Online Reputation Management: A Guide for Business Owners

It’s impossible to overstate how much the internet has completely revolutionized the business landscape. Online reputation management is now something every single business needs to pay attention to compete. Not only has the landscape changed the way we conduct business but it’s also changed how customers relate to you and how they preview your business’s online reputation. In many ways, it seems that the internet has made life easier for the customer while making things more difficult for the businesses that serve them. And research shows that is largely due to how damaging negative online reviews can be. 

It’s no secret that businesses have always depended on customer recommendations. But in the past, the reach and speed of word-of-mouth limited the damage radius of a single negative customer experience. Today, a single online review can destroy a business under the right circumstances.

To survive the strikes of wronged customers (whether those wrongs are real or imagined), every business needs to be aware of and actively working to protect its online reputation. In fact, from solopreneurs to major corporations, it seems clear that no business or venture can afford to neglect online reputation management. 

But don’t worry. We’re here to help. Read on to learn what online reputation management is, why it’s important, and how to handle it like a pro. 

What is online reputation management? 

Online reputation management is a set of proven strategies intended to improve how customers see your brand online. In some ways, it’s your most important form of public relations–how you shape the way consumers see and engage with you. Online reputation management is critical to setting yourself up for long term growth and establishing a permanent, growth-oriented presence in your community. 

Often, it involves successfully gathering, managing, and responding to reviews (both negative and positive), engaging with customers on various online platforms, managing your brand reputation and engagement across multiple listings, and maintaining a consistent image across your listings and digital marketing efforts. 

The best brands know how important online reputation management is to maintaining valuable real estate at the forefront of potential customers’ minds in any given industry. Getting to the top of the Google Map Pack is no accident–it involves strategy, maintenance, and planning. 

Online Reputation Management Channels

As with anything else, online reputation management comprises many different channels. It’s critical to understand and take care of all your channels consistently to manage your online reputation effectively.

Paid media

Paid media consists of the marketing that includes placements that are paid–pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, display ads, and more. Your paid media should always be consistent with the brand image you’ve established (think website, content, social media profiles, etc.), and in alignment with the values and needs of your target audience at any given time. 

Shared media

Shared media includes all of the content you share across third-party platforms or that other people share for you. Your shared media should reflect high awareness and engagement, indicating a brand that responds to shares, thanks posters, and gets back to customers quickly. 

Owned media

Owned media includes everything you create: blog posts, your website, ebooks, whitepapers, pamphlets, etc. Your owned media is a huge part of your online reputation in the way that it communicates your credibility, trustworthiness, and expertise. 

Earned media

As you probably guessed, earned media is media you earn. It’s when your service is so good that people talk about you, advocate for you, and provide testimonials and reviews for you. Consistently asking for reviews, making it easy to leave reviews, and providing praiseworthy service is critical to tapping into the power of this type of media. 

Why is Online Reputation Management Important? 

Online reputation management is one of the most powerful tools business owners have to grow their companies. While the distance your business is from any given potential consumer can vary, reputation management can ensure that you show up as a top result online, closing the gap with a snap. It:

1. Improves sales.

Did you know that half of consumers are willing to travel farther and pay more to engage with a business that has a better online reputation? Online reputation management isn’t simply “nice to have.” It significantly raises your ROI by making you a business that is 1.) easier to discover and 2.) more appealing to consumers. 

2. Improves brand awareness and trust.

Here’s a secret: reviews influence almost 90% of customers in discovering a local business. Your online reputation tells potential customers exactly what they can expect from interacting with you. Positive reviews tell them what differentiates you from the competition. Negative reviews warn them about what to avoid. Responses to negative reviews tell them how you resolve issues, aka how you’re going to resolve their issues, should any arise. A place in the Google Map Pack tells them that you’ve done the work to get to the top and are invested in your clients. 

3. Provides valuable feedback.

When you manage your online reputation correctly, you’re able to gather invaluable insights into your customer experience that can significantly improve the way you do business. Negative reviews can show you what can be going better, and some even offer solutions upfront. You can understand what is going really well, what your customers are noticing about you that you should capitalize on, and what they want you to fix in order to become their number one. 

4. Helps you deal with negative reviews and feedback

Of course, online reputation management helps you deal with bad reviews and feedback by providing an effective plan you can use to consistently resolve issues. Executing this plan well demonstrates that your business is consistent in providing support and ensures that your customers receive the same treatment when it comes to resolving problems–a critical part in establishing brand trust and credibility. 

How to Develop Your Online Reputation Management Strategy

3.3 stars, on average, is the minimum star rating consumers would consider engaging with.

The first step in your online reputation management strategy should be an evaluation of your online image. Tracking your reputation is an important part of reputation management. And ideally, it’s a practice that you’ll continue once your primary reputation remediation efforts are finished. That’s because staying on the right track requires constant vigilance. A little bit of neglect can turn into a serious problem very quickly.

Start with some basic searches, primarily using your brand name as the keyword. Plug it into a search engine, and see what comes up. As you analyze the search engine results pages (SERPS), look to answer a couple of questions:

• What are the most pressing issues? 
• Are there one or two items that stand above the rest?
• How extensive is the damage? Is it a few links on the page, or does it cover the top 20 or 30?
• Is there defamation coming from customer reviews or published content (articles, news posts, etc.)?
• Is it accurate? Can the claims be refuted?
• Is anything positive cutting through the noise?
• What kind of online presence does our company have?
• What kind of social media presence does our brand have?
• What is our cumulative brand image? 
• Where are our brand’s customers? Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, other?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you’re ready to start putting together a strategy for answering the concerns. Start with “What?” and then move to “Why?”.

• Is there anything obvious about our company’s presence that can be corrected or improved quickly?
• Are we out of touch with customer experiences?
• How can we better collect customer feedback?
• Can we directly address the most egregious cases of defamation in a reasonable way?
• What can we use to bury negative search results with positive ones?

Ultimately, an effective online reputation management campaign will address each of these and will include SEO tactics, positive content marketing, Voice of the Customer (or similar feedback strategies), and a willingness to make changes if they are truly needed. 

How to Improve Your Online Reputation? Tips & Best Practices

70% of consumers said they would be willing to leave a review if asked by a business.

So, how do you go about actually improving your online reputation? Here are six tips and best practices to get you started. 

1. Showcase the reviews you want.

Yes, it’s time to make that vision board–but with reviews you already have. Curating the right online reviews starts with showing customers what you want–what they should be looking for when engaging with you, and what you want them to recognize and remember about you. 

You’re likely to see a lot of improvement if you take steps to openly emphasize the reviews you want to be seen. Try linking to reviews or review sites you want seen to build link authority and push those to the top of SERPs. 

Using tactics like these can boost your SEO and help bury any negativity as well as positively influence those who search for your brand.

2. Get and respond to customer feedback.

The most common reason for needing online reputation management is disgruntled customers–and with good reason. As we mentioned, 3.3 stars, on average, is the minimum star rating of a business consumers would consider engaging with. Whether it’s a single negative review outweighing a handful of positive ones, or a slew of critics amongst thousands of reviews, the first step is the same: start asking more of your customers for feedback.

If the critiques aren’t an accurate reflection of your services or products, the additional feedback will help drown out the negativity. Otherwise, collecting more reviews will help identify where the problem area is and help you know how to address it. Either way: the more reviews, the better.

As you collect feedback, you want to do what you can to guide the feedback process and make it as simple as possible for customers and clients. The easier it is for them to leave feedback, the more feedback you’ll receive. If you provide them a way to give you feedback directly with convenience, like sending them a text with a link, you have a much better chance to address concerns before they’re pushed in front of the public eye.

Along with this, giving customers healthy places to vent (like customer service or support forums) will help cut down on the number of high ranking negative reviews.

3. Deal with and respond to negative reviews.

One important lesson that anyone using reputation management needs to learn is that addressing a problem is better than letting it fester. A negative review can be dealt with if you respond to it properly. Leave it alone, though, and it offers its unfavorable opinion unchallenged. The key is knowing how to respond in real-time.

When you respond well, you can sometimes turn critics around and make them into loyal customers. Barring that, you can show other customers that you care whether or not your customers have a good experience.

Start by training whoever will be responding to handle complaints tactfully. Showing genuine concern and care for your customers is something many local businesses actively train and work on. Generally, it begins with deeply understanding your customers’ lifestyles and pain points so you can better understand and empathize with where their frustration is coming from.

Some critics will say something of value, offering an honest critique of your brand. Don’t sleep on those insights. When you receive negative feedback, consider it and determine if it’s an indication of a real problem. If it is, be willing to make any necessary improvements. Some of your best optimizations can come from negative reviews. 

Once you have honest feedback handled, you’ll want to address anything that’s inaccurate or dishonest—whether it’s a review, a piece of content, or something in the news. Again, you’re best served by tackling the problem head-on.

Remember: Don’t tolerate unfair and unlawful defamation of your brand. If there’s something out there that’s untrue, there are things you can do to fix them. 

4. Collect positive customer reviews.

Everyone wants to open the floodgates to positive reviews. While it’s unethical to incentivize positive reviews, there are many ways to encourage customers to leave reviews–and to make sure that the circumstances are optimum for those reviews to be happy ones. 

• Set expectations
• Ask in person
• Send review invites via text
• Incentivize review leaving
• Automate your invites 

In any customer journey, there is a peak when the customer is most happy–perhaps right after they’ve found the right wedding dress or gotten their troublesome AC fixed. Find this point in your individual CX and train your staff to highlight what went well, ask the customer to leave a review, and explain how the process is going to work:

We’re so glad you found the perfect dress! Would you be willing to leave us a review? It really helps us to continue delivering top-notch, personalized experiences for all our customers. 

On your way home, I’ll send you a text with a link you can click to review us on Yelp. If you leave a review, we’ll be happy to give you 10% off your next purchase! 

Making it easy for customers to leave reviews is vital, and text is the preferred way to communicate for many customers. Eliminate any barriers to entry by using a platform that allows customers to review you simply by clicking a link they receive via text. 

When it comes to asking customers to leave you a review, there are also a few things you can do to make sure no one slips through the cracks: 

• Train your employees to ask customers to leave a review as part of the payment process
• Integrate online reviews, or a similar product, into your point-of-sale system to automatically ask each customer for a review of your business
• Create a review and refer loyalty program 

Pro tip: Always open the conversation by asking open-ended questions such as, “Did you find what you were looking for today?”, “How would you rate our customer service?”, “What kind of experience did you have with our brand/product/service during your visit?”

Once you get those reviews, don’t forget to show your thanks! Vitally important to getting positive reviews is showing that you are responsive to them. Only 54% of local businesses respond to all or most reviews. In reality, that number should be 100%. Businesses should always take the time to respond to all positive and negative reviews in order to demonstrate brand consistency and trust.

By responding to both positive and negative reviews, you prove that you’re listening and that you care about what kind of experience all of your customers have—not only the naysayers. 

5. Improve your SEO.

Effective SEO optimization is something every business should be practicing, regardless of online reputation, but it’s even more important when there’s negativity about your brand online. The primary objective of using SEO in online reputation management is to effectively and consistently bury the negative with the positive. This can be done a number of different ways, depending on what you can commit to the effort— including link building (and backlinks), content marketing, social media management, and more.

Focus on strategic keywords, and do your best to own them. For most brands, these will be keywords related to their brand name, so take ownership of what’s yours and don’t let anyone else steer the public conversation. This may sound a bit more daunting than it really is. For most successful reputation management strategies, it’s a gradual effort designed to replace the top 30 results, one page at a time. Once you’ve cleaned up those first three SERPS, you can start to rest easy.

A significant portion of your SEO efforts can also be accomplished by taking the time to regularly produce high-quality content.

“The key to success in any online reputation management is to be proactive with original content. Steer clear of copying and pasting the same boilerplate copy, same pictures, and same videos. What people (and search engines) want is something different and something new.” Kevin Pike, Rank Fuse 

By offering search engines something more valuable (and more positive) to find, you can effectively drown out the negativity that’s damaging your reputation.

6. Improve your customer service. 

Did you know that poor customer service is the number one reason customers leave a negative review? There are so many variables when it comes to running a business. However, having consistently outstanding customer service has to be your top priority. So, how do you actually improve it?

• Show your employees you care about them on a regular basis.
• Train consistently and regularly using real-life examples. A great idea is taking a shift once in a while where you can work directly alongside your staff and show them what your brand stands for. 
• Prevent burnout by staying up-to-date with technology that can take a load off your employees, such as messaging and Webchat tools. These tools keep your staff off the phones and give them more time to respond to your customers.   

Implementing the tactics we’ve covered (and avoiding the unsavory ones) can help you recover your reputation and start winning over new customers in a revolutionary way. And you don’t even have to do it all at once. You can experiment and use proven methods of trial and error (such as A/B testing) to see what will work best in helping you meet the unique demands and needs of your local business and industry. 

But as we mentioned earlier, many businesses and professionals struggle to give reputation management the attention and capital it needs, especially when they have a small customer support team. For those who don’t feel like they can handle the job in-house, there’s a welcome alternative.

Check and Improve Your Online Reputation Score

Your reputation online is critical to business success. Use a tool like Podium to improve your customer feedback response time, collect more reviews, and support your customers via the channels they want to use.