Knowing Google’s Best IT Practices can help you manage your online reputation.
Your personal and business online presence dramatically impacts your chances for success. Today, companies are more connected than ever, and a prospect or business partner’s first impression of you is online. Therefore, you should ensure you have a positive, consistent, and existent presence.
Your Personal Online Presence Impacts Your Business
Like it or not, your personal image will bleed over into your professional life. For example, experienced business professionals will research vendors, prospects, and partners before entering a business arrangement. In addition, landlords, college admissions, estranged family & friends, lawyers, and love interests (including stalkers), search your online profile. They want to know your associations, personal aspects of your life, and expressed views. This is why social media dominates the business world today.
Google Best IT Practices: Atlanta GA and Beyond
Whether you know it or not, you reveal who you are with every picture, post, like, disklike, comment, or share on your favorite social media websites. Beware that potential employers, prospects, clients, or partners may reject you for your viewpoint. And, it’s not just what you posted recently but what you have posted throughout your entire online history. Some of the things you reveal include:
- Political Association & Views
- Religious Association & Views
- Personal Preferences
- Associations
- Medical Diagnosis
- Interests
- Passions
- Relationship & Family Status
- Personal Pictures
Google IT Best Practices: Don’t Ignore the Obvious
While this may all seem obvious, people are surprised when it negatively affects their career. An excellent example is a CBS employee who posted about the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas and stated she had “no sympathy for the victims because country music fans are often republican gun toters.” It is apparent this was her personal opinion; however, it not only got her fired from her job but will likely haunt her career for years. Therefore, be very careful about who you associate with and avoid controversial topics unless you are willing to take the risk.
Personal Reputation Management
In other instances, people have even had private pictures come back to haunt them. There are countless stories of professionals who had past nude photos exposed. I even came across one business owner who didn’t know his 19 mug shots spanning ten years and came up with a Google Image search. In this situation, he had started his life over and had not been in trouble for over five years, but the Internet didn’t care. Fortunately, Reputation Management companies can help push positive pictures and stories to the top so that these things are hidden deep into several pages.
Your Business Online Presence & Google IT Best Practices
Your online presence is a unique marketing stream for your business. It spans your website, customer reviews, social media engagements, online publications, directories, and more. Your online presence ia a sales enabler as it helps prospects, partners, and clients become more familiar with your brand. For this reason, your online presence needs ongoing attention.
Google IT Best Practices: Responsive Website
You will not rank well if your website is over eight years old. In April 2015, Google began prioritizing responsive websites. Subsequently, responsive sites allow the screen to resize, making it more user-friendly for mobile devices. Therefore, the question is not if you have a website but if your website has a presence that can be found.
Google IT Best Practices: Consistency
Gone are the times when business pages and brick-and-mortar signs served as your primary source of business development. Of course, that was a long, long time ago. Today, it’s all about your online business presence. And if you have bought a business, moved, or changed management, you likely need consistent information across the web.
Google IT Best Practices: Social Media
You cannot expect clients to come to you in the new digital world. Instead, you must meet them at a common location. Often, that is on social media. Whether you like it or not, social media dominates the public perception of your company. Lack of presence impacts your business. A positive presence affects your business. And, at worst, a negative presence affects your business. As such, you need to be the one to control your business’s social media, not the other way around.
Google IT Best Practices: Negative Reviews
The worst thing that can happen is negative customers, employees, and prospects reviews. Most of the time, businesses get what they earn, but sometimes, a competitor or a scorned employee can wreak havoc on your reputation. Unfortunately, this is not always easy to correct. When this happens, companies turn to established SEO companies for reputation management.
Summary
When I was growing up, my mother used to say, “You are known by the people you associate with.” Those were simple times because your reputation was based on the people you hung out with. Today, your reputation is based on your social profile. Unfortunately, your connections to strangers have never been more dangerous to your personal and professional brand.
It’s a strange new world. Your online image determines where you go to school, what jobs you will get, what opportunities you will get, and your future relationships. Therefore, taking these Google IT Best Practices seriously, is essential.
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About the Author
Deborah Frazier is the author of IT Outsourcing Secrets – A Small Business Guide to Compare IT Support Companies. With nearly 20 years of experience consulting small and medium-sized businesses on their IT support needs, she brings a wealth of knowledge to INSI as Head of Marketing and Sales. If you like this article and want to be notified when a new article is posted, click here.
