The Ultimate Mid-Year (2023) Reputation Management Checklist

Your online reputation is not static but dynamic and constantly evolving. Every mention of you in a comment, post, or online review can make or break your online reputation. 

Customer feedback is the cornerstone on which your online reputation lies. According to a report from PowerReviews: 

75% of online users make their purchase decisions only after reading customer reviews. 

86% of the users buy products that have higher ratings. 

You need to salvage the reputation of your business and ensure that you get only positive reviews, mend the negative ones, and weed out fake ones. Read this guide on online reputation compiled by our experts. 

The impact of online reputation on your brand and business 

Let’s start with the effects of online reputation on your brand or business. 

Builds your brand 

Every new brand needs to create and build an image to attract prospective customers. This brand image should always be positive, favorable, and trustworthy in the minds of the consumers. An effective brand reputation management strategy can help build its image. 

Instills trust in your brand 

If you want people to know your brand or your business, it should be talked about and visible. While this visibility can be created by advertising, you need to build trust to sustain it. However, trust can’t be created in a day. You have to slowly nurture it by creating a positive reputation for your brand. One of the best ways to do this is through online reputation management strategies. 

Provides insights into customer’s mindset 

If you want to attract new potential customers or retain your existing cones, you need to enhance the customer experience. To do this, you need an insight into the consumer’s mind. 

The information collected from online review sites helps you to easily gauge and predict customer behavior. Using these inputs, you can frame or alter your marketing strategy to make your business grow. 

Improves sales 

Most customers look up a brand online before buying its project. So, if your brand has a good reputation online, it translates immediately into a purchase decision, improving your sales. 

Ways in which Reputation management services can help your brand 

Creating a positive reputation 

This is the first task of any online reputation management company. A favorable opinion can be formed in the minds of the customers by 

• Inviting and posting reviews from satisfied customers. 
• Sharing their good customer experience videos .

• Asking consumers to rate the business and sharing actual ratings, etc. 

By collecting such ratings and reviews, a collective opinion of goodwill is formed, becoming the reputation of the brand. 

Maintaining the current reputation 

Maintaining a favorable brand image is a part of online reputation management. Every mention of your brand on internet sites and social media pages adds to its image and affects its business reputation. To keep this brand image always vibrant and positive, its online reputation must remain unspoiled and unsullied. 

Bad reputation management 

While positive reviews can boost your brand image, negative reviews can break it. To protect your brand image from reputation damage, it needs constant monitoring of the online content about your brand. Brand building involves not just the display of 5-star ratings but also an appropriate response to negative content as well. 

Using review management software, you can classify the reviews as good, bad, and neutral reviews. While getting positive reviews will boost your stature, the main task is to prevent bad reviews from ruining your reputation. 

Reputation management services do this by monitoring the reviews closely and responding instantly to bad ones. They issue an apology message including your intention of corrective action. 

Increasing visibility for your brand 

Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc are the best places to build your business reputation. Using online reputation management software, you can increase the visibility of your brand. 

Follow these steps to build your business reputation using this checklist. 

The Ultimate Reputation Management Checklist 

Use this checklist to manage your organization’s reputation. 

Conduct a Brand audit 

This is the first step of your online reputation management strategy. Inspect your online presence on websites, third-party business profiles, blogs, and social media, and take inventory. Analyze the Google search results to see if there are any negative or unrelated results. Try to gauge what people say and feel about your brand. 

Track Brand Mentions 

Every time anyone mentions your brand name on the web, you must hear about it. Only then can you react or respond quickly to each review, especially the negative ones. 

Set up alerts that notify you when there is a brand mentioned on blogs, videos, discussion forums, etc. This helps you to respond at once to negative mentions. This is crucial as the sooner you respond to negative comments, the better. 

Manage Negative Reviews 

Negative reviews cannot be ignored. They give you the best chance to interact with customers directly, understand their complaints, and address them immediately. By giving them a remedial solution, you have a chance to win unhappy customers and convert them to happy ones. 

For all positive reviews, thanking users is a must. In general, convey your appreciation and gratitude for all reviews. 

Customers gain trust, not with coupons or discounts. They become convinced only when they know you are sincere about caring for them. This happens when you respond instantly to bad reviews. 

Turning a bad review into a good one is the strength of online reputation management. 

Focus on SEO 

Online reputation relies a lot on SEO to build the brand. 

We rank different pages of a website for a set of search queries. For managing your reputation online, we rank websites for certain brand-based queries. 

While doing this, you can push negative content down or replace them with positive ones. 

Your SEO strategy for ORM should include 

• Creating unique and useful content on your website that attracts reviews. 

• Create backlinks to pages that you want to rank on Google Search.
• Sustain your presence through posts on social media like FB, Twitter, etc. 
• Use Public relations to gain more positive mentions. 
• Claim profiles on third-party sites like Yelp, GBP, etc. to control reviews. 
• Optimize social media content. 

Your content on social media sites is the one that attracts attention and the most reviews. Use SEO-optimized keywords and hashtags to help this content feature on search engine results. Remove negative comments, fake reviews, and irrelevant posts that might create controversies. Post regularly but sensibly on social media sites. 

Leverage PR 

You can build the reputation of your business online through Public Relations exercises like 

• Press releases 
• Branded and charitable events. 

• Guest posting 
• Interviews on company.
• Podcasts 
• Live-streaming of company and product videos or interviews.

 

Adopt the following measures to collect online reviews 

• Identify your fans using an automated Review Funnel and encourage them to post reviews. 
• Send emails to all customers asking for reviews. 
• Offer incentives to customers to post reviews. 
• Respond to all reviews appreciatively. 

• Issue Customer Review badges to the best reviews and displays them on your sites and posts. 

Propagate Positive Content about your business or brand 

To do this, you can 

• Display customer testimonials on your site.

• Flaunt all your customer ratings, even the 4-star ones. Research shows that a 4-star rating could easily translate into a purchase decision. 
• Share all the favorable comments on social media sites. 
• Collaborate with influencers to boost your brand. 
• Interact with users on customer engagement platforms. 
• Filter customer-generated content on your brand and use it appropriately. 

• Share videos of happy customers and their experiences on your website. 
• Showcase your brand endorsements. 

Things you need to protect your Online Reputation from 

With technological advancement, spammers and hackers arm themselves with clever ways to damage your online reputation by using the following ways. 

Digital Attacks 

In this competitive world, many try to malign your brand or cause your business disrepute. 

Competitors, Consumers, Journalists, bloggers, influencers, etc., try to attack your online stature by spreading false information, bad comments, fraudulent news, etc., on social media. 

Using the right ORM software or Review Engagement Platform will help you curb negativity about you on the internet. 

Negative SEO 

Search engines normally have a threshold for over-optimization of content. They restrict the usage of too many keywords to avoid manipulation of their search results and ranking. 

Smart SEO hackers use this threshold to their advantage to push your website ranking down. They manipulate the website optimization to lower its search ranking. This kind of SEO will damage your reputation online. 

Spam Bots 

Programmers and Digital Marketers use technology for market manipulation. They damage the standing of your website using spam bots. 

Spam bots are automated AI-driven programs or software that inject bad comments or malicious content in bulk on websites. 

Astroturfing 

Astroturfing involves populating third-party websites with false comments, artificial content, etc, using anonymous accounts. This kind of malicious activity can harm your online standing for good. 

All the above techniques are black-hat methods adopted by skillful hackers to harm your reputation. Only an ORM specialist with technical expertise can help you thwart such malevolent activities. 

To combat such malicious attacks, what you need is not a mere review management campaign but a full-scale online reputation management program. 

Only an experienced ORM agency will have such an approach to reputation management. This comprehensive approach will include website, SEO, and social media management to vitalize your online reputation. 

Your reputation online is your greatest asset. Value, protect, and upgrade it by engaging the right ORM specialist. Such an ORM expert will help you build, bolster, and bulwark your online reputation. 

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