Are you new to Online Reputation Management? Let us get started with the definition first – Online Reputation Management (ORM) is the work of improving and influencing the digital content that people find online when they look for any information related to your brand.
With the easy availability of the internet and mobile phones in every pocket, people can research a product, service, or brand anytime and anywhere. Hence, ORM is extremely important for businesses. It is believed that if you are not actively practicing ORM, the chances are higher than some subset of your targeted audience will drop.
See, the repair of online reputation can be done in several forms. But, if you do not know how to do it, you will have two ways – higher a reputed online reputation management company or simply focus on the following three critical elements:
- Search Engine Results: You must look at the content that appears on the very first page of Google and other search engines around your branded searches
- Online Reviews: You must have some genuine reviews of your products/services and company on the leading review websites
- Online Customer Services: Your customer service should be prompt and reliable. It is because the way you respond to your customers say a lot of things about your company
The elaborated details of these crucial strategies have been given here so look closely to protect and improve your digital reputation:
Search Engine Results
Take out some moments and run a Google search of your products and brand (always use a private or incognito window to avoid skewing the search results). If you are not actively running any ORM program, the chances are quite higher that you will only get 1 or 2 results on the first page (on which you will not feel proud for sure).
It means you should start thinking about producing and promoting new yet more relevant content around the keywords that show negative content on the search results’ first page. This simple strategy will help you elevate your newest content on the very first page and push the negative ones to the 2nd or 3rd page where most visitors will never go.
We have often seen situations where the same negative content about a product or company appears on the first page for different branded search terms. For instance, a 4-year old YouTube video disparaging your products/brand could come across an extensive range of branded search terms related to your business. Well! This is good news for you as you do not have to produce a ‘long’ stream of content on a variety of topics. Rather than this, just follow the below tips:
- Create some pieces of online content around the targeted topic i.e. the terms more likely to appear for that negative video/content
- Optimize your content pages for all those search terms
- Displace the negative content all around the multiple branded search terms after a while to get more slots on the first page
Online Review Website
How strongly and deeply negative reviews can affect your brand? Well! As per the Pew Research Centre, around 82% of people say that they read online reviews at least once before buying anything. Other studies have also shown that if one-star increases in the Yelp rating, the revenue of business improves by up to 5-9%.
In several cases, the actual customer satisfaction of a company is far better than their ‘star ratings’ given on the review sites like Google Reviews, Yelp, etc. It is because many customers rate and review a product or company when they are not happy. They typically don’t go there to write a review or give star ratings when they are satisfied.
The easiest and quickest way to improve your reviews and ratings is to get more of them. This will increase the possibilities that your star-ratings reflect your ‘actual’ customer satisfaction. For this, you can send an email to your loyal customers and request them to write a review of your products/services used by them. It will boost the total number of reviews and improve your ratings rapidly. Depending on the nature of your business, you can ask your customers quickly to write reviews.
And the most important thing to note down does not consider any ORM strategy to generate fake or unreal customer reviews just to improve your ratings. It is not only unethical but runs you afoul of the regulations, resulting in a hefty fine.
Online Customer Services
The way you publicly respond to positive and negative feedback also influences your digital reputation. To put it simply, businesses/brands that respond to social media comments and online reviews quickly, politely, and professionally will fare better than those that do not.
Your company must have clear protocols, responsibilities, and roles to respond to reviews and feedback. Some companies even outsource the services of a company to handle the task. In simplest terms, you must define clear rules and roles for how to handle negative feedback and respond to bad reviews.
Closing Remarks
So, these are just a few but most crucial ways to manage and protect your online presence and reputation. You can even hire a professional online reputation management company to effectively manage everything on your behalf.
Hi I am Jeniifer a Professional Blogger and Writer. From Past 1.5 Years, I am sharing information related to technology, lifestyle, fashion, travel, health etc. You can follow me on Google+ and Twitter
