service agency such as The Reputation Management Company. Our agents have a comprehensive knowledge of all the programs and tools listed above, plus our own in-house tracking software and so much more. We’ll handle every aspect of tracking and maintaining your online reputation so that you can be free to focus on the important things, such as running your business and living your best life.

The Bottom Line

The internet is our most important forum for sharing and disseminating information, including our feelings about the local businesses, public figures, and brands we interact with. While staying on top of your online reputation is important, it can also be extremely overwhelming without the right tools.

Fortunately, there are several internet platforms that can help you assess and monitor your online reputation. You can also reach out to The Reputation Management Company at any time for a consultation.