It can take years to build up a positive reputation, delivering a consistently good service to your clients and customers. Earning their trust is hard work, particularly online where people are able to get to know everything. Unfortunately, it can happen that you have worked at your reputation for years, and a single disgruntled customer can undo all your hard work in a matter of minutes by posting a negative review.
This is why every business needs to focus on proper review management techniques. Destroying a reputation is all too easy and it often happens in a very unfair way, with people posting false comments. Businesses must therefore have a number of strategies in place to ensure their reputation is always a positive one.
What Is Online Reputation Management?
Essentially, this is the process used by experts to build and maintain a brand or company’s positive reputation. Good consultants will almost always combine reputation management efforts with search engine optimization (SEO) efforts as well. Combining these two strategies build credibility and help to get a website to get to the first page of Google at the same time.
Steps to Online Reputation Management
There are a number of steps to improve your online reputation:
- Improve your SEO so that you end up on the first page of SERP (search engine results page). If a negative comment about you has a high SERP ranking, you have to make sure that you change this. You cannot remove their pages, so all you can do is get your pages to rank higher.
- Get rid of bad feedback links. As stated, it is nearly impossible to have a page completely removed from the internet. You can, however, downgrade them significantly so that they move further down the SERP. Make sure there are no links from your own pages to the negative reviews and try to see who else links to it and ask them to remove it.
- Create sister websites to promote yourself. By creating micro-sites yourself that links back to you, you are engaging in excellent SEO practices. Not only will it be easier to find your own website, the micro-site will also start to rank much higher. This, in turn, means that you can use it for further positive reviews and comments.
- Blogging is absolutely vital to making sure people spot your positive reputation. It is one of the most basic and simplest to follow SEO procedures. Use it properly, and people who search for your business will always end up either on your website or on your blog. This means that they only see the positive things, as you overtake anyone who is leaving negative results about you on the internet.
Online reputation management is vital to the success of your business, both online and offline. With the above steps, you should be able to make sure that any negative comments are quickly sent to the dark corners of the internet, never to be seen again.
