Reputation Management – Why Bother?

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Written By Robert Dunford
I am a Marketing Consulting in the Great Toronto Area with over 25 years experience in building and implementing marketing plans for small business.

We live in the digital era, where having an online presence is extremely important. “If it isn’t online, it’s like it doesn’t exist” is the motto many customers operate and live by. Therefore, it’s not surprising that a business’ online reputation is one of the deciding factors during the customer consideration process.

Anyone can write a scathing review online, and the growing popularity of review sites ensures that potential customers will see them. To avoid losing business due to this, you need to incorporate reputation monitoring into your digital strategy. If you’re wondering why you should bother with reputation management, we can have a look at some of its capabilities and benefits:

Research Your Reputation

Wondering what your online reputation is like? Go to Google and type in a few queries related to your business. Incorporate keywords such as “reviews,” “comparison,” “advantages,” “pros and cons,” etc. What comes up in the SERPs is what your potential customers will see.

Is there a negative review at the top of the search results? You might think that there’s no way to affect it, but there is. Through reputation monitoring, you’ll discover opportunities to control what type of feedback the customers will see. Other than reaching out to the reviewer to see if there’s a way to convince them to change their input, there are different ways to manage your online reputation.

Manage Your Online Reputation

Reputation monitoring and management have become an essential part of any business’ digital strategy because of its importance to a clean online presence. A negative review has a lot of power, but a positive one even more so. Fortunately, you can use the positive information you have about your brand and take steps to rank it higher than the negative feedback.

It all revolves around keywords. Using a specific keyword that leads to high-ranking negative feedback results, you can optimize your existing content (or create new content) for the same keyword that will overtake it in the SERPs. You may not be able to change or delete the negative information, but you can push it down the search results into online obscurity.

Find high-ranking search results related to your business, and use their high traffic to your benefit. A guest post, press release, social media announcement or your best website content can be great tools to allow you to spread positive information about your business to keep your online reputation impeccable.

SEO controls every aspect of your online presence, including your business’ reputation with the customers. However, its downside is that it can take months before you see any results, especially if you’re trying to do everything yourself. With a distinguished digital marketing service professional on your side, your reputation management process will be much faster, and you’ll get reliable results.

Don’t hesitate to contact me if you wish to see your efforts come to fruition more quickly. I’ll be happy to discuss your marketing strategy with you and help in any way I can.

Rob Dunford is a Marketing Consultant in the Great Toronto Area with over 20 years of experience in implementing marketing plans for small businesses.

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