Online Reputation Management Can be key to Your Success
Think your online reputation doesn’t matter? Think again! Based on a study by Erik Qualman of Socialnomics.com, nearly three-quarters of respondents say they trust the information offered by total strangers online. Further, some 80 percent of consumers have changed their minds about buying a product after reading a negative review online, and over 84 percent say they find online product reviews as being a trustworthy source of information.
You need to take negative reviews seriously and take measures to counter the negative effects!
Here are five solutions to do just that:
- Look at your search results monthly – Monitor your company’s name in Google at the very least once a month. Use Google Alerts or mention.net to inform you if you have any activity involving your company name or important keywords. Also, look beyond page one of the search results; negative entries can gain traction and end up on the first page tomorrow.
- Deal with negative content ASAP – Do your best to make contact with the person who posted the content in question as quickly as possible, especially if they are an unsatisfied customer. Do your very best to take care of their concerns in a positive manner. Don’t enter into a public tussle with them! You won’t like the outcome.
- Use your company’s name in your page optimization – Be sure your pages and other content are using your company’s name in keywords, tags, URLS, and titles. The more pages you own that bear your company’s name, the better the possibility Google will view your site as the authority for this keyword (your company name) and provide you with higher rankings. Also, most negative content will most likely not have done any SEO.
- Create more content channels with your brand – You can use free blogs like WordPress.com, Blogger.com or even subdomains of your own site for this, along with your social channels such as YouTube, Facebook, and Google , will help keep your company name prominent. Post fresh content to these channels as well, so they maintain their search positions.
- Ask your customers for reviews – The most apparent and by far by far the most useful tool for successful online reputation management is to ask your satisfied customers for a review. Encourage and even reward reviews. This is also your very best source of social proof!
Follow these tips and safeguard your good name! It’s the right thing to do.