Do you want to develop an online reputation for your brand and bring better customer experience to your audience? Thank you for making a wise decision.
Reputation can be a decisive element that can bring fortune to your company over a longer period of time. But, developing and managing it is difficult. The concern here is if you don’t take care your visitors or customers then you may attract negative responses around your business, like a negative comment, or a bad review.
With reputation management techniques, you can prevent these situations from ever happening in the first place and maintain a perfect status.
Let’s discuss more on reputation management SEO strategies to implement it in a live business model.
- What is SEO Reputation Management?
- Why is SEO Reputation Management Important for Your Business?
- Bad SEO Reputation Management can Lead a Business to its Downfall
- 4 Master Strategies to Perfectly Manage Your Business Reputation Online
- FAQ
What is SEO for Reputation Management?
Brand reputation management is a progressive system that decides whether a customer will have a positive or negative outlook over your business on the internet. Clearly, reputation management is a continuous process that overlooks the perception of prospects, users, and influencers for your business.
Sometimes, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies are implemented on managing a brand’s reputation to influence and control the online aspects surrounding a business, individual, or brand.
These strategies can be publishing helpful content, promoting high-quality contents, helping prospects with queries, backlink building, handling social media channels, and replying to reviews, queries, and support tickets.
Combining SEO strategies with reputation management, you can improve your business’s popularity by 10 times!
Why is SEO Reputation Management Important for Your Business?
You can continue your business forever without reputation, but can you make profit from the business?
Most importantly, will that business be valid for a long term investment? Can it even attract customers continuously? Is it even legitimately classified as a business? No, you can never fully utilize a business’s potential without building a reputation around it.
We mean will you buy a packet of Lays (Owned by PepsiCo), a renowned potato chips brand that has delivered quality products since 1932 or simply buy a packet of chips from an unknown brand that you have never heard of? Definitely Lays!
Just like you wear a suit and matching clothes to appear intelligent, smart, and professional for modern society, a business will also need to wrap itself around a reputation cloak to appear trustworthy in front of its prospects and customers.
Managing a business’s reputation can be greatly beneficial,
- Improves your business’s online visibility by pushing down negative search results from the SERP.
- Build a long term customer trust and increase credibility by maintaining precise and accurate information online.
- Your business’s official website will gain increased traffic, ultimately leading to potential conversions.
- By maintaining reputation, you are protecting your brand image from ever getting ruined by any negative and misleading contents.
- Receive better perception from your prospects and customers and ensure that your business is reflecting the best aspects.
- Reputation management can strengthen customer loyalty and ensure a positive online presence for your business.
- If any sudden problems arise, reputation will aid you in crisis management to swiftly solve the problem faster.
- Be competitively ahead of your competitors by maintaining a reputative presence online.
You may ask, are there any drawbacks about reputation management? In our perspective, the only negative thing about reputation management is it costs a bit much. But rather than that we don’t see any other negative impact on businesses.
Bad SEO Reputation Management can Lead a Business to its Downfall
It can take years to build a good reputation, but a small mistake can break it in seconds. Maybe an angry customer, delayed product, misplaced delivery, or simply bad customer service can ruin your reputation, like a fire spreading through a cloth!
There are thousands of cases of bad reputation management available online, we mentioned a few of the below.
Case 1: Mambo Taliano Restaurant
- Location – 145 Mulberry St, New York, NY 10013, United States
- Status – Closed
The locals say that this restaurant is one of the worst restaurants in NY, and only has 1.5 star ratings in their Google business profile. From bad food to waiting for hours, you will get all the misery you want from Mambo Taliano, yep misery, because they never cared about giving good service in the first place.
Undoubtedly, the restaurant authority never cared about their service or reputation, hence needed to permanently close their business. You can witness a painful review below,
Case 2: Kleargear
Did you ever get a fine for writing a negative review from an online product retailer brand? Well, John Palmer and his wife, Jen did. In 2013, KlearGear charged this Utah couple $3,500 for simply writing a bad review for their services. To justify their bad deed, KlearGear simply said that their accusation was based on their terms and services! The audacity.
Image Credit – Nextiva
Later, Kleargear faced tremendous backlash online for their terms and customer policies. Someone should teach them how not to respond to negative online reviews.
Case 3: Boners BBQ
Image Credit – Nextiva
Having a bad customer review is bad, but replying to that review with another bad response is just a disaster.
In 2012, Boners BBQ, a local barbecue joint, gave a response to a customer for not tipping their waitress, even after getting a 40% discount for that specific offer.
This shouldn’t happen, and soon Boners BBQ faced public criticism for their unprofessional behavior.
4 Master Strategies to Perfectly Manage Your Business Reputation Online
Now that you know how important reputation management is and its absence can cause disasters, It’s time to learn how to manage reputation management and use SEO for your business.
1. Start Managing Your Reviews
95% of customers are influenced and read online reviews before purchasing a product or service, which is 9 out of 10 people are likely to read an online opinion before judging the product quality (luishazou).
You will need positive reviews, and trust us you will seek these thousands of reviews because reviews will work as the pillar of trust and crown jewel of your business online.
So, plan a managing strategy for reviews, here is a short rundown of what you can do,
- List out the platforms you will likely to receive reviews and responses from, like Facebook page, X profile, YouTube channel, Linkedin profile Google business account, or your own website. You can also list out service and tool review sharing platforms, like G2, TrustPilot, Capterra, PeerSpot, and Demandbase.
- Use a review management tool that will give you alerts, help you separate good and bad reviews, and automate different analyzing processes.
- You can hire a social media manager for your business, who will handle the review part and initial posting.
These are the initial steps online review management, but you will need to handle the way you can respond. And, keep in mind that people will love to interact with real people, instead of automatic massages, so don’t take help from automatic or AI bots.
Address the Customer in a Friendly Way
The first step will be addressing the customer by their first name before starting a reply, you can say “hey Amanda” or “Hi there Marry”. This creates a positive vibe, which can bring satisfaction and trust to the customer end.
Respond to Reviews as Fast as Possible
Try to respond to your reviews as fast as possible. According to shoutout about us, you should respond to a customer review within 24 hours, more than that can make the user believe that you have bad customer service.
Maintain Professionalism in Your Replies
Most likely, you will talk with experts with many skills who will expect and admire someone professional while getting a reply, hence you will need to show them how professional you are in that specific area. It also represents that your reputation management is top notch, developing a trust to the user end.
Personalize Your Replies based on User’s Emotions
Your users might show different emotions like frustration, anger, dissatisfaction, or they might even show positive ones like gratitude, joy, and satisfaction. Whatever emotion your customer has, try to modify your replies based on them.
Here is an example,
In this example, you will see how the replier handles a 2 star-started “frustrated” review with a simple, yet effective reply.
From this response, the user will not only be benefited within the game, but also he can communicate with the customer service team and describe the problem more specifically.
2. Open a Trustworthy Customer Service
We all experienced it right! That 1 customer with his 1 specific problem who will visit your customer service more than 1 time, but still the problem may remain unsolved. It’s not good for your business’s reputation.
If review is the body of your brand’s reputation, then customer service is the heart and soul of it. You can’t ever expect to build a good or excellent reputation, without building a proper customer service team first.
To develop a proper customer service, you will need to define some clear objectives and values that your employees can follow and reach customer experiences also, their work will need to align with your customer values.
After the initial plan, you do realize that you will need to hire proper skill based people, willing to learn and possess excellent communication skills, professionalism, problem solving mindset, excellent learning, and have experience on handling customers.
Here is a simple trick you can apply while hiring, ask them “What does customer service mean to you?”. When they answer, carefully notice these questions,
- While answering, does the candidate stutter or nervous?
- How well is he answering the question?
- Does the candidate give a lengthy answer?
- How good is his English pronunciation and speaking tone?
- Can he explain things in a simple manner?
We trust you on hiring proper people for the job, but you will also need to consider some points on training and educating them for proper employees,
- Develop a positive and supportive work culture for the people working in your customer service department. So they can experience positivity and deliver it at the same time.
- Build proper strategies and procedures for handling specific types of questions and problems.
- Encourage learning from past mistakes, so your employees can remain relevant and keep their skills up to date.
- You can open a reward program once a while to keep their enthusiasm for work alive.
- Analyze customer feedback and tell your team to refine their response process to improve service quality.
3. Create High-Quality Contents (SEO Based)
So, we have covered the body and soul (We meant review and customer service) of reputation management, now we will address the beauty of reputation management. Contents like explanation videos, blogs, audios, and e-books that solve customer problems will uplift your customer service to the greatness.
Here are some quick tips on making quality contents specifically related for SEO for reputation management,
- First, understand your targeted audience so you can create a content strategy that solves their problems.
- You can research on diverse topics and accumulate updated information to add them in your contents.
- While writing problem solving contents, try to keep your subjects relevant and write contents on similar topics.
- While researching on KWs, select trending topics and finish contents on those specific subjects first.
- You can make your blog headlines, introductions, structures, and meta descriptions engaging and follow SEO best practices while maintaining a consistent brand style.
- While creating content, try to maintain a precise tone and style that reflect your brand’s identity.
- After you have many many contents, review your contents on a regular basis, ensure clarity and in-depth details.
4. Work on PAA (People also Asked)
You can simply take them as KWs or FAQs, they look like this,
You may ask why they are important and relevant to building reputation for you, or what’s the point of working on PAAs? Well, initially they don’t have a huge impact on your website’s SEO or reputation, but consider them as simple elements that together can bring a huge impact on your website’s reputation.
Imagine most of your contents have 5 or 10 FAQs on them, answering questions asked by real life prospects. Your blogs may also get prioritized on the PAA section, making your brand reputable and also enhancing your website SEO.
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FAQ
Can you do SEO for free?
Yes, you can implement SEO strategies for free. There are many SEO strategies like link building, SEO optimized blog writing, optimizing website structure to enhance SEO, building organic traffic through content publishing, handling social media can be performed without any costs.
However, after you become a bigger brand, you may need to hire SEO experts and content creators to perform these strategies for your company.
What is a backlink in SEO?
A backlink can be described as a hyperlink that leads a user from one website to another website. You can insert reputed websites backlink to your contents to use their authority for your own website, backlinking. Enough backlinks can increase your authority and hold it for a long time.
What is reputation monitoring in SEO?
Reputation monitoring in SEO is a management process that involves looking out for your brand about any type of mentions, reviews, blogs, news, outlets on different social medias, review sites, or other websites. Responding to those mentions is also a part of reputation monitoring.
Is reputation management part of PR?
Yeap, to have a PR (Public Relation) profile, you will need to have good reputation management for your company. Through PR you can maintain strategic communication, media relations, and crisis management. Effectively maintaining reputation can lead you to build trust and credibility for your users, ultimately improving your PR.
Is reputation management a marketing strategy?
When a brand, organization, or individual takes necessary steps to introduce their product to the general audience and profits by converting the audience to legitimate customers. Same as reputation management, marketing strategy also involves public relations and other crucial elements like SEO. So, you can say that reputation management is part of a marketing strategy but not the entire thing.
Manage Your Business Reputation and Improve it for Long Term Success
Reputation management is not a one time process, but a long time activity that will require your full attention.
Giant companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta all hire people to handle their reputation, and deliver quality service and products. These companies have a great reputation and they are maintaining it for decades!
You can do that too! If you are managing a small brand and fewer employees then consider handling the reputation management by yourself.
By doing this, the general prospects will build trust towards your service and they will think that the business founder himself is so helpful and trustworthy. This will provide a long term good reputation for your company.
We trust you, you can do this!