It used to be called vanity searching, but now it’s a valuable tool in keeping tabs of your online reputation, presence and image.
In fact, running your company name through a variety of search engines can yield some interesting facts on how your company is being perceived by the public and what pages need to be updated or changed. This is especially important if your company is repositioning itself in the market, launching a marketing or promotional campaign, or simply wishing to gauge how the company fares against rival companies.
Indeed, by searching on an array of search engines, not just Google, we can build up a picture of how searchers may be diverted or confused by other results. Sometimes this can be beneficial to both parties. An example recently was a client whose domain ended .org.uk. Unfortunately, another organisation in Denmark, which operated in a very similar field but at a European level, had the .org variation of the same domain name. They’re now looking at reciprocal links to help ease the problem, particularly since the Danish site is in English too and there’s anecdotal evidence of UK users arriving on the Danish site and thinking it was the .org.uk site.
Yours truly here does this type of search engine research occasionally too on his business domain and his own unusual name. I was recently amused to find that someone who shares exactly same name showcases his stand up comedy on MySpace.com. As he was 19, it could be argued I’ve been doing the same thing for a lot longer.
