Are you aware of all online comments about your company? If not, it is time to investigate. In this article, we provide actionable advice on online reputation management, specifically how to maintain or repair a positive reputation.
Why is online reputation management important?
Before making a purchase, we frequently read product, store, and service reviews. Undeniably, there are times when we do not purchase something due to a negative review or a lack of reviews.
If you’re anything like me, you read Airbnb reviews when searching for vacation rentals, check company responses to customer complaints in a product’s comment section, and evaluate delivery options based on their ratings before making a decision. This demonstrates the significance of online reputation for both customers and businesses.
Online reputation management (ORM) can assist you in the following ways:
- Increase sales. Customers conduct research on a business, its products, and services prior to making a purchase. Personal recommendations are the most reliable source of information. According to a study by ReviewTrackers, 94% of users choose not to conduct business with a company that has negative reviews. Therefore, if you have sufficient positive feedback and respond to negative comments, users will recognise that you provide products of high quality and are eager to improve.
- Recognize your customers. Monitoring your online reputation allows you to see yourself through the eyes of your customers. You can learn what your customers think of you, as well as what they perceive to be the company’s strengths and weaknesses, either in terms of the product or customer service. This type of research will help you generate new ideas and strengthen your weaknesses.
- Know your employees. The same concept applies to enhancing your employer reputation. Online reputation management enables you to identify discrepancies between your perception of the company and that of your employees. This is the first step towards fostering stronger relationships with current employees and enhancing your appeal to prospective candidates.
- Please your clients. People enjoy it when others respect their viewpoint. When you thank them for their feedback, request specifics, respond to and share their opinion, and provide updates and enhancements, they feel satisfied. By managing your online reputation, you demonstrate that your customers’ opinions matter.
- Secure your future. Once something is uploaded to the internet, it will remain there forever. Therefore, even if some unnoticed misleading feedback does not immediately harm your online reputation, there is always a chance that it will surface in the future and do so.
- Be more transparent. Companies that are transparent share both the ups and downs with their customers and engage them in conversation. The only way to demonstrate you have nothing to hide is to publicly address criticism and maintain open communication. 85% of users admitted to being more loyal to companies that are transparent.
- Not start from scratch. Building brand awareness and a solid reputation requires considerable time and effort. But if you leave even a single negative review unattended and it rises to the top of Google, it can destroy all of your hard work. Therefore, it is essential to constantly monitor your online reputation and respond promptly.
Your online reputation not only affects how others perceive your brand, but it also provides you with the means to enhance your communications and better comprehend your customers’ needs.
Key aspects of your online reputation
Online reputation management involves monitoring your company’s image across all available online channels, including review sites, the media, social networks, and search engines. This includes monitoring mentions, responding to them, creating content with value, and gathering feedback for future enhancements.
Reviews, search results, and social media mentions are the three primary focuses of a business’s reputation management strategy.
Reviews
72% of consumers do not make a purchase before reading reviews. There are several locations where reviews can be located:
- Your website
- Social media
- Review websites
- Comparison shopping websites
What should you do with reviews?
- Respond to feedback. 71% of users are more inclined to purchase from a company that responds to their feedback.
- Request positive reviews. Negative reviews carry less weight the more positive reviews you have. As a form of social proof, positive feedback can be displayed on a separate page on your website. To build a solid online reputation, solicit customer feedback via email, social media, or personal accounts on websites and applications.
- Recognize negative comments. Negative comments are not unexpected, so do not remove them. Users may view their complete absence as suspicious. The best course of action is to respond promptly and professionally. Demonstrate that the customer’s opinion is valued and that you are open to dialogue. Ensure that the author of the complaint is publicly notified of any subsequent changes to the service or product. A prompt and proactive response mitigates the damage and halts the dissemination of negative information.
Search results
70% of users conduct online research prior to contacting businesses. Search engine reputation management (SERM) involves ensuring that your brand, products, and services appear favourably on the first page of search results. With reviews, news, blog posts, social media posts from your website, and social profiles or mentions on third-party platforms, you can positively represent your brand.
Online reputation management tools
The following services will assist you in managing your online reputation:
- Google Alert is a free tool for setting up automatic email alerts for keywords you wish to monitor. This can be your brand, product, or service name, the names of your competitors, or any industry-specific phrases. You can also specify alert frequency, source type, language, and location.
- GoFish Digital Complaint Box is a free tool that searches over 40 complaint websites to determine if a negative review of your business has been published. Simply enter the keyword, click the button, and then peruse the search results.
- BuzzSumo allows you to search the web for any content containing a particular keyword. Each result includes parameters such as Facebook engagement, Twitter shares, Pinterest shares, Reddit engagement, link count, and evergreen score. BuzzSumo’s internal ranking for the number of links received within 30 days of publication. Monthly prices for paid plans range from $99 to $499.
- Mention enables you to monitor conversations from over 1 billion sources, blogs, forums, and other websites, as well as send alerts for keyword mentions. Additional features include content scheduling for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as sentiment classification for mentions. The free plan allows you to manage three social media accounts and one alert. Monthly costs for paid plans with advanced features range from $25 to $450.
- Reputology allows users to monitor online reviews on Facebook and Google for multiple locations or businesses. You can also manage reviews from sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor, as well as other local search directories, employee review websites, and app directories. You may also receive email notifications, reply directly from the system interface, obtain semantic analysis of reviews to highlight recurring topics, assign reviews to specific team members, and track their progress. Monthly costs for paid plans range between $162 and $2,500. There is a free trial offer.
- Hootsuite is a platform for social media management with multiple monitoring tools. You can monitor mentions of a specific account, keyword, hashtag, or location in multiple languages, assign a team member to respond, and integrate additional monitoring applications. Prices range between $19 and $599 per month and include the platform’s primary feature of scheduling posts. There is a free 30-day trial available.
- SimilarWeb is a comprehensive platform for ranking websites that can be utilised for search engine reputation management. Among other features, it allows you to analyse referral traffic to your competitors’ websites, revealing new information-sharing resources. If you track the performance of competitors’ websites, you will see a list of domains that refer to competitors and the proportion of traffic they bring. A free plan provides access to five results per metric, one month of mobile app data, and three months of web traffic data. Advanced features provide an unrestricted feed of mobile app and website traffic results for the last 28 and 36 months, respectively.
- ReviewTrackers enables users to monitor online reviews across 100+ websites. It monitors your average rating, number of reviews, response rate, and response time and notifies you via email. In addition, you can monitor responses to Google and Facebook reviews and extract keywords that reflect the sentiments of customer feedback. The only way to obtain pricing information is by contacting the ReviewTrackers team.
- SEO SpyGlass enables the monitoring of your backlinks and the effect they have on your online reputation. In addition to the referring domain, the backlinks dashboard also displays the penalty risk and authority of each link. The platform supports 146 international and local search engines, as well as its own vast database of backlinks. You can also examine the backlinks of your competitors, revealing their anchor texts and page titles. There is a free plan that provides access to up to 1,100 links per website, but its features are limited. The annual cost of the paid version ranges from $124 to $299. There is a free trial available.
- Awario monitors brand mentions on over 13 billion web pages and social networks daily. The platform has a remarkable leads searching algorithm: you enter your product keywords and competitors’ names, the system combines them and finds conversations in which users are seeking a recommendation or complaining about similar products, and then you simply engage with leads by responding to their posts. Awario also offers comprehensive analytics regarding mentions’ quantity, reach, sentiments, and visualisation of progress. You can set up daily or weekly alerts and filter the results by language and location. Monthly costs range from $29 to $299. A limited functionality free trial is available.
- BrandMentions is a monitoring tool that allows you to maintain control over your company’s reputation. You receive every mention of your brand, allowing you to stay abreast of everything that has been said about it and gain an accurate understanding of how the public perceives your product and brand. You gain the ability to comprehend your audience and protect the reputation of your brand in a competitive market.
By being in the right place at the right time, online reputation management tools assist you in protecting your reputation. They are especially helpful if your business appears on dozens of review websites and listings, making it difficult to manually track brand mentions.
Best practices for reputation management online
Your reputation management strategy should be based on the principles of regularity and consistency, regardless of the communication channel. Prior agreement on the key message and responsibilities is required.
Consider the following aspects to begin managing your online reputation:
Allocate resources
To respond to all comments clearly and promptly, you require personnel and funds. At a minimum, a person must be appointed to manage feedback and mentions. Whether it is just one person or a separate PR department, those with responsibility must communicate frequently with sales and customer support to verify the reviews’ accuracy and resolve the issue.
If you have sufficient funds and do not wish to manage your online reputation yourself, you can hire a reputation management agency.
Craft communication standards
To manage your online reputation, establish and adhere to a transparent online communication policy. Consistency only enhances the credibility of your brand. Ensure that the same person consistently responds to reviews using the same tone and language. There are two global reasons for the significance of these standards.
The initial factor is content engagement. Investigate the motivations and objections of your target audience, evaluate the performance of your content, and identify the most effective posts. Develop your brand’s voice based on this information and adhere to it consistently. As a result, your customer communications will be more relevant.
The second reason for establishing communication standards is to prevent the dissemination of harmful content. You can dictate how employees should conduct themselves online when discussing your brand, its customers, and its competitors. Sensitive information, such as financial or private data, should never be shared, but it is always preferable to state this explicitly. A communication policy will help you avoid legal issues and safeguard the reputation of your company.
Eliminate contradictions
Track all of your communication channels and ensure that they conform to the chosen standards. Everything that contradicts your tone of voice erodes the identity of your brand. Change incompatible messages, remove inappropriate posts, and update obsolete data. Thus, all of your interactions improve your online reputation.
Combine automated and manual monitoring
Automated services will not discover all mentions. For instance, they cannot extract reviews from closed social network groups or reviews that do not mention your company’s name. Therefore, reputation monitoring should be performed both automatically and manually.
Where and how to carry out manual monitoring:
- utilising search engines Check image and video search results for screenshots of your products or software. Occasionally, people do not specify a brand with words, but instead provide visual feedback.
- On social networking sites. Join closed communities devoted to your subject and monitor them periodically.
- On review platforms. Some review sites may have distinct sections dedicated to a single business. Therefore, the reviews themselves may not mention your brand. Look for sections like this and manually inspect them.
When you begin monitoring your reputation, you will discover the source of the greatest number of references. Later, you can concentrate your efforts on these websites. However, do not forget to periodically monitor the remaining potential sources to paint a more complete picture.
How to repair a damaged online reputation
Suppose you read the reviews and monitored social media, but the results were disappointing. What measures can be taken to resolve the issue?
If there is no feedback
A lack of digital presence today is highly suspicious. You must begin constructing your media space immediately:
- Collect feedback Include your business in all relevant directories, business listings, and maps.
- Create social networking groups
- Create a blog on your website and add relevant articles and guest posts.
- Post guest articles to other blogs
- Launch advertising to promote your specialized articles and pages in general.
If the feedback is mostly negative
Commence with SERM. The search results are the first place a customer can find negative feedback about your company.
Analyze the first two pages of Google for the following brand-related queries: “company name” and “name + reviews.” Your next steps are:
- Compile the results in a table.
- Define all resources that appear more than once in this table for multiple queries.
- Sort the resources, including review websites, directories, and blogs, by category.
- Find four to five comparable resources for each type and add positive content to them.
Remember that you must request positive reviews, not create them using fake accounts. Your content must be SEO-optimized for search engines to rank it highly. Thus, you can flood the first page of search results with positive brand-related content.
Conclusion
Online reputation management is essential for increasing brand awareness, handling negative mentions over time, and gathering customer feedback. Three important platforms exist:
- Review websites
- Search engines
- Social media
An efficient reputation management strategy should consider:
- Human and monetary assets
- Communication specifications
- Consistency of messaging and tone of voice Observation both automatically and manually
Publish new materials about your brand, manage all reviews, and communicate frequently on social networks in order to establish a formidable reputation.
