How To Manage And Monitor Your Online Reputation

Anything anyone says about you online has an effect on you and your company. It can be positive (we all hope for this) or it can be negative. Either way, it has an effect.
Managing and monitoring what people are saying about your brand is part of maintaining your brand. This is known as Online Reputation Management.
It takes a lot of hard work to build a solid reputation, and that reputation can be torn down with a single tweet. People will sometimes be negative. They will not like everything you do, and they will share their opinions with others. The best way to fix it is to change your practices if need be, and respond positively where possible. How do you know what they’re saying? Well, you need to monitor your reputation.


Knowing what people are saying about you and your brand is a great indication of the health of your company. And of course, you want people to say good things about you. If there’s something bad out there, you want to know about it so you can fix it. People will usually tell their friends before they will tell you.

Tools to Monitor Your Reputation Online

The first thing you need to do is monitor what others are saying about you and your brand. To do this you will need some tracking tools. There are many good choices out there.
Be sure to monitor variations on your name as well as your actual name. Customers will tend to shorten your name, use acronyms, or even spell it wrong. Now, let’s look at a few tools.


Google Alerts lets you monitor the web for interesting content by creating an alert about a specific topic and having links about your alert sent to you in your email. You can have the alert sent to you once per week, once per day, or as it happens.
You can choose the sources that you wish to get information from. Sources include news, blogs, web, video, books, discussions, or you can choose automatic. It gives you alert suggestions in each of the categories. You can also set your language and region. You can have it set to send you all of the results or only the best results. As you type in your search, the page will give you a preview from each of the sources. You can create as many alerts as you wish. You can also edit or delete your alerts.

You can create alerts for your own website, business, and for yourself and get an email with links where you are mentioned. You can also use it to stay on top of trends and news in your industry. Google Alerts is free to use, you just need a Google account.



It also gives you some scoring info with charts. These sections are explained well with popups that appear with mouse-overs.


They include:
Strength – the likelihood your brand is being discussed on social media.
Sentiment – the ratio of positive and negative mentions.
Passion – the likelihood that those talking about your brand will continue to talk about it.
Reach – your range of influence.

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5 Tools to Monitor Your Online Reputation

Why Monitor Your Online Reputation?

It takes time, effort and an elaborate strategy to build a solid company reputation, but everything you’ve worked to build can be undone in just a few hours.

Negativity spreads like wildfire, especially in an environment that’s open 24/7. Any online content, positive or negative, impacts how people view your business.

#1: Watch Industry Websites

If This Then That (IFTTT) automates simple online tasks by using one of the most basic principles: If this happens, then do that.

IFTTT lets you set up rules (called recipes) for everything from getting the latest weather updates as a text message to automatically sending Instagram photos to Twitter (or any other platform). It has both fun and professional applications.

You create a recipe by choosing a trigger channel (the “if this happens” part) and an action channel (the “then do that” part).

To monitor what people are saying about your company, set up a recipe that scans RSS feeds of important industry websites, then sends you a daily email alert with the results—IF [website] mentions your company, THEN receive an email alert.





#2: Track Employee Mentions

Google’s Me on the Web tool notifies you when personal data appears on the web. It’s handy if you want to monitor mentions about certain company employees or senior staff.

Me on the Web is simple to use, but you do need an existing Google account. To set up an alert, click Stay current with web alerts, type your search term(s) in the text box and click Add.






#3: Filter Instant Social Searches

If you want to instantly search blogs, Twitter and Facebook for specific terms, IceRocket is the tool you need.

IceRocket doesn’t require an account and is easy to use. Just type your term(s) in the search box and choose the channel you want to search: blogs, Twitter, Facebook or search all.






#4: Find Influencer Opinions

Topsy is a powerful Twitter search tool (more powerful than Twitter’s native search). Use Topsy to find key influencers related to your industry and company, as well as sentiment scores over a period of time.





#5: Search for Sentiment

Social Mention returns results based on the sentiment of social media buzz around your company. You can monitor multiple websites in one place and even find out which keywords people use when talking about your company.

To set up Social Mention monitoring, type your search term(s) in the text box and choose a channel (e.g., blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, images, videos or questions). You can sort results by date, source and time

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How to Manage Your Business's Online Reputation

4 Ways to Manage Your Online Reputation

Online reputation management is a growing field, one that is tightly related to search engine optimization. In both cases the tactics tend to be the same, requiring you to monitor and act on search results to improve your online standing. With SEO, the goal is to make your website rise to the top. With ORM, you're not necessarily concerned about helping your own website rank highly in search results; rather, you want to ensure that positive information and commentary about your business ranks higher than anything negative--no matter who said it.



It's a subtle difference that requires greater and more complicated interaction with a larger range of online constituents. ORM is so important that Google offers a dedicated page with its own advice. In the sections that follow, I'll cover Google's basic tips--and a lot more. I'll also provide brief reviews of a variety of tools and services that can help you tackle the job.

Get Alerts

With a baseline in place, step two is to make sure that you're aware when new content about your business hits the Web. The easiest way to do this is to use Google's free Alerts service. The system is fairly self-explanatory: It emails you when new blog posts or other Web pages are created using terms you want to follow. Type in a query (you'll know from the first exercise which ones are most important), and select how often you want results to come to you (from weekly to "as it happens"). You can filter results--just blog posts, just videos, and so on--and you can allow Google to choose whether to send everything or just "the best" results



Alerts are invaluable for clueing you in to happenings you might otherwise miss completely. My Google Alert for "chris null" told me about an up-and-coming band whose bassist shares my name. For a business, a timely Google Alert can help you head off another company attempting to launch using your name, or it can warn you about someone who is maliciously using your brand to hijack search results.


Another benefit of Google Alerts is that it lets you see whether Google is properly indexing your own blog posts or other Web content you're producing. If you put up a new post and don't receive a link to it in your Google Alerts email, you'll want to make sure that the search site is considering your blog--and if it isn't doing so, you should find out why.

Social Scanning

Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are all key avenues for branding, and users know it. When consumers want to complain about a company, many of them are more likely to tweet about it or kvetch on Facebook than they are to pick up the phone and call customer service. Although you can't control what customers say about your company, you can easily respond to the comments on each of these same services. That response, more than the complaint itself, is often what will determine how you are perceived by other customers who might come across that post or comment in their search results for years to come.

Tools to Make the Task Easier

Keeping track of all this stuff isn't easy. As with managing SEO and your social media presence, dealing with your online reputation can easily consume hours every week, leaving you with no reputation, good or bad, left to manage. Assorted startups and services aim to take some of the pain out of the process. While many ORM services are tied to the related world of social media monitoring, here's a look at some of the bigger names in the business.

Social Mention: This free service offers a mountain of data about mentions in the blogosphere, ranked as positive, neutral, or negative. The top keywords in those posts are also included, along with all sorts of additional minutiae. The value of this information can vary. Unless you have a major (national) brand or a unique word in your business name, expect an awful lot of unrelated and irrelevant results.

Kurrently: This real-time search engine examines Facebook and Twitter results that include the keyword of your choice. Leave the page loaded, and results update in real time. There's not much to it, but Kurrently is fun to check out if something big involving your business is happening. Unfortunately, the service offers no way to send these results to you regularly; you must use the Web interface to see them.

Addict-o-matic: At Addict-o-matic, you can create a "custom page with the latest buzz on any topic." Like Kurrently, it's not of much use unless you have a big brand that you need to follow, and the results are a bit of a hodgepodge. Some of the "news" I found in sample searching was more than three years old. Still, unlike most of these freebie services, it covers a wider range of sources, including Flickr, YouTube, and even Ask.com news.

TweetBeep: This site describes itself as "Google Alerts for Twitter," and that's exactly what it delivers. Add keywords just as you would with Google Alerts, and you get a list of mentioning tweets emailed to you daily.

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Shift in SEO Knowledge & Experience: Priorities in a Post-Penguin and Post …

SEO Core Knowledge

After playing around in the SEO space since 2004, and officially as a career (moving away from web design development ) in 2006, which eventually led me to climbed the corporate ladder from company to company as an SEO specialist, SEO engineer, to currently, the SEO Director at Internet Marketing Inc., I have seen a change in the focus of skills and talent when searching for new candidates of people to work with, in finding the right outsourced vendors and other partners where it was way different back in the day, and for sure it was also way different before I was active in the SEO space.

1 – Marketing Background: These people either had a related undergraduate degree or had jobs going into this direction. Knowledge and experience in this area helps SEO because it is the marketing people that know how to promote a product, reach people, make a buzz, creating things that would help out in the overall awareness of the product, with or without SEO. But since they know how to call the attention of the people for their target market, it is these same people that you reach out to online, and if you target them well, eventually their work is what gets users linking to your sites naturally which helps out in the overall search engine ranking.



2 – Writing Background: These people that are trained so well in writing and concentrate mainly on pleasing the readers, the actual website users and not search engines. The best writers are not really looking at keyword count, or keyword density as the main factor that dictates how they write. Writers make content compelling to users, makes them more interested in reading. They persuade users to take a certain action. They get the main point across in the simplest of words and always using the main words needed to rank well at the same time in a very natural sounding tone. Writers that make great content that people love also makes users pass these around online in whatever way, social media, email, instant messaging and other various way, eventually linking to them naturally and driving other people to link to them naturally.


3 – Technical Background: Almost 99 percent of the times what we are trying to rank are web pages. And there is a lot technology that goes into webpage creation.
The Design: Use of graphic software, and frontend development in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In more advanced cases, some sites run on Adobe Flash or AJAX.

Server Side Programming: The backend development can run on a variety of scripting languages such as PHP, ASP or .Net, JSP, Perl, Phyton, Cold Fusion and more.

Databases:  Often these server-side scripting is tied to a database specific database. Some examples of these would be MySQL, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase and more!

Common CMS’: Instead of programming from scratch in a server-side language and database, many times you can simply use a CMS and customize it. There are many popular CMS’ such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or some that are more for online shopping like Magento, OS Commerce, ZenCart, Cube Cart, xCart, etc.

Server Configurations: All websites are hosted on a server. And servers can cause SEO issues such as problems with 301 redirects, error 404s, or challenges in URL rewriting where the implementation of these differ depending on the platform. Configurations on Windows running IIS would be different from running Linux running Apache.

Domain Names: For international campaigns you have to deal with a variety of Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLD)
Mobile SEO: On any mobile website, it is better to auto detect web browser device using user agent detection to properly display the website depending on the user agent.

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Why You Need To Be Using Keyword Matrices

Think of this scenario:

You manage an eCommerce website that sells high-end camera’s and camera equipment.

Two visitors come into your site using the search term “SLR camera accessories,” they both searched Google using the same body term with commercial intent.

They are both looking for the exact same product, a Noktor 50mm lens, but here’s where it gets interesting, and where alignment between keywords and your content becomes critical to conversion – one visitors click’s into the category “SLR Accessories,” while the other clicks into “SLR Lens.”

Do they both find the Noktor 50mm lens they’re looking for?

It depends on if you have listed the product in all of the intent-based locations where it’s relevant.

The separation is between product versus function, one user is looking for a product specific attribute, a lens, where the other is looking for a functional attribute, an accessory.

Keyword research is one of the first places to find consumer pain points – by nature, they are looking for answers to their questions. So, it’s a great place to do research. But finding the keyword is not enough – you must also do a competitive analysis to determine whether or not your solution can be the best, or the cost-benefit may not be worth it.

For example, we built a marketing checklist and did comparative research: are there any other checklists out there? Do they compare to our proposed solution? What competitive advantages do they have? After determining we could create by far the best solution (not a requirement), we moved forward in building it.

In the scenario above it’s not as much about the pain points as it is how different brains approach solving the same problem, and how content needs to be structured as a path toward a solution, regardless of which path is taken.

How to Build a Keyword Matrix

Initial keyword research is the first step toward building an informative keyword matrix.

So fire up keyword snatcher (or whatever keyword mining tool you fancy), drop in your head term (just one), and send it off to the races. The Excel file is designed to handle *any* keyword data, as it uses a natural language macro to look for signaling words (that you can manage in the key) to tag searcher intent.

Export to CSV > Filter out illegal characters > cut into lists of 10,000 keywords > Save CSV.

Upload into Google Keyword Planner > Get Ideas > Export to CSV.

Use keyword combiner to join all of your individual research files.

Open in Excel > Sort descending by search volume > Add a column for intent > Add a column for “Best” > Save.





Tagging For Intent


Tagging for search intent is critical, this is where effective prioritization starts to really come into focus. Here is how I approach tagging for the 4 top-level buckets of user intent:

Informational – a specific question where the results are the information the searcher is looking for, may contain phrases such as:  info, more information, details, features, benefits, etc.


Navigational – contains the name of the brand, product, service, or a person at the organization.


Commercial Investigation – easiest to identify and least ambiguous, these queries contain specific parameters for researching a purchase, such as sizes, colors, versus, best, price, pricing, etc.


Transactional -indicative of shopping behavior further down the conversion funnel, at this point the searcher knows what they want – so look for terms like buy, purchase, sale, coupon, discount, or locations.

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How To Build a Keyword Matrix and Why You Need One

So, What is a Keyword Matrix?

Unlike the virtual world built by the Wachowski brothers, the idea is relatively simple, a matrix is a 2-dimensional table that enables you to cross reference two aspects, and analyze opportunities – with the potential to slice and layer additional information on top for deeper analysis.

When applied to keywords, it gives you 2 axises from which to gauge different qualitative heuristics.

Michael Martinez discusses passive versus active keyword matrices, putting the emphasis on purpose; a passive matrix records keyword data that other websites are using, where as an active matrix is used as a design template for your website and content.

I am going to be taking a different approach to defining and building keyword matrices for organic search.

I want to look at search intent versus search volume and search volume versus SERP competitiveness. These 2 scenarios are very interesting because the first is an inverse relationship, and the latter is linear.



Query complexity tends to also have an inverse relationship with search volume; as complexity decreases (from long-tail to head), search volume tends to increase.

In the graph above you can see how search volume steadily decreases as intent increases (thus the inverse relationship), and again, it is usually the case that the query length (and complexity) increase in relation to intent.

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Making Sense of All This Keyword Data

So with some simple Excel sorting this offers me an at-a-glance snapshot of the both the upper and lower maximum’s in terms of overall SERP competition.

The keyword opportunity model I talk about in my SEO competitive analysis post explains the idea of taking a macro approach to dissecting SERP’s at the keyword level, which in my opinion, is necessary for enterprise SEO and growing websites to over 100,000 visitors per month.

The macro approach to keyword research is necessary for content heavy websites (and optimizing for traffic), but not ideal when doing intent-focused keyword research, as would be the case for Ecommerce, software, or other scenarios where some keyword phrases are going to carry significantly more qualification.

Researching for Searcher Intent


When optimizing for conversion, it is critical to gain some perspective into the psychographics of your target audience, and also understand the most common segments of search intent. While all 4 of the most common segments offer opportunities for conversion, only 2 are of truly high value and worth targeting; commercial investigation and transactional queries.

The best way to get a handle on all this data is to group and categorize your keywords to look at the potential stage of the conversion funnel the searcher is within. By segmenting your keywords into funnels you can begin to paint a picture with your data that allows you to disseminate search intent.

Taking this even a step further, you can begin to understand keywords as they relate to search context. Where even something as simple as word order can play a crucial role when defining the meaning behind the query and ensuring you are selecting the right keywords to target.




Time to Do The Research


You can’t build the right house without the right tools, and search engine driven websites are no different.

The good news is at this point in time SEO has been around long enough that there is a whole slew of great tools you can use to assist you with your research efforts.

Tools run the gamut in functionality from pulling search volume, to providing related suggestions, to competition in AdWords, and many other helpful bits of information.




Don’t Forget to Check Plurals


One of the most common mistakes when doing keyword research is forgetting to run the numbers for both the singular and plurals versions of your terms.

I have found that often times one is significantly higher than the other, and quite often the plural version is indicative of commercial intent.

Take for example SEO versus SEO Services, the former is an informational query where the intent is most likely research or information gathering. The latter, SEO Services, is a transactional or commercial investigation phrase indicative of being further in the purchasing funnel.




Create Keyword Evaluation Model


Evaluating keywords for relative opportunities is still very tough.

Without massive stores of data and detailed insights into the competitive landscape it is easy to throw a  lot of time and money at targeting keywords that will never deliver a stable return.

In order to avoid this and instead focus only where there is rank to be had and money to be made, I believe it’s best to use an evaluation method.

There are a number of methodologies ranging from complex formulas including many different heuristics to more simplified models designed just to give you a sense of the opportunity.

I have developed a simple keyword opportunity model to help with this process, but for this post I am going to use a  simplified version.

This is meant to be more of a barometer than anything else and this data should not be used to make a business case, but more so just to give you a sense of opportunity.

I’m going to use keyword competitiveness scoring from SerpIQ, but you could also do this with SEOmoz’s keyword difficulty score or something similar.




Keyword Research for Page Titles


Optimizing page titles for search is best done finding a balance between volume and intent.

Bringing this back to the 2 schools of thought, your title keyword composition is going to depend on your goals;

If optimizing for traffic you want to find combinations to maximize use of high search volume terms.
If optimizing for conversion you want to pay attention to intent instead of search volume.
In both scenarios I recommend looking for creative ways to combine exact match phrases to leverage strings of keywords that contain several target keywords but are not awkward or stuffed.

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