Nowadays, before people check out a business, they often do a quick search online to know more about it. This search includes reading online reviews, which 84% of people trust as much as their friends’ recommendations. It’s all well and good if the feedback and published content are positive, but it may be a significant cause for worry if they’re far from flattering.
Your business’s online reputation is an important currency in this internet age. That’s why you must have a strategy in place to protect it. With this in mind, here are some steps you can take to manage your online reputation.
Evaluate your online presence
The very first step is to evaluate your company’s online presence and identify the prevailing sentiment about it. You can easily find this out through basic searches, with your business name as the keyword. When encountering negativity, identify the most pressing issues, the sources, and the extent of the damage.
Once you have the necessary information, it’s time to go deeper and explore the reason for the kind of reception your business is getting. Be honest and self-aware in your reflections, and determine if your company has made some lapses in certain areas or in connecting with customers. Then identify your available resources and what you can do to counter the negative publicity.
Encourage and respond to feedback
More often than not, negative attention to your business can be attributed to disgruntled customers. Getting more feedback from your other customers can either help you bury the negative review or help you learn more about the cause of their dissatisfaction. The key here is openness, so you can go about finding a long-term solution to this problem.
Whether you get good or bad reviews, the important thing is to respond to them. This is especially true when it comes to negative reviews because addressing them head-on can help rectify any misconception or identify the root problem.
Try to determine if there’s some value in your critics’ feedback and if it’s something that you can use to help your business grow. It could be they’ve pointed out an issue that you’d do well to fix.
Implement your online reputation management strategy
If the negative publicity you’re getting is coming from a source that has been producing deliberately misleading content, then you should also address it directly. This is especially important if a top-ranking page is spreading lies about your business. You can first ask the site owner to take down the content, and if they don’t, raise it to an authoritative body.
Utilize SEO in burying negative reviews. You can do this by focusing on producing valuable, high-quality content, strategic keywords, link-building, and social media marketing. The goal here is to put positive content about your brand in the top three SERPs.
You should also highlight the good reviews you’re getting. Addressing negativity while highlighting positivity should be the core of your strategy.
Manage Your Online Business Reputation with Reviews911
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Get in touch with a Reviews911 representative today.
