Nowadays, the Internet is utilized for everything, which means that your online reputation is crucial. Online reputation can be a reflection of your business and its customer interaction, the quality of the service, and the values that your company holds. Your online reputation can heavily influence a consumer’s opinion of your business. In the modern world, people are very reliant on the Internet, therefore, it is very important to keep up and be aware of your online reputation. In this article, you will learn what reputation management is, how to monitor your reputation, and how to keep a good reputation on Google.
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What Is Reputation Management?
Reputation management includes monitoring, generating, and responding to customer feedback across multiple platforms with the goal of improving your brand’s image. When considering a new product to use or a restaurant to try, many consumers will look at your online reviews on Google, social media, and customer review platforms to see what other people say before going further with their decision.
It is important to note that Google search reputation management is different from online reputation management (ORM). ORM focuses more on finding the right strategies to influence the public’s perception of your business through various forms of online media and follows a different strategy. Google search reputation focuses more on Google search and targets Google search engine results pages (SERPs). As a business you want your source to be one of the top results on the first page, rather than being buried in the second or third.
Why Is Reputation Management Important?
Reputation management can aid your business if you use it the right way. With any business, there is going to be negative and positive feedback. What matters is how you respond to it. When there is negative feedback, make sure to address it right away. Hopefully, you can resolve it. When the feedback is positive, you can utilize it to promote your business. Having a good and effective reputation management strategy increases brand awareness and opens your business to new opportunities.
Keeping Up With Your Content
With the proliferation of the Internet, it can be increasingly difficult to build up a business. Just a couple of bad reviews can damage the reputation of your product/service heavily. While you cannot control the content that is being posted about your business, you can find ways to protect it using reputation management software. Such software will help monitor your reviews and help promote a positive experience for your brand. This includes replying to complaints in a timely manner, usually within 24 hours. Ignoring negative feedback does not make it go away. Instead, it implies you do not care about the consumers, which may hurt your business even more. In addition, by going through these comments, you can use them to better your business. You get to see firsthand what people enjoy and things they would like changed. Show people that you can adapt to your customer’s needs. This will make them feel appreciated, as well as build brand loyalty.
Trust Drives Your Business
The reputation of your business will have a big influence on how successful it is. When people are deciding between two businesses, they will often conduct a quick search and go with the result that has a better rating. This is because this business most likely offers a better service and is more trustworthy. This also means that if your customer had a good experience, they will share it with their friends and family through word-of-mouth marketing which will help boost your company’s reputation.
The presence of negative reviews can be hard to recover from. 60% of consumers say that negative reviews dissuaded them from a business. If your company is experiencing a slight bump, make sure to show your customers that you are listening to their complaints and making changes.
Your Site Could Disappear
If you continue receiving negative reviews and do not manage them, it is likely that Google will banish your website. Negative comments on the business will affect the number of people going to your site. If there are not enough visitors, Google will see no point in keeping the site up.
Online Presence
Having a strong online presence will help establish a strong client base. You want to be high up on the Google search result page and easily accessible when potential customers are looking up your service. Having a strong online presence means a lot of people trust you. This means that your site will have a lot of click-throughs, resulting in more conversions for your business. It is also important to keep your site and social media accounts up-to-date. Delete things that are no longer relevant to the business and try to avoid giving the consumer false information.
Google Should Not Be Your Only Resource
The easiest way to check your online reputation is to look yourself up. Look up your name, your company name, your products, parts of your company, and any other relevant terms and see how it appears to the public. This only shows how you are currently doing, which is why using a reputation manager can be helpful.
While Google is necessary for seeing what your reputation is, it should not be the sole platform that you rely on in improving your business’s online reputation. Learning to use additional reputation management software is important because Google can limit you.
How to Manage Your Google Reputation
According to Google, it is an easy three-step process to manage your online reputation.
- Search for yourself or your business on Google and see what information comes up about you.
- Create a Google Account. From there, you can manage the information that the public is seeing, such as your bio and contact information.
- Remove unwanted content and the associated search results. You would first determine who controls the content you are trying to get removed and sometimes Google can remove it but not always.
It is not this simple though, because even when Google removes it from the search results page, it is not completely gone. It may be harder to find but it will still exist somewhere on the web and can be accessed through the page it resides on, social media, or other search engines. Also, yes Google does allow content to be removed. But it is difficult to gain approval for said removal. The things that are more easily removed would be things that create risks of identity theft, financial fraud, sexually explicit images, and contact information or that violate Google’s policy.
Improving Your Online Reputation
As said before, it is not always easy to get unwanted content removed from the eyes of the public. So, the next best thing is to suppress the negative content. The first thing you can do is focus on the aspects that you can control, like your social media account, and only show positive comments. Then you can publish and promote the positive content to push the negative comments further down. After that, continue to monitor your Google search results and repeat this process as often as needed. You will never have full control over what information is being shared with the public about your business so on your side. Do the best you can to show the positives of the business.
Having a Good Brand Reputation Strategy
Throughout this article, we have talked about the importance of having a good reputation. It is a necessity in today’s world. It is important to also have an action plan for when things go downhill.
First, you need to Google yourself and identify your strengths and weaknesses, the things that could harm your reputation. Create a plan on the things that could be improved or removed to address those concerns.
Secondly, monitor your reputation. You can set up Google Alerts to monitor any keywords and phrases you would like. You can set it up to notify you whenever your business is mentioned in Google’s search engine results. Also, set up an online reputation manager that can help your business develop the best strategy for you to keep a good online reputation.
The last thing is to manage your online reviews. There are always going to be unhappy customers, and you are not going to be able to satisfy every person that interacts with your business but the actions you take after you know about the situation are what matters. Be sure to respond to the unhappy customer and show that you are making an effort to change things.
A good brand reputation strategy should be used at all times, not just for the businesses that are currently facing a problem with their reputation, but with all businesses. Be prepared and do not wait to take action when things are going wrong, we provide a reputation management service that can help.
FAQ:
- What is reputation management?
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- Do I need a brand reputation strategy?
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