Table Of Content
Just a decade ago, businesses used to rely on word of mouth from local people and traditional media to invite new customers. A poor reputation just meant that you had only a handful of grumpy customers.
Fast Forward to today, since the concept of digital marketing has silently crawled into the world, a poor reputation can lead to a significant amount of drop in revenue, sales, customer acquisition, customer retention, etc.
So, the majority of businesses depend on digital media and online advertisements to craft a successful marketing strategy.
But wait!!! Why do you need to maintain a stellar online presence to market your business?
Well, online reputation is of prime importance now in terms of promoting a brand or individual. Because you can’t deny the fact that the exposure of your business has extended beyond local customers. Now a minute slip-up can bring in a major downfall to your business.
If you can’t integrate faith in other people about your brand, then the chances of becoming successful become “zero”.
So, reputation management plays the role of a savior here by organizing the online content in a way that speaks in favor of your brand.
We will walk you through the different types of reputation management to its significance to help you come out with a result-oriented marketing campaign. But let’s start with the concept of online reputation and its benefits first.
What is Online Reputation Management?
The internet is filled with multiple definitions on online reputation management but they all share one common view that it’s about taking back control of online content and making other people perceive the positive side only.
So, online reputation management means representing your brand in a trustworthy and authoritative way to draw the attention of a maximum number of customers.
“Reputation is everything when it comes to building a digital brand” – Stacey Kehoe
The concept of reputation management has grown radically due to the rise of social media and internet users. In today’s world, a whopping 4.54 billion people actively use the internet which is nearly 59% of the global population.
Besides, the number of social media users has shot up to 2.65 billion as per Statista and it is projected to increase to 3.1 billion by the year 2021.
Reputation management helps to maintain the exposure of your brand to such a large number of customers to drive the maximum amount of revenue.
Importance of Reputation Management: Why Should You Focus on Managing Your Online Reputation?
Well, the reason behind this huge uproar towards managing online reputation certainly has some benefits. Or a lot of benefits to be precise.
However, if you are still unaware of the importance of reputation management, don’t worry we have got you covered here. Let’s take a look,
-
Increased Trust
The research states that an average customer reads at least 10 reviews prior to trusting a business. This becomes quite simple if you put yourself in place of your customers.
For Example, observe yourself precisely at the time of ordering something online. You research the brand online, you read their reviews, you check their ratings, and then if you get the positive vibe, you buy the product. Isn’t it?
It happens with everyone. A majority of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. So, it’s important to manage your online presence in a way that helps you to be reckoned with.
-
Increased Profitability
A better online presence attracts more customers as they perceive you as a trustworthy service provider or individual.
Adding to this, since SEO is an integral part of the types of online reputation management, it helps you to get the optimal visibility on the search result page. So, whenever your customers search for businesses such as yours, they land on your site.
The concept of online reputation is simple and plain; the higher the visibility of positive reviews you have, the more people you attract. As people get attracted to your business, it drives up the conversion rate and increases profitability.
-
Decreased Conflict
In 2017, Harvey Weinstein was allegedly accused of sexual abuse after the New York Times revealed this in one of their posts. People started speaking against Weinstein and within a short period, he popped up as one of the most hated public figures in the US.
The reason why we are telling you this story is that this indicates the effect of reputation mismanagement.
A well-versed online reputation management agency can easily predict this situation of crisis after having years of experience. So, they keep a crisis management plan beforehand to utilize in times of need. It helps to beat these conflicts and more importantly, it prevents these conflicts from popping up in the first place.
Reputation Management Types: Multiple Ways to Manage a Stellar Online Presence
The types of reputation management are classified into 4 different stages; review management, identity monitoring, and internet removal, search engine suppression. These four are the pillars of a strong online reputation.
Let’s dig deeper into each of these classified categories to understand the ways to make reputation management work in favor of you.
-
Review Management
“If you are in a competitive industry, great online reviews are not just nice to have, they are a requirement!” – Tom Kenemore
This is truly said as even research states that 72% of customers feel reluctant to take action unless they read reviews. Hence, review management is important, especially for eCommerce stores. You know why?
The majority of customers filter the search result page to check the products having only 4 stars above rating and a good amount of reviews.
But, the question that comes here is why do you need to manage reviews, right?
Well, there are some slip-up moments when you fail to match the customer’s expectation hence they become angry. And a grumpy customer won’t give you compliments for ruining their experiences, right?
So, an online reputation builder ensures that customers read positive reviews first before jumping into the negative ones. As humans tend to make a judgment within a matter of 2 to 3 seconds. So, organizing the positive reviews on the top makes your job of converting a visitor into a customer easy-peasy.
Let’s take a look at the top-rated sites on which review management plays a decisive role.
-
Google
Google gets the maximum amount of searches on the internet. The latest stats revealed that Google handles 40,000+ queries in a second. Hence if you are having poor reviews on this platform, then the chances of drawing customer’s attention become too vague.
What is Google review?
Google reviews are the detailed first-hand information that appears on the right side of the search result page next to the business listings. It appears both in Google maps and search results when you type in a brand name.
Google reviews provide valuable information to the customers and having a ton of positive reviews on this page indicates a positive online presence.
Are you wondering how you will get that ton of positive reviews?
Well, according to Google, you need to implement the following practices if you want your business page to be flooded with reviews, let’s have a look,
- Introduce a quick and easy process for your customers to leave reviews on any devices.
- Reply to both positive and negative reviews. It shows that you value your customer’s feedback.
- Google wants businesses to get verified first to respond to reviews. So, get your business verified by Google and tackle the information more precisely.
-
Yelp
For local business queries, yelp is one of the major platforms of internet reviews and ratings. It works like a directory website, where a list of businesses on restaurants, dentists, beauty salons, doctors. Bars are listed.
Let’s take a look at some of the recent facts of yelp,
So, if your business falls under any of these categories, then check the site if your business is listed there or not. Since local businesses get the maximum organic traffic, review management plays a decisive role in making or breaking your business.
Let’s take a look at some of the best practices to maintain a positive presence on Yelp,
- Claim your business listings on Yelp.
- Request your customers to remove the negative reviews. Learn how to persuade your customers to remove negative responses.
- Report against defamatory reviews.
-
Facebook
2.45 billion people use Facebook and it stands right after internet giant Google. So, if you are overlooking to generate reviews from your customer on this site, then you are driving away from a significant number of potential customers.
Your customers look at the Facebook ratings and reviews before making a purchasing decision. A whopping 15% of social media users of the US shop on Facebook. So, review management is extremely crucial for this platform.
Let’s have a look at some of the best practices of review management on Facebook,
- Claim your business page before someone else falsely claims it. Learn how to claim the Facebook business page.
- Add accurate information on your Facebook page.
- Convince your potential customers to submit a review.
- Improve your services to generate the maximum amount of positive reviews.
-
Identity Monitoring
Some businesses believe that ignoring the web world might not cause any harm to their reputation. Whilst the truth is, you are there on the internet already even if you are not actively managing it. So, one of the reputation management types is to monitor internet activities actively.
Well, you may need help with some reputation management tool for this as the amount of activity occurring in a second is unbelievable. You can check the image below,
But, how would you keep track of these activities?
Since internet activities, monitoring is a type of reputation management, reputation management services have come out with some top-notch strategies to keep track of these activities.
Let’s have a look at how they keep a track on such a large number of activities,
-
Leveraging the Power of Reputation management tool
Reputation management tools have the power to keep a track of real-time information such as anyone types a review, anyone rates your services, anyone posts a blog post on you, any news channel posts a defamatory article, etc.
Some of the reputation management tools like Google alerts, reviewspush, brandmention provide you real-time updates every time something pops up on the internet.
-
Monitor Social Accounts
Monitoring social media accounts is of prime importance in order to maintain a positive presence online. It’s understandable that you can’t post every day but posting consistently is crucial.
Some of the best practices of social media monitoring are to research your targeted audience to get the information on which time the majority of your customers are online.
Once you get the information, make sure you consistently post on that particular time to engage with your customers.
-
Set The Privacy Setting Precisely
Websites like Radaris, MyLife gather the data from the internet and make a profile out of it. So, the profile may contain information like your family’s data, your bank account, your property details, etc.
All this information becomes publicly accessible once you have a profile on the above-mentioned websites. The worst part?
If you continue ignoring this type of reputation management that deals with identity monitoring, then you may not be able to know whether you have a profile on these sites or not.
So, monitor your identity online and set the privacy setting firmly enough to prevent others from stealing your acute personal information.
-
Internet Removal
Coming out with an apt reputation management strategy is a challenge for most people. That’s the reason why more and more reputation management agencies are popping up. However, you can lessen the impact of reputation scandal and reputation mismanagement while implementing the removal strategy efficiently.
Hence, one of the important types of reputation management is internet removal. This step is considered to be of prime importance as you can’t have a stellar reputation unless you wipe off the negativity about you on the internet.
People often can’t discern the differentiation between internet removal and search engine suppression. Hence, they perceive removal and suppression methods as one.
But, the removal method is only implemented only when the content can be taken down. Let’s take a look at how the removal strategy works,
There are concrete steps to clean up the negativity around the internet, take a look,
-
Removing Results from Google
Google removal guideline states that it may remove acute personal information that creates the risks of financial fraud, identity theft, etc. So, if any of the information puts you on risk, then you can request Google to remove the search results. For more info on crafting removal requests, you can read our blog on Google image removal.
-
Removing Content by Website Owner
The easiest way to remove negative content from the internet is to request the website owner. You may think that you are shooting in the dark but it’s worth a shot. While requesting, try to use a polite tone of voice to convince the person.
-
Add a NoIndex Tag
If the embarrassing content is posted on a site on which you have the control to operate, then you can add a no-index tag to the HTML to indicate Google to ignore the page. You can add this HTML tag to multiple pages where the negativity is posted.
But, if the content is posted on another site, then you can request the website owner to add the tag and deindex the content from Google. The no-index tag looks like,
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
It’s a way to tell Google to ignore the page. This eventually removes the page automatically without even taking away the page as search engines don’t give priority to such pages.
However, taking down can’t always be performed. So the suppression method is considered one of the crucial steps under the types of reputation management. It’s the process to bury the negative content down the search result pages.
-
Search Engine Suppression
The suppression method is applied when the content can’t be taken down. Let’s take a look at how the suppression method helps in managing one’s reputation,
-
Promoting Positive Content
Only a systematic approach towards the suppression can help you bury down the negative results deep down the search result pages. But, oftentimes if the negative content is posted by a site having high authority to search engines, then the suppression method becomes challenging.
Yet a combination of top-notch strategies can beat the negativity down. This includes better content, building authority, better promotion, etc. So, promoting positive content is part of the suppression strategy.
-
Creating High-Quality Content
You can’t beat down the negative results if your content doesn’t have the power to convince people. The content should have the decisive power in convincing search engines that why it deserves to be on the first page.
The search engine doesn’t show the negative results upon the top due to any personal envy rather it thinks the content to be of relevance. So, you have to create content in a positive way and indicate to search engines that this one is of the highest relevancy.
Once the positive content starts showing up on the top, the negative ones will automatically push down far back on the page.
Conclusion
The type of reputation management has been framed to make this reputation management process more efficient. None wants to notice negative results on the top of search engine result pages.
So, if you are finding such damaging content on the top of search result pages, suppress them immediately. You can also contact a specialized and guaranteed reputation management service to delete the pages entirely.
Has the guide helped you to build a positive online presence? Let us know your thoughts.
