Why Is Online Reputation Management Important?

Online reputation management is essential for businesses. Your presents online say a great deal about your company and or business. Maintaining a solid and strong online reputation is necessary for any successful business.

Online reputation management (ORM) is a combination of a few things: your marketing, public relations, legal, and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies that promote and protect your online reputation for you or your business.

It is extremely vital to any business to monitor your presence online but not how many views and how much interaction and leads you are receiving on the internet. Online reputation management is a large umbrella of a multitude of things that you will need to monitor, such as:

• Social Media
• Blogs
• Blogging Communities
• Websites
• User-generated Content
• Sites that have individual reviews

At Paton Marketing, we believe that having a solid online reputation is very important to a successful business. We are here to provide you with insight and advice on how you can improve your online reputation management.

Continue reading to learn more and gain more insights about how you can build a positive online reputation.

How to Get Started With Online Reputation Management?

If you have no clue where to get started, don’t worry; we are here to help. One of the first things that you can do is research your company. This is as simple as typing your business into Google and going through to see what people online have to say about it.

Is there a positive or negative reaction? If there’s a negative reaction, what can you do to change that? If there is a positive reaction, think of some ways to continue to have a positive impact on people through your business.

Create a Google my business account GMB for short. This is the next step to get started with online reputation management. This is where you create a business account on Google. When doing this, you want to be sure that everything remains consistent with spelling and the photos you choose to upload.

Next, you want to create Google Alerts for your business. This way, you are notified immediately if something positive or negative is said about your business.

Finally, you want to remove or push down any negative reviews about your business. Now, not all of the time, you can get these comments removed, but it is possible to push them down so they are not the first thing that appears when someone is doing a Google search.

What is the Impact of Positive VS Negative Reviews Online?

Often, before people purchase a product or service, they look to the reviews for guidance and assistance as to whether they should purchase the product or not. When it comes to purchasing products online, 9/10 customers will read the reviews before making a decision. If your business has many negative reviews, chances are the customer will not be purchasing from you.

Here are a few more of the consequences of negative reviews and why it is so essential to work on your reputation management as a business.

Negative reviews lower your Google search results. When your Google ranking is lowered, your business is less likely to be seen by consumers. People often click the very first tab that appears during their search results. Sometimes, this first tab may be an advertisement that the company paid to be there, but oftentimes4, the following result was put there organically by Google. Check out this example of Winter coats.

In this example, you see the first three search results were paid, while the fourth from Amazon appeared organically. This strong example of reputation management is also tied back to those little gold stars that Eddie Bauer received.

Eddie Bauer received a Google ranking of 4.5 stars. Generally, customers will not purchase a product under five stars.

Negative reviews also lower your reputability. If customers feel like they can not trust your business or dislike you, this will trigger other customers to feel the same without even having any interaction with your company.

Enough with the negative impacts, let’s dive into the positive impacts of online reviews on businesses.

First is a higher ranking. As mentioned before, a higher ranking on Google’s search results is everything regarding reputation management! Google is one of the most widely used search engine results pages. The higher you rank organically with great reviews, the better your business will do.

Next is improved reputability. Positive reviews from real customers enhance new customers’ feelings of trust and respect for your company. This will also make new customers feel more at ease purchasing a product from you if they never have before.

How Can You Manage and Improve Your Online Reputation?

There are a variety of ways that you can start today to improve and manage your online reputation. A great way is keeping up with relevant content that your subscribers or consumers want to read or gain more insight about.

Blogs are a great way to drive traffic and improve your online reputation. Adding a few blogs a week about a particular trending topic that is going on is a great way to engage your readers and have them share it with their followers. This as well promotes free marketing when they share it with their friends.

You also want to be sure to have updated contact information on your website at all times. If you consumers can not reach you with questions or concerns they have this is another red flag that they may have. Making an easy and consistent point of contact among your customers is key to improving your Google search engine rankings.

Promoting online reviews among your satisfied and pleased customers is a great tool to use at all times. Many people are far more likely to leave a negative review than a positive review. Sending follow-up emails encouraging a positive review is a great way to keep up a positive online reputation.

You may ask your customers questions like this:

“How did you like your service at (enter business).”

“Please share the experience that you had today at (enter business).”

Ensuring that each customer had a positive experience is key to earning those positive reviews.

Are you Looking to Improve Your Online Reputation?

If you are looking to improve your online reputation today, contact us at Paton Marketing for advice on how you can be the best business online and in person. It is important to work with a trusted marketing firm such as Paton Marketing to improve your online reputation today.