Maintaining your online reputation involves actively tracking reviews and feedback of customers who search for you online, to ensure they only experience positive interactions when searching.
One negative experience can have a devastating impact on a company’s reputation, particularly with social media’s fast-paced spread. Amy’s Baking Company took swift action against an adverse online review by responding with their own strong defense – even appearing on local news for it!
1. Monitor What People Are Saying About You
Reputation building takes time, effort and an in-depth strategy. Unfortunately, a single negative interaction could ruin all your hard work.
Monitoring what people are saying about your business – online reviews, social media posts and website comments should all be monitored closely as this should become a daily task so any negative feedback can be addressed quickly.
Another effective eEndorsements strategy for managing online reputation is securing positive press coverage. You could achieve this through contributing thought leadership articles to local publications or by signing up with Help A Reporter Out (HARO). Doing this will allow your branded searches to rank highly while simultaneously building up credibility and increasing search traffic.
2. Make It Easy for Customers to Leave Reviews
Online reviews can help your business build trust with customers and garner their loyalty, but leaving reviews can often be challenging for many customers. Therefore, make the review process as effortless and straightforward as possible so as to increase reviews from your target customers.
Doing this involves placing direct links to your review page in multiple places – such as emails, newsletters, and websites. This also serves to remind customers that reviewing only takes minutes! Ensure there are no friction points such as complex platforms or lengthy review processes which might put customers off reviewing your business.
3. Respond to Negative Feedback
When customers submit feedback through Google or Yelp, it’s essential that you respond immediately in order to demonstrate that you care about their concerns and are looking for ways to enhance your business. By responding swiftly, this shows customers you value their opinion as much as they do yours and that their needs are being taken seriously.
Personalizing your response by including the reviewer’s name at the start will help build trust between yourself and customer.
As much as it can be unnerving to hear criticism of your online reputation, it is crucial that it remains your priority.
4. Make Sure Your Website is SEO-Optimized
Businesses without an effective online reputation management strategy risk falling behind their competition. People often express their views freely online about companies and brands; therefore it’s critical that you monitor your reputation on all available channels.
As part of your preparations, this may involve claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile; optimizing your website for local search terms; listing in online directories; as well as inviting customer reviews onto both your website and social media pages.
Other key factors aside from keywords include navigation and internal linking (try not to get too deep with your site structure), page speed, and the overall user experience.
5. Create a Social Media Strategy
Your digital reputation is one of the most essential aspects of running a successful business, as it determines how consumers view it and its values, ethics and customer service offerings.
Setting out a plan to monitor online conversations about your business is essential. Appoint certain employees as monitors of these discussions; these should ideally include members of customer-facing teams.
Monitoring the web for damaging photos or references that have slipped through can be done to monitor online reputation bombs that threaten to devastate your brand and lead to sales loss, but can be hard to remove once posted online – these should be dealt with as quickly as possible before further damage occurs.
6. Take Action
Online reputation management is essential for everyone from celebrities to small businesses, from those managing a social media page or blog, to protecting against negative comments that could compromise its standing in an instant. Negative comments or reviews could damage a brand quickly so taking immediate steps to defend yourself against this potential damage is vitally important.
Reputation management involves closely tracking online feedback, building relationships with your customers and producing positive content, as well as taking measures to push down negative information on search engines such as Google. One effective method for doing this is through SEO strategies which increase positive content rankings to help mitigate the effects of PR crises – this is particularly relevant when clients access business via search engines such as Google results.
