What is online reputation management?
by Phil Chow
Online Reputation management is getting customers to write online reviews of you.
Why online reputation management is important
It’s important because Google uses online customer reviews of you, along with other criteria, to rank your website. Online reviews are now one of the top five search ranking criteria Google use ((Unfortunately, Google will not tell you what that order is!). Essentially, the more online reviews you have, especially positives ones, the higher you will show up in Google’s search results when people search for your type of business.
What this means is more potential customers will visit your website over others who don’t have as many online reviews as you.
Moreover, these potential customers will more likely become your customers as your reviews serves as your endorsements, swaying them over to you. A survey showed that about 72% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
But what able negative reviews?
Of course, you can’t please everybody all the time. You’re bound to get some negative reviews sometimes. However, by having lots of positive reviews, when you get the occasional negative one, the overwhelming number of positive reviews will mitigate any negative ones.
In fact, getting the occasional negative review may actually increase your credibility and trustworthiness(!) as this indicates your positive reviews are genuine and not paid for or made up.
Besides, legitimate negative reviews can serve as learning opportunities for you; they can shed light on what aspects of business that your customers find negative that you might not be aware of.
As well, getting the occasional negative review is an opportunity to show that you indeed provide excellent customer service, further increasing your credibility! How’s that possible?
It gives you the chance to address the concerns raised in a negative review. By addressing the author of the negative review concerns and then you writing about it online on how you solved them, you show your high level of customer service.
Further, the author of the negative review may even then amend their negative review by writing an additional, positive one.
Infographic: the new word of mouth
The above discussion shows the importance of managing your online reputation. The following infographic illustrates other aspects of equal importance about your “social signals” and how they affect your online reputation (If you like to see or print off this PDF in full size, just click on the right pointing arrow on the upper right hand corner of the PDF window to view it.):
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