Did you know that 84% of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation?
That’s incredibly important to know because it applies to both good and bad reviews.
Online reputation management is a huge factor in any business’ success in this day and age.
Here are our top 5 reasons you should focus on managing your online reputation.
Why You Should Focus on Online Reputation Management: The Top 5 Reasons
Online reputation management covers reviews across many platforms, including google, yelp, amazon, social media, etc.
1. Create and Protect Your Positive Reputation
Great SEO (search engine optimization) is not the only factor in gaining customer leads. You also have to have good reviews to go with those good rankings.
If your business comes up first when searched, that’s great. However, if all the reviews say that your service or product stinks, few people are likely to choose your business over the competitors.
Managing your online reputation is a great way to boost positive reviews and handle negative ones.
2. Improve Your Visibility
You can’t expect customer leads if no one can find your business online! This is where online visibility comes into play. Customer reviews are a great way to boost your SEO, especially when they include keywords about products you sell or services you offer.
3. Prove Your Trustworthiness
Your online reputation is a go-to place for customers to determine if your business is trustworthy.
For example, great photos can make your business look good. However, customers backing up that the food really tastes delicious or the spa really is luxurious backs up what you are selling with authority.
4. Show Your Customers That You Care
Even a “perfect” business is bound to run into disgruntled customers, sneaky competitor reviews, or make a mistake once in a while. It is not just about squashing bad reviews, it’s about proving your customer service when responding to unhappy customers.
Harvard Business Review conducted a study of over 75,000 people who had interacted with customer service representatives. The study found an interesting fact: “Delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; reducing their effort—the work they must do to get their problem solved—does.”
Meaning, efficient handling of an unhappy customer is even more important when building loyalty than delighting the customers in the first place.
5. Increase Customer Leads
Positive reviews get customers in the door. In today’s digitally dominated world, your business doesn’t have a chance without an excellent online reputation.
It is not a one-time fix either, to increase customer leads, and therefore your bottom line, you have to consistently focus on your online reputation management.
5 Tips On Online Reputation Management From Ther Experts
Whether we like it or not, reputation is everything in the business world.
And, since the advent and increasing use of the Internet, online reputation management is crucial.
Why?
Simple. Take Yelp reviews for instance. You’re hungry. You go to Yelp to search for the best Thai food restaurants in the area.
You skim over the reviews that are below a four-star rating. You then decide on a restaurant that has a 4-5-star rating, with several hundred reviews.
In other words, you looked past the restaurants with a lower reputation, choosing a business with a much higher one.
And businesses with poor reputations pay for it.
In a Harvard Business Review article, companies that had 10,000 employees spent up to $7.6 million to cover their poor reputation. When you think about it, it makes sense.
If you overlooked those below-four-star restaurants, chances are, others are doing the same thing.
So, as a business owner wanting to improve or sustain your reputation, what can you do?
Read on to find out and learn more about online reputation management!
1. Google alerts
You need to know when people are talking about you, your business, and your brand.
You don’t want one of the worst scenarios to happen: Customers are happy to your face but write negative reviews online, trashing your business and your products or services.
The worst part is that you don’t even know it’s going on…until you check your profit margins and realize they’ve taken a significant dip.
To combat this, set up Google Alerts. In a nutshell, this tool sends an email, notifying you when your brand is mentioned on Google.
2. SocialMention
Also, utilize SocialMention. This online reputation management tool gives you a list of the social media platforms that have mentioned your name/brand/company.
You can customize these tools (Google Alerts and SocialMention) to your liking—getting real-time hits or a notification once a day.
3. Keep the content coming
By content, we mean SEO-focused content. Consistently producing insightful content not only increases your credibility but positively affects your ranking.
Why does this matter?
If someone searches your business, you want the first page (at least) to show the user your business is professional.
Another way of putting it: you want your good reputation to stand out.
That puts the negative reviews on the backburner (or twentieth page of Google).
4. Negative reviews
On that topic, every business has at least one negative review.
It’s not negative reviews that ruin your reputation, it’s how you respond to them that can make or break your company.
To mitigate bad reviews, respond within 24-48 hours after the negative review was written.
Apologize, but keep it short and sweet. You want to show customers you value customer service. But you don’t want to “air your dirty laundry” so to speak.
Ask the unhappy customer for their email address, and work it out privately.
5. Update your site for Optimal Online Reputation Management
You wouldn’t invite guests into your dirty house, would you? The same goes for poorly constructed and outdated websites.
To maintain a professional presence, keep your website updated and looking professional.
You can do this by separating long paragraphs, in addition to photoshopping optimizing images to increase load time.
Where Do I Start?
Online reputation management isn’t always easy to do alone. On top of the busy workload of running a business, it can be hard to keep up with a good strategy.
What’s the solution? Hire a trusted company like Rebel Fish Local (see reviews from our happy clients!) to take care of your business’ online reputation today.
For more information about boosting your online reputation management, contact us.