Online Business Reputation can be affected by just one negative feedback. The flame of a bad review or two can create doubt on a customer’s mind. Furthermore, it can damage trust and credibility. So businesses must focus on their Online Business Reputation to grow.
• With positive feedback, most business gets 18% rise in sales.
• Customers spend 31% when they read positive reviews.
• 22% of customers change their decision to buy after reading one negative review.
• Due to bad reviews business lose around 70% of customers.
If the numbers above are not enough to convince you, just look back on some major brands, how they were brought to their feet because of rejection from customers. However, most of them handled it well, while others suffered major losses.
Should businesses be scared of having bad reviews? Of course not. Remember, everything has a good side as well. Customers’ reviews help business to grow and improve. Also, bad reviews make a business look genuine. It conveys a message to customers that those behind the business are still people who make mistakes. However, it doesn’t mean businesses have to be unworried, though. Because at the same time, it boils down to how they manage their reputation.
It takes years and a significant amount of effort to build a brand. Therefore, a poorly-handled online reputation can change everything overnight. So, it is essential for businesses to take control of their online reputation with great delicacy. And to make it easier digital marketing agencies should step up.
When you’re performing a role of a digital marketer, your main concern is to get customers as much campaign as possible to bring them more business. The more campaigns and publicity they have on search results, the more customers are likely to be aware of the brand. Everything about your client that appears on search results becomes your responsibility – whether it is customer feedback or brand mentions.
So, as a digital marketer, what are the steps that can provide your clients with the tools they need for their online reputation?
One of the aspects of a strong local SEO strategy is getting a business on directory or listing websites. You’ll find a number of local business listings online—Google My Business, Yelp, and Yellow Pages are often the first listings that businesses or agencies set up on their own. However, the listing should be related to the business, which can be based on industry or location.
True information is essential when listing a business on directory sites. The more reliable and complete information published on these sites, the more likely it is to fetch the trust of users and search engines. When you talk to clients about their local SEO needs, make sure you collect maximum information about their business from the start.
Building citations is another aspect of local search strategies. You can consider this in three ways: First is through listings (discussed above). Second is through publishing about the business and their address or contact details in blogs, news articles or social media platform. Last is on the main website of the business.
How do you build citations? Start by exploring where the competition is. A quick Google search is one option to do this—just copy and paste their NAP and check the results that appear to search which ones allow submissions. However, if you want an easy and quick way to build citations, use a reputation management tool that is perfect for scraping the web for potential listings for particular businesses.
When a customer writes a bad review, some businesses ready to be on the defensive mode. But, counter-argument can be taken out of context and do more damage than good.
Here’s one thing with online reputation—you can’t attract stone with stone. You have to calm down the customers and resolve issues in a way that will not affect the business.
As an agency, you’re also responsible for maintaining business professionalism when it comes to their online interactions. Make sure your review strategy takes care of this.
• Top review websites to monitor for your customer – Which websites to pay attention to.
• Review guidelines when interacting with a client – How to respond to customers who left reviews.
• Negative review action plan – How to deal with negative feedback.
• Review requests send to customers – How to start conversations that will encourage customers to leave reviews.
Guide your clients in how they should deal with reviews and make sure they implement the recommendations according to your review strategy.
Even after implementing the particular online reputation strategy and local SEO efforts, there will be cases when a business will be hit with nasty link building activities and fake reviews. So, this is an instance of negative SEO, which should be one of the things to consider at in Online Business Reputation.
Though Google has applied measures to prevent the impact of negative SEO on websites, your agency should still be conscious of how to counter negative SEO to safeguard your clients’ reputation.
Needless to say, if a business takes care of their customers, customers will take care of their business. But who will take care of Online Business Reputation? That’s where digital marketing agency’s experts come in. Know how to regulate when it comes to online reputation, and you’ll find your agency with more businesses to service.
Vanshul Banta August 7th, 2018
Tags: Business Strategy, Online Business Reputation, Vanshul Banta