Our Online Reputation Management Process Will Grow Your Business
Online reputation management is a topic that most small business owners would rather not deal with. It’s like doing your taxes. We understand that, and we have a process we can implement with you that will make collecting feedback and reviews much easier for you. It will also help your content marketing and SEO processes and help your business win new customers online. Call our office at 281-343-3284 and make an appointment at our Sugar Land office or at your business.
Summary of the IX Brand SEO Version of Online Reputation Management
My name is Paul Sherland from IX Brand SEO Services in Sugar Land, Texas. And today I’m going to be talking about reputation management, which is one of the core areas of IX Brand SEO’s services to our clients.
Most Local Business Owners Are Reluctant to Collect Reviews
I know this is a hard topic. Most businesses aren’t real keen about asking their customers to leave reviews. I understand that, it’s a natural reaction. Hopefully, we can make it easier for you. But I understand that it’s difficult.
So, what is reputation management? Reputation management from our standpoint is implementing a process for collecting feedback and reviews from your customers. And that process is intended to make it easy to leave feedback and reviews.
Online Reputation Management Is a Process for Collecting Customer Feedback and Reviews
You know, the unhappy customers, the angry customers are going to find a way to rant online, so what you need to do as a small business owner is make it easy for the great majority of your customers, the happy ones, to leave feedback and reviews both for you and for prospective customers for your business. If you just leave it to chance, then what’s going to happen is the few angry ones will be the ones that leave reviews, and your business is not represented fairly online, and you won’t get the benefit of all you do for satisfying your customers, for making your customers happy. So, that is what the process of online reputation management is.
Now, I have long experience in online reputation management because I created a website in 2007 to help small businesses leave reviews for their customers, or collect reviews from their customers, rather. It did not work because small businesses were not eager to pay me to ask their customers for reviews. So, it was drummed into me back in 2007 that this is something that most small business owners don’t want to do.
But in the last 10 years, I think most small businesses, or many of them, have kind of become resigned to the fact that they have to do something because their competitors are doing it. Their competitors are collecting reviews. And if you don’t have a body of feedback and reviews on websites like Google and Yelp and other sites like that, then you’re kind of vulnerable to anybody who leaves a bad review.
If you have a whole bunch of great reviews on those sites, and someones leaves a bad review, it just makes the other ones look more credible. So, you want to be the business that’s collecting feedback and reviews all the time, and you want to have reputation management as one of your business processes.
So, that’s how we do online reputation management. We work with you to create a business process for you that makes it easy for your customers to leave feedback and reviews. We work with two companies that provide the software — GatherUp.com and BrightLocal.com. We train you in how this operates.
We can work it any way you want. We can do most of the work, or you can do most of the work to cut your costs, but it’s a process that we implement with you. The cost is dependent on how much you do.
The Cost of Our Online Reputation Management Depends on How Much You Want to Do
The way our system is set up, you can do most of the work and you can cut the cost. If you want us to do the work, it’ll cost you a little bit more, but the net result is the same. You’ll get more feedback, and you’ll get more online reviews from your customers with this process.
So, how does it work? Basically, the way it works is we work with you to send a feedback request to all your customers using GatherUp.com or BrightLocal.com. And your customers can answer a single question “How likely are they to recommend your business to their friends and colleagues”? This is called the Net Promoter Question. You’ve seen it before, I’m sure, on a lot of surveys. And there’s a comment block, and your customers will leave comments, which are gold for you in your business process improvement strategy.
The customers who are most positive about your business are asked to provide reviews with another email that provides links to your review sites. So, the system encourages your customers to leave reviews on these review sites if those customers are fans of yours. If they’re not fans of your, the system asks them for more feedback so that you can learn more about what went wrong. And if it’s possible to fix it, you can do that.
Please note that even the customers who are not fans of your business will be asked to provide a review to Google, Facebook or the other review sites. Google requires that these review collection systems ask for reviews from detractors as well as promoters.
Don’t Ignore Online Reputation Management
If you ignore reputation management, we’ve talked about that a little bit already, but if you ignore reputation management, bad things can happen. Your unhappy customers can leave reviews for you, which are the only reviews that people will see because, by and large, your happy customers don’t take the time to leave reviews. You have to make it easy for them to do that. So, you have just a few reviews by some unhappy customers, and that will definitely hurt your business. So, you don’t want to ignore reputation management.
If you run a great business, if you work at customer satisfaction, you try to make your customers happy, you want to have an online reputation management process working for you. As I said before this, online reputation management process works to enhance your content strategy and your SEO, because you’re continually adding keyword-rich content to your website as you collect feedback from your customers. You’re getting great reviews, which drives traffic to your website. And you’re building trust with potential clients. So, it can just work wonders or you.
And it’s part of the process, it’s part of the overall strategy of using SEO content marketing and reputation management to help your business grow online. So, if this is interesting to you, if you have a local business, you sell services or products, and customer satisfaction is important to you, then we might be able to help you. We work especially with businesses in the Houston area. We’re based in Sugar Land, but we work with businesses in the Houston area.
But if you’re outside that area and you want to talk to us, we’d be happy to talk to you too. So, you can either send me an email through the contact form on my website, or you can call me at 281-343-3284.
What Doesn’t Work in Online Reputation Management!
Some online reputation management consultants will promise that they can push the bad reviews off the first page of results for your major keywords. For example, if you have a car dealership, these folks would say that they can push negative reviews posted on Google, Yahoo, Health Grades, Dealerrater, Yelp, etc., off the first page of results for keywords like “used cars Sugar Land TX.” We can tell you that they can’t do it!
These folks will promise to buy lots of domain names with your business name and keywords and then create new websites that will occupy the space on the first page of results. But there’s no way these tactics will work to push Google reviews off of Google’s first page of results or Yahoo off of Yahoo’s first page of results. Other websites like Citysearch and Yelp, will not be pushed off the first page of results with this strategy. These tactics also depend on the idea that your domain name has a big impact on your search ranking — that may have been true 10 years ago, but it’s not true now. Google says it uses more than 200 factors to rank your website and Bing uses more than 1000 factors in its ranking algorithms. Don’t waste your money on this fool’s errand!
Proven Online Reputation Management Strategies!
IX Brand SEO Services offers its IX Brand SEO Reviewability system which is proven to work for small businesses without breaking small business budgets. If you learn of a bad review or you want to collect positive reviews, please call us at 281-343-3284 or use our contact form, and let’s do something about it. We’d be happy to arrange a meeting at our Sugar Land office or meet at your business if that’s more convenient for you.