What your customers are thinking about you?
How often do you monitor your online presence? Or, should I put it this way: Have you ever monitored your online presence? I don’t have the stats to back my assumption, but from the people I have been working with, I can safely assume that online reputation is often overlooked.
Regardless of your products – physical goods, information or services – you should manage your online reputation. Simply put, bad reputation loses you clients and, eventually, revenues.
When doing business online, many web business owners are typically focusing on search engine optimization (SEO,) search engine marketing (SEM) and social media marketing (SMM.) They are focusing on getting their websites and brand names on top of search engine result pages and making your business heard in socialsphere.
However, they often overlook that nagging result from the search engines; they often disregard the negative reviews about your business on social media. And more often than not, when they notice the negative reviews, they ignore them thinking that such reviews and comments will go away in no time.
Wrong. So wrong.
When it comes to search engines, there is such a thing as link popularity. When a bad review about your business is getting favorable mentions and links from others, it will get good ranking.
What if when someone search about your service and found that the negative review about your business ranks higher than your actual business website? I don’t know how about you, but to me that means big disaster.
Fortunately, there are some ways you can do to manage your reputation online – here are 2 major ways:
1. Get more positive reviews
Many online reputation management companies focus on getting positive exposure for their clients. The strategy here is to get as many pages as possible rank well on the search engines, in such a way that negative reviews will naturally pushed down in search result pages.
Also works in social media, engaging your customers and communicating what you are doing and what you have done to improve your business will get you the positive buzz.
2. Take down negative reviews
This is only offered by a handful of companies, but it’s something you should consider trying, especially if you are getting bad reviews on independent sites.
Independent sites are typically publishing honest reviews, as well as fake reviews, for some reasons. Indeed, some people intentionally want to bring down your business or simply doing so for fun (yes, I know… there is such thing!)
As a business, you have the right to get represented by Lawyers and you can force such sites to remove the negative reviews. You can also file a DMCA complaint and use it to take down the pages.
Should I DIY or hire a pro?
A cliche question; the answer depends on the scale of online reputation campaigns you are going to do. If you are a business getting reviews from big sites, such as Yelp – especially negative reviews from sites like RipOffReport.com, then you should hire a pro. Otherwise, you can DIY your online reputation management, using available tools, like this one provided by Google.
Takeaway
Of course, online reputation management is obviously useless if you do nothing to improve your products and services! While you are doing reputation management campaigns, you need to better your products, offer better services and do whatever necessary to win your customers.
Doing both simultaneously is important, if not mandatory – and results don’t show in an instant; it does take time to build your reputation and grow your business. Be patient and persistent – only then you can start seeing results!
Good luck!
Ivan Widjaya
Online reputation management