Whether you love it or hate it, social media platform plays a key role in the marketing world. When it comes to business or brand reputation, social media channels and search engine can make it or break it. It all depends on how your customers feel about your product or service. One bad review can ruin your business image online as well as offline. Maybe this is the reason why most entrepreneurs nowadays choosing online reputation management service. After all who doesn’t want to build an excellent online web presence? Especially when it affects your goodwill, your sales and your reputation.
Do you really think online reputation management really work? According to experts it only works if you follow and implement the steps carefully and smartly.
Let’s discuss step by step guide for online reputation management.
Needless to say, every business owner wants to see his business ranking in position #1 on the first page of Google. What if your website is not ranking in position #1 on Google first page? The reason could be any of the following:
• Your website is not indexed
• You don’t have any backlink to your website
• You have a Google penalty
If you feel your website may not be ranking due to any of these reasons, fix it!
When it comes to the ranking of your other social media pages including Facebook, Twitter, Behance, youtube channel, etc.; you can implement the following tips:
• You must have appropriate profiles and you should be active on them.
• You can link to them from your site (and you can do it by using a sitewide footer link)
• You can link to them from any third‐party site on which you’ve registered (such as forums, other reference sites, etc.)
This way you can tell Google that these are your “official” pages which ultimately increase the chance of them ranking in the search engine result pages.
But it will only work if you keep them active, which can be quite a difficult task in itself.
People may have mentioned your brand, product or even services in their articles, reviews, guides, etc., which is a good thing of course. Hold on! It is not always a good thing, especially if it is mentioned in negative feedback. It can ruin your brand image if the site fetches thousands of visitors. In such a situation it is necessary to reach out to the person who wrote it and request to fix the outdated or inaccurate information. Otherwise, you can lose your potential customers.
Push negative reviews down and pull positive ones up
You need to consider this point only if
a) There is at least one negative review using the tactic mentioned above, and
b) You’ve tried your best to convince the publisher to accept a mutual agreement to remove the negative review or article with the motive to resolve the issue.
Remember, you should only do this if you find the review unfair or inaccurate. Never try to bury review if it is objective.
Now the question is how to push a negative review.
You can start by adding a link to the positive review from your website. For example, you can try to mention it on your testimonials page, after that you can add the testimonials to your homepage.
However, in case you think it is not enough to push it up a few pages, you can add a link to it from guest posts as well.
You can follow the following process for this:
• Search and select a few sites in your niche where you can publish guest posts
• Write quality content for them. Remember, the content should be related to the keywords you need to rank the positive review for.
• Link to the positive review that you desire to rank with the help of your guest post
If you follow this process for the next few times you will find that review would surely push the negative review out of the search engine research page to some extent.
People are searching for various things related to your brand on the web, not only reviews. If you’re not in the search engine research page while they searching for these things, ultimately they will pick the required information from a third‐party. This may not be desirable. Therefore, it is better to search for the keyword which is in trend related to your product and create content accordingly.
Suppose someone else has posted a content regarding your product which is not accurate and correct, this is where you can follow the two options:
1. As we discussed above in point #2, connect with the author and request him to update the post with accurate information.
2. create content by yourself around this term, and try to outrank him.
After considering everything, you will find the first option easier. So it’s better if you try the first option before moving onto the second option.
So finally you have solved the negative reviews and mentions. Great!
But you know what? It is a continuous process as people are continuously talking about you or your company.
This means there is a possibility that a NEW negative review may arise in future on the web.
Therefore, it is important to actively monitor the reviews and mentions a post for your brand. That’s why it is advisable for every entrepreneur to actively monitor brand. And for that purpose, you can use Google alert.
So, if you want to make use of online reputation management, execute this step by step guide and make a difference.
Vanshul Banta March 30th, 2020
Tags: brand, business, google, online reputation