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Importance of Reputation Management

Nowadays, an online reputation or digital reputation is as important, if not more important, than your real-life reputation. If you think your client does not care about your online presence, think again. Gone are the days when you could get away with a poor online reputation, or even no online reputation at all. Nowadays, clients can all see your digital reputation, and you need to know how to manage that reputation.

Online Reputation Management is a crucial process for anyone looking to succeed online or offline for that matter. The internet is a big place and anyone can freely review any business. For this reason, it’s important that you have a well planned reputation management strategy in place to ensure that any negative review can be countered with positive ones. If you don’t have any positive reviews online, it will be much harder to push negative ones to the bottom of the search engine rankings. Your reputation is literally in the hands of people and yes reputation matters and it matters a lot.

Customer Reviews

In this day and age, people buy more from businesses with higher online ratings than from businesses with lower online ratings. Studies have shown that people are twice as likely to buy from companies with a 4.5-star rating or higher. When someone wants to buy a product or service, they search on google and read google reviews first before taking any decision. Reviews make or break a business and it is essential to keep the customer happy and have them write both positive and negative. There are numerous ways to do this, but one thing for sure is that the more you do it the more likely you are to get a positive outcome. There are some great review software available in the market which can make this review capture process very easy. Typically, a business will collect customer feedback in multiple ways: through email surveys, online customer forums, and even one-on-one interviews. With the use of technology, collected data can be analyzed to spot trends in consumer sentiment and behavior and can be used to improve overall customer experience. However, to avoid bias and accurately capture opinions, data should be collected from a variety of sources, including external reviewers, social media, and third-party review sites such as Yelp, Google Review or TripAdvisor. On average, the online presence of a business on Google has 47 customer reviews. Just imagine if your business has hundreds of reviews then how big advantage you will have over your competitors. Individuals trust other people who are using a product/service and their feedback is very valuable. Google and other social networks is a good opportunity for individuals to express their opinion whenever they want. Google reviews are the most popular followed by Yelp, Facebook etc.

Online Review Search

Review sites can be great tools for businesses to attract online customers, especially when they're well-written and have positive things to say. But if you've ever tried to search for your business online, you've probably noticed that you can't always find the reviews you'd like to. So how do potential customers find what they're looking for when they search online? First, they'll do a basic search on their favorite search engine. They might search for your online presence by business name, or the name of your product line. Google is the leader and more and more people are now relying on Google for their decision to buy a product or service. Yelp, Facebook and many other social networks are also playing a big role for customer reviews.

How To Build Reputation?

There are different ways a business can build reputation. Of course, they need to provide good service to their customers but even after providing good service it is very important to manage the reputation. One of the ways a business needs to adapt is to focus on Review sites for their business. Each niche has its own set of review sites where people go and leave the reviews. Business needs to have an online presence to those sites. This process is called citations.

After having citations with correct information, business needs to focus on getting the reviews from their customers/clients and work to manage bad reviews by preventing them to appear on the review sites and if they cannot then replying to those reviews and addressing the issue right there is a better option to build online reputation or digital reputation and reduces the negative content when issue is resolved by you resulting in a better reputation score. Sometimes when Individuals want to write bad content to have a negative image of you but managing it helps you address these types of defamation issues. There is no one scale to measure reputation score and usually review score is used by people.

Second way to do online reputation management is to build authority and trust by having news on the news sites. This can be done for the services and products you offer and have the news sites publish news about it. News about a product and service not only changes the perception about business but also work as a content. This content is very important for search engine optimization and search engines give priority to that type of content. When people perform an online search and come across news about your product or service, they perceive it as positive content. People have a tendency to think a business is legit and trustworthy when they see news about it. Companies should have a great positive online image when individuals perform online search and those results should show higher ratings about the business and product or service they offer. Creating these viral news cycles builds the reputation quickly.

Third way of building a reputation is to have reputable blog sites to have blog posts about your products or services. It not only improves your online presence but also plays a big role in search engine optimization. These blog posts need to be published regularly to keep it updated. When blog sites or third party sites publish a blog post, it is called back linking in SEO terms.

Fourth way of building reputation is to have social media profiles across major social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn etc and posting the content on these platforms regularly. Scheduling posts in advance helps more. Companies can use these social posts for all the announcements in the company or for their online service or product or pretty much anything, and they work like online reputation bombs. They build social media reputation quickly. When you have good contents on these social media platforms, people start following you and these people become your actual customers. They buy when you have a new offering and then you can ask for customer feedback using the same social media platform or by other means. Social media reputation is very powerful and creates popular belief about any product. Companies make thousands of dollars using social media platforms and their online space is full of positive content.

Online Reputation Management Challenges

Companies face challenges in online reputation management to have positive reviews because they usually do not have reputation management strategy in place. Due to the lack of reputation management plan, these businesses struggle to see the importance of online reputation management and its impact on their business. These companies struggle to build online reputation, get more reviews, solve issues and are unable to handle any defamation issues which results in an unfavorable image or negative image created online. They can certainly buy a good review software to automate the review process but in order to build a solid reputation, they have to have a team.

The better way to do reputation management is to hire a good reputation management firm. A good reputation management company has reputation management tools which can perform reputation analysis. Reputation analysis performed by these reputation management tools covers many aspects of your online reputation and gives you exact areas where you need to improve. It can pull reviews from Google, Bing and Social media platforms and calculate a reputation score for you. These companies have reputation management specialists and follow good reputation management practices and usually have good reputation platforms and review software under their belts. By their help, you can do reputation control and reputation protection. Reputation control is when you want to control what reviews should go out to platforms and which ones should not. Reputation protection is when you want to resolve the issue when a client is not happy with the product or service.