Andy Beal, the CEO of trackur and the publisher of MarketingPilgrim, is one of the highlighted speakers at PubCon’s Master training today. Beal, who specializes in reputation management, provided actionable advice on how to manage a company’s reputation and conduct online reputation management audits.
Keyword Research
With reputation management, keyword research is focused primarily on protecting the brand, the branded products, and other the important brand search terms (i.e. the CEO’s name). Using the Google Analytics filter feature, it is very easy to quickly find the branded keywords and their misspellings by including a string of text from the company’s name. Compile a list of all branded keywords that have significant traffic – these will be the keywords that are monitored moving forward.
Google Sentiment Audit
Once a company’s list of branded keywords is compiled, it is time to conduct a Google Sentiment audit by compiling a list of the first 30 results for the branded keywords in spreadsheets. The spreadsheets should include the ranking website, the owner of the ranking page, and the sentiment of the brand mention.
Color code the spreadsheet as follows:
Green – positive (good reviews, pleased customers)
Yellow – neutral (another brand with the same name or non-related pages)
Red – negative (bad review)
Next, code the spreadsheet according to who owns the ranking page:
Owned – you own and host these sites
Controlled – WordPress, twitter, or other sites that you control, but don’t own
Influence – content that you cannot upload, but that you can influence (business partners or employee’s blogs/accounts)
Third Party – no influence
80% of the time and effort invested should be focused on the content you own, 10% on content you control, and 10% on content you influence. Due to focusing time on the content that can be changed, the company will achieve maximum benefit and achieve more branded term rankings.
If the company does not have serious reputation management issues, it is a good idea to conduct the Google sentiment audit once per month. However, if the company is currently experiencing a reputation management issue, it is a good idea to monitor the changes daily to understand the changing reputation environment.
With online reviews and reputation management steadily growing in importance, it is important to conduct Google sentiment audits on a regular basis – this will provide the organization with information related to branded terms and helpful in developing an online reputation strategy.
