It is common knowledge that internet has made it very easy for an unethical competitor or a disgruntled consumer or a vengeful past employee to leave a false and damaging comment about your business.
Surveys reveal that nearly 80% of prospective buyers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations while making a purchase decision. This goes to show that not having any reviews online or having bad reviews could be driving your customers to the competition and your customer-base would eventually shrink.
Customers who don’t understand the value you are providing them, former employees and competitors can all dent your online reputation pretty quickly. Internet has come to stay and it is up to you to protect your online reputation and encourage more positive reviews from your clients.
Here are 3 easy steps to protect your online reputation:
- Please make sure that you have more positive reviews than negative and controlling what appears for your brand name when searched. When the positive reviews are overwhelming, the negative reviews will automatically fade away. Take precise measures to ensure that all adverse criticisms are relegated to the third or lower pages of search results. Visitors are generally impatient and what will not search beyond the first two pages of search results. This is the best proven way to control what people see when they search for your company name or brand.
- One of the simplest and most commonly used methods of controlling the first page results for your business is creating profiles on authority sites and leveraging that authority to rank quickly. This in known as Barnacle SEO and is used in many different ways, including reputation management. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram and Youtube are some good sites to create a profile on. As most searchers don’t go beyond the first two pages, creating 10 profiles on all major social media sites should be ample to safeguard your reputation.
- Once you create a profile on these major social media sites, fill out all of the details exhaustively. On the all these social sites, interacting, gaining followers and sharing updates are all crucial. Simply creating a profile on these sites is often enough to rank but when it isn’t; some link building will become necessary. To build links, simply include a link to one of more of these profiles when you are guest posting on other sites. In addition, you can also use lower quality links to rank social profiles and authority sites which is one of the advantages of using Barnacle SEO.
Having reviews for your business is very important and just like word of mouth, the more people speaking positively about your business, the more clients you will get.