How To Clean Up Your Online Presence For Your Business — How To Start
Digital Spring Cleaning can refer to many different processes. The ones I’m going to focus on in this article are primarily meant to benefit businesses: websites and social profiles. These are easy ways of keeping house for your business, so that things don’t get so far out of control that you would need to pay a huge bill to a company to deep clean your online presence. And since Geoffresh is all about keeping things fresh, it’s the most à propos subject matter for us to talk about too.
Determine Criteria
Define how you will determine something you need to remove versus something that just needs changes. Assuming you will be undertaking your digital spring cleaning yourself, how you determine these criteria for keeping, deleting, or changing things is going to be up to you and your discretion. The following are simply rules of thumb.
Something That Needs To Be Removed:
- Images or content that you don’t have permission to use.
- Anything that doesn’t makes sense to display, or is confusing.
- Anything that can be damaging in some way.
- Anything unflattering or embarrassing in nature.
- Anything that is no longer relevant to your business.
- Ex: an image of a former employee
- Ex: a service or products you no longer odder
- Anything that you don’t like anymore.
- Anything that doesn’t boost or help your business’ image.
- Text that you don’t attribute as a quote and don’t give proper credit.
- Anything plagiarized. Stealing anything of any kind is never a good idea. There are so many tools that bigger companies use to scrub the internet to find websites that are using their content.
Something That Just Needs Editing:
Again, this is up to your own discretion, but I recommend getting as many eyes as possible to double check you and to give you suggestions. Honestly, digital spring cleaning is hard work for one person to do.
Inspect What’s Posted Online
Here’s how I would recommend you organize your approach in identifying everything online about your business:
- Compile a list of every online profile you’ve created for your business (i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, Manta.com, etc.).
- Then make a list of all the online profiles you find for your business that you did not create—this can be done by doing a search on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc. Search using every possible name by which your business has ever gone.
To save time and get relevant search results, use quotation marks around the name so you get an exact match. Also, if there are businesses with a similar name, add your city outside the quotation marks.
- Once you have your two lists, start with the accounts you didn’t create yourself.
- Why? These business profiles are auto created by the website’s programs that scrub through the internet. The reason these profiles are created are to entice businesses to register with these websites and pay for any services it can provide for exposure. Another reason you want to start with these profiles is because you want to nip in the bud the things you have had no idea about as quickly as possible for any possible damage control.
You might have trouble claiming these profiles, so you might encounter a roadblock to editing or deleting them. In this case, determine if it’s worth going to the trouble of contacting the company. If your business profile is blank and doesn’t have anything damaging on it, you can leave it alone, especially don’t worry as much if the website isn’t highly trafficked or well-known. Manta is more of site businesses go on to assess other business, but Yelp is where customers would go to find out about a business.
- Once you’ve addressed the business profiles that you didn’t create, I recommend starting with the one that you’ve spent the least amount of time using and finish at the profile that has the most for you to weed through (usually Facebook for most businesses).
- And finally, see what you have posted on your business website.