Get More Customers by Managing Your Online Reputation

Do you have a strategy to handle the online haters? Be prepared by learning how to effectively manage your reputation and build a stronger brand.

What is Reputation Management?

Reputation management is exactly what it sounds like. It is managing your online reputation. 

In this report, we will be covering several techniques that you can use to clean up your online image. This will make sure you have the best possible reputation to make more sales.

If you have spent any time online, you know that almost anything can be found on the internet, including any negative reviews or poor press on your business. 

It is very difficult to truly delete anything from the internet. If a review is posted on a third party website, you have limited power to remove or edit it.

While you may not be able to truly delete negative press, a proper reputation management strategy can lessen the effects. This is done by making negative comments more difficult to find and by masking it with positive reviews. 

Managing your reputation includes having a professional website and leveraging social media to give your company positive exposure.

Reputation management is an ongoing process that requires constant attention in order to be effective.  Negative reviews and comments can pop up at any time, so it is important to have a system in place to deal with them.  

Why Manage Your Online Reputation?

At first glance, reputation management may not seem like an important aspect of building your business.  Sure, it might be more fun to focus on creating new products or running your daily activities, but you are missing out on a lot of business if you don’t take a look at your online reputation.

Reputation management not only suppresses the bad comments, but also helps to accentuate the good. By doing so, you can build a stronger brand and, ultimately, sell more.

To truly understand the importance, put yourself in a potential client’s position as they search for your business. 

Example: Searching for a new gym

Let’s say you are looking for a new gym in your city. You want to find one with quality personal trainers at an affordable price.

First, you search in Google and find two gyms within 10 miles of your home. You decide to look into them further to see which one may be better.  

1. Go to Google Maps and look at physical location to make sure it is convenient to get to.
2. From Google Maps, you click on the link to their website to find out more about their services.  In this case, the Gym A brings you to a basic listing on Yellowpages with a small amount of information on the gym.  Gym B has a complete website that gives you detailed information on their services, trainers, and pricing.
3. After checking out their websites, you head back to Google and search for the gyms to read some reviews to see if people like it.  Gym A has three reviews on Yelp that give moderate reviews and an overall rating of 2.6 stars out of 5.  Gym B has over 35 reviews on several review sites and the average rating is over 4.0 stars.
4. A little further down the search results, you notice Gym B has a Facebook fanpage that is active and has over 200 likes.  There are pictures of the gym and it looks like the trainers host competitions and motivational races on a regular basis.

Which one do you prefer?

As you compare these gyms online, you are essentially comparing their reputation. The better online reputation helps you to determine which gym has the better overall brand and value. 

In this example, it is easy to see that Gym B has a much better online reputation. It looks better positioned to provide the services that you’re looking for, so it’s an easy choice.

Just like this example, it is important to have a great online reputation for your business in order to give you a leg up over your competition. 

Every business has some sort of competition. You can improve your conversion rates simply by making sure your company is presented in the most professional light possible.

Evaluate Your Online Reputation

The first step is to evaluate your current online reputation to determine how you are positioned in the search results. 

Even if you prefer Bing or Yahoo search, I recommend using Google for your evaluation. The majority of people online use it, so try it out.

Head over to the search engine and type in the name of your business. See what pops up on the first and second pages of the results.  

You generally don’t have to worry about websites past the 3^rd or 4^th page of the search results. Very few people will continue past the first or second page. 

The goal is to see your business website listed in the number one slot on the page and to have your company location listed on a map at the top as well. 

If you don’t see your website in the top 3 results, there is definitely room for improvement.

Search Like Your Visitors Do

Next, search other keywords related to your company and location to see if you are able to find your website. 

For example, you could search for “plumbers, San Antonio” or “attorney Houston” and see how well you rank.

You will also want to check for reviews of your business on sites such as Yelp, Yellowpages, Google, CitySearch, Facebook, and Twitter. 

See if they are positive or negative, if there are certain trends, and if they are appropriate to your company.

Finally, there are certain websites that people can post concerns of scams or very poor service and you will want to be aware of any comments that may hurt your business. 

There are many sites that have these services like Better Business Bureau, Ripoff Report, or ScamAdvisor. Do a quick check of these to see if you show up in the search results.

Improve the Ranking of Your Website

Now that you have an idea of your online reputation, you can start taking steps to improve it. 

We are assuming that you have an updated and professional website to start. If you haven’t looked at your website in a while, see if it needs to be updated.

Once you have an attractive website, you will want to make sure it shows up at high as possible in the search results for your business name and popular keywords. 

This may be more difficult for certain companies due to higher competition and other businesses, but using consistent SEO techniques can help.

On-Page SEO

You should make sure that your website has the most appropriate title, description, and keywords embedded into the header of the website so it can be read by search engines.  If you are using WordPress, this can be added in the Settings area or by using a SEO plugin. HTML sites should have it hard coded into the head section. 

Adding a sitemap to your site and submitting it to Google is a great way to make sure your site is indexed properly and will be categorized under the proper keywords.

Having great content for visitors is essential for high search engine rankings because they factor in time spent on a website. Capture your visitors attention with intriguing and helpful content, and you’ll be rewarded with better rankings.

Reduce Page Load Time

It is also a good idea to reduce your site page load time since this can affect your rankings.  Generally speaking, the faster loading websites rank higher than otherwise identical sites. 

Fast websites also help to capture leads more efficiently since people don’t leave frustrated before the page completely loads. Ever try to visit a website that took forever to load? You probably didn’t stick around too long.

Submit to Search Engines

Once you have set up your website and optimized it as much as possible, you can “ping” it using several online tools like googleping.com. 

This essentially sends a small message to the search engines to let them know that they should crawl your site.  By pinging the major search engines, you will get indexed faster and be sure that your site will get found.

Improve Social Signals and Backlinks

There are other offsite search engine optimization techniques that can improve your rankings and move you to the top. 

Include social share buttons on your website so people can “like” and easily share your content.  These types of social signals have become important to improve your SEO and Google is putting more value in it.

Similarly, backlinks from social sites can be very beneficial to your rankings.  Try to get people to link from their Facebook or Twitter profiles to your website and this will not only improve your traffic, but will help your rank. 

Other social bookmarking sites such as Stumbleupon, Digg, and Redditt can also have positive effects. 

Youtube is a great way to to improve traffic, especially since Youtube is owned by Google.

Continue to Learn and Evolve

Unfortunately, Google is continually changing its ranking algorithm, making it hard to know what SEO methods still work and what don’t. 

Building large amounts of backlinks used to work well but is now frowned upon by search engines. 

Social media has become increasingly more important for rankings and is now a major focus for SEO consultants. 

If you don’t know the latest SEO standards, you may want to partner with a company that specializes in SEM.

Shine Your Reputation on Review Sites

Once you have your business website ranking well, the next step is to make sure you have plenty of positive reviews. 

The trick is to have a mixture of glowing reviews along with a few less-than perfect reviews. 

This is to give your company a more believable feel and make the positive reviews more authentic. This all helps with getting more customers when they see that the vast majority of people love your products and services.

How to Get Positive Reviews

Create a funnel that will get your happy customers to leave positive testimonials on public websites.  At the same time, negative feedback can be sent directly to you to deal with privately.

This can be done by emailing your existing customer base and simply asking for a review. 

One great way to get reviews is to print up some business cards that have a link to your review site. Give these cards to your customers after they complete their transaction.

I recommend setting up an automatic system to filter the good reviews from the bad. This will help prevent the bad ones from getting posted online. 

As a simple system, create a web form on your website that includes their name and testimonial but, when they submit the form, it is not submitted directly to a site such as Yelp or AngiesList. 

Bad reviews are redirected to your email address so that you can take steps to correct any problems.  Good reviews can be sent to the popular review sites so they are published where people can easily find them.

Or, you can automate the process by using survey funnel software.

Showcase Your Reviews

You can also harness the power of reviews on your own website by adding star ratings to certain pages. 

If you are selling physical products, you can add special Google Schema HTML code to your site. This will allow certain pages to show up in Google search results with star ranking next to it. 

This can be done with either a WordPress plugin or by editing raw HTML. Either way, it will help your search results stand out. 

Imagine having 5 stars next to your website title in Google…think that would help your conversions?  Of course!

Address Negative Comments

If you do have any complaints filed on BBB.org or another “scam” reporting website, there is probably not much you can do to remove them.  However, there is usually a way to debate the claim and to post your side of the story. 

In many cases, a disgruntled customer may post something negative because they think you did something wrong. However, you can give details to show that you may not have done anything truly wrong. 

It is always better to address any negative posts than to ignore them.

It is also possible to take steps to “hide” these reports from view in the search results by moving them further down the search results. 

This can be done by getting other websites ranked higher, which will automatically bump thee negative reviews down.

Some reputation management companies will say that they can use negative SEO to push down rankings of other websites. We don’t think this is ethical and would instead recommend you trying to improve your rankings while leaving competitors alone.

Using Social Media to Your Advantage

These days, one of the most visible parts of your online reputation is your social media profiles. 

Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Youtube each have billions of impressions every day. It is also very easy for anyone to search for your company using these platforms. 

If you aren’t active on these sites, you are probably losing customers to competitors that are.

The Giant: Facebook

Facebook is an excellent place to start because it is easy to use and very popular among a wide range of users. 

Anyone can set up a business page in minutes to make sure people can find your main website. 

Once you have it set up, you will want to add new content and continue to post regularly to help grow your audience and keep them interested. 

When you have a popular Facebook page, you could easily post a status update promoting a new service and instantly get a huge response from your followers.

Other Social Sites

Twitter is also easy to use and can be connected with your Facebook page so that you can update both sites at the same time. 

Linkedin is a great way to give your company a professional look and to find both prospective clients and employees. 

If you have videos related to your business, upload them to Youtube. Not only will you will see a spike in your traffic, but you’ll see better conversions as visitors have become more familiar with what you are offering.

Be Prepared for a Variety of Comments

While social media has many advantages, it can be a double-edge sword if you aren’t careful.  Putting the power of commenting into the public’s hands means that you can occasionally get some negative remarks.  The benefit of social media is that you can immediately respond to those remarks to minimize any PR damage and you can always remove any comments that you don’t like.

While you may have the power to delete comments or ban people from your page, we don’t promote doing that on a routine basis.  Deleting many comments, even if they are hurtful or negative, can give you a bad image if used excessively. 

Social media management is an ongoing process that requires diligent profile updates and monitoring for both positive and negative comments.  You can use the positive comments to build your business while tactfully minimizing the damage of any negative comments.

Develop Your Own Strategy

Using strategic reputation management techniques has proven to be essential to the growth of many of the biggest companies. 

The most successful companies know how important brand recognition is. Having an excellent reputation is vital for their continued success. 

Part of having a strong company is projecting an image to the public that people can trust. If they trust you, they will be more willing to invest with you.

Keep building a solid online reputation that will help to bring in more sales and covert long-term customers!