Chances are that you work hard to develop and improve your business’ reputation. You are putting constant effort into ensuring that your customers and clients have the best possible experience when dealing with your business. So why would you ignore your business’ online reputation?

So many people today are doing business online and researching products online before purchasing. What people are saying about your business online may be more important than what your customers are saying to their friends over coffee.

Here are a few simple strategies for managing your business’ online reputation.

1. Monitor your online reputation

The first step to managing the online reputation of your business is to keep track of what customers, clients and competitors are saying about you online. There are some very simple ways of doing this. You can periodically search for your name and the name of your business using an online search engine such as Google. Ideally your business’ website should be the first result, or at least on the first page of results. If it’s not, you may want to consider what changes you can make to your website to increase your search engine ranking.

To get a more complete picture of what people are saying about you and your business online, consider creating a Google Alert, which will alert you by email whenever your business is mentioned online.

2. Compare your online reputation to those of your competitors

After you check out your online reputation, check out the reputations of a few of your competitors as well. This is a good way to learn about what you are doing right, and what you can do to improve both your reputation and your business in general.

3. Generate positive and diverse web content

You may not be able to ensure that no one ever says anything negative about your business online, but you can control the overall picture of your business that is presented to a potential customer online.

The more new and interesting positive content that you create about your business, the more that content will dominate the overall online content relating to your business. Diversifying the types of web content relating to your business will help to ensure that the positive content created by you dominates the search engine results, which will help to minimize any negative comments that exist online.

4. Concentrate on providing your customers with an excellent product and/or service

It can only help your online reputation if you consistently provide your customers with an excellent product or service. By making your customers happy, you will be more likely to receive positive reviews and comments online.