As branding specialists, we at The Practice like to offer our clients the full treatment when it comes to honing their corporate profiles. Aside from meeting their creative briefs, we also strive to create strategies that best manage their online identities, whether that be through effective SEO or PR campaigns.

When it comes to online reputation management, regardless of how honorable a company might be, for example, the web can unfortunately host many vicious and untrue remarks that won’t help maintain the business’s positive reputation- consumers today don’t just rely on word of mouth alone, especially when it comes to smaller companies. Their first port of call? – an online search.

The essential and surefire methods to help any client’s best intentions are to constantly track and monitor on their behalf; for this it helps to set up Google Alerts to receive emails any time a new Google result appears. The same goes for Google Analytics- surely one of the most important tracking devices to see incoming search terms and analyze a company’s demographic information. Finally, the Google Adwords Keyword tool enables you to see the volume of any relevant search terms.

Aside from aiding positive online exposure for our clients, we want to optimize the amount of exposure they receive. Good content, (or at least content that garners a decent amount of exposure), is what gets you noticed and boosts your online appearance. Search engines like variety, and try to filter out duplicative results. While creating individual content can be as simple as taking a paragraph from a press release you’ve written and adding it into your blog entry, for instance, true value is what search engines pick up on- and this comes from creating fresh and new material that can’t be found anywhere else online. That’s why we often suggest to our clients that they can benefit from a blog; it’s something that allows for insightful and unique journalistic content, candid photos, social shares, links and of course, branding. All these play a big part in appealing to Google’s algorithm.

Simultaneously, we’ve learnt throughout the years that on-page optimization is essential. The trouble is, it can be difficult to strike a balance between creating a feat of design and making a site well optimized- often some of the best looking sites are poorly optimized because they offer little scope for key content, thus performing badly when it comes to SEO. The way to get around this is of course, to balance beauty with text that’s going to be easy for search engines to crawl through. Perhaps a site banner, rich with live text that a search engine will pick up as HTML, might do the trick?

Of course, the beauty is that there’s never one failsafe way to maintain good online reputation for good. From experience, each problem that The Practice team has encountered differ in some way, making coming up with some unique solutions more exciting. Some clients may benefit from a social media boost, others from optimizing their site more effectively; this coupled with Google’s ever changing search results ranking algorithm makes for an inventive new approach every time.

Do you rely on any methods or best practices for managing a client’s online reputation, or even your own? (We’re not snooping for tips- honest! We just want to know what works for you!) So we’d love to hear your suggestions, so please share them with us by tweeting to @PracticeDigital and via our Facebook page.