Use Google Tools to Monitor Your Brand Online
Writing by Brick Marketing in Search Engines
A positive online brand reputation can take years to build. It’s important to do all that you can to preserve that positive reputation once it has been earned. When consumers are looking for a product or service or for information about a business, they turn to the Internet. Anybody with an Internet connection can find an outlet online today to post whatever they’d like about your business that can be found just as easily as the content that you are sharing. Mistakes happen and it’s best to nip any potential online reputation issues in the bud before they escalate into something bigger. In order to do so, it’s necessary to constantly be monitoring your brand mentions online. Half the battle is knowing that an issue does exist. As long as you have that knowledge, you can take steps to remedy the situation. Here are a few Google tools that can provide you with insights about how consumers view your brand:
Analytics
If you have a business website, it’s important to have it hooked up to Analytics so that you can monitor the success of your website and find out how people categorize your brand by looking at the keywords and phrases that they use to find your website. These are the words that they associate with what you have to offer.
Alerts
It’s easy to sign up for Google Alerts and you can sign up for as many alerts as you’d like. Set up an alert for your full brand name as well as any other combination of keywords that people may use to find or talk about your brand. For example, if the name of your business is Smith & Brooks Movers, you may also go by S&B Movers. If you are a local Mexican restaurant, set up an alert for “Mexican restaurant Anytown”. Any time Google indexes a page that includes any of the keywords that you have signed up for, you will receive an email notification.
Search Autocomplete
When you begin typing a search phrase into Google you will notice that Google tries to guess what it is that you are searching for and suggestions pop up that you can click on. According to Google these search suggestions “are algorithmically determined based on a number of purely algorithmic factors (including popularity of search terms) without human intervention. The autocomplete data is updated frequently to offer fresh and rising search queries”. To see how people are searching for your brand, type it into Google and see what follows. If you see “Company X reviews”, “Company X contact information”, or “Company X phone number” that’s good. If you see “Company X scam”, or “Company X complaints” that’s bad.
