How does Reputation Management work?
When a company is spoken poorly of on the internet, with the reviewer having no personal accountability, an online reputation management firm can help overcome an angry customer or your competition to make sure that their bad reviews of your business does not end up costing you customers. While it is a good thing that the internet can allow you to reach a huge collection of customers without too much of a problem, there are review sites online that can serve as a shining example of what your company does best, or they can be used as a platform from which to bring your company’s good reputation down. A good online reputation management firm can protect a company’s reputation online by pushing down bad reviews, responding on behalf of owners, and getting customers to put up good reviews of their own.
Pushing down bad information on business review sites is the most important part of online reputation management. The fewer people who see the bad reviews, the better it is for the business, especially if the reviews are from your competitors or from a customer who is disgruntled. The way that reputation management companies do this is by shooting a lot of links to the bad reviews that are anchored by “negative” texts. This causes bad reviews to drop in the search engine ranking positions, allowing good reviews to take its place. The bad reviews will technically still stay on the site, but you won’t have to worry about very many people seeing them and forming their opinion about your business on a negative review.
Some online review sites allow owners to respond to potential customer complaints, online reputation management companies can do this for the owners, which will save the owner time, and gives the reputation company a direct voice to use their experience in rebuking negative reviews. Since very few reviewers are ever going to return to respond back to the owner once they have their say, it will effectively look like you have successfully defended your business without a whole lot of trouble. This is particularly useful if there is a specific problem about your business that has been fixed or is in the process of getting fixed, since nobody else is going to be commenting on it after a while.
Some online reputation management companies will go the extra mile for their clients and help to get customers to put up their own reviews about the business, usually only contacting satisfied or return clients. This ensures that the reviews are going to be positive, and you should be able to get quite a few positive reviews to help balance out any negative reviews. If there is some sort of overall score that the site gives to businesses based on the percentages of good reviews and bad reviews, you will get a big positive boost with the influx of new positive reviews. These positive reviews can also be spread around the internet and given their own backlinks so they are the ones that show up in the search engines, further negating the impact of a bad review.
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