How to Keep Your Online Reputation Positive

Every business has a reputation, including yours. The question isn’t so much what your reputation is, but rather how well you manage it. The online world presents an opportunity and a challenge. If you ignore it, you’re just setting your business up to fail. So you need to develop a plan for your online reputation management.

Thanks to Google My Business, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp and all those other online review sites, anyone anywhere can leave a review or recommendation for your business. Good reviews are of course golden. But a bad review can fester like an unwashed cut, bleeding your business of potential customers. Unless you can afford to pay a company to repair your reputation, it’s on you to practice sound online reputation management techniques.

How to Foster Positive Reviews

If your business is successful and growing, you have clients who love what you do. For web developers, web designers, online marketing agencies and website content writers, each project you complete is an opportunity to ask for a positive review. Make it easy for your clients by sending them the link (or links) to online review sites, where they can leave their glowing comments.

Whenever you deliver a finished project, you feel great at the accomplishment, and your clients are flush with excitement. It’s the perfect time to ask them to review your work in an online forum. You can even copy and paste the testimonial to your website and social media accounts. In fact, that’s a step you must take to spread the word.

How to Deal with Negative Reviews

At some point, however, someone may leave a negative review on social media or on one of the review sites. You have to deal with it. If you don’t, it becomes more than a nuisance; it becomes a liability, encouraging potential customers to choose your competition. Fortunately, there are strategies for dealing with negative reviews, such as:

• Reply to the negative reviewer, seeking to make it right. Whether the reviewer is right or wrong, if you publicly try to make amends, your business earns points when others see your response. But you must respond within 24 hours, which means monitoring your reviews. Online reputation management requires constant surveillance of your social media channels.
• Encourage your existing clients to flood the review site with positive reviews. You can never make a negative review disappear, but you can bury it in a sea of authentic positive reviews.
• If the negative reviewer is holding a grudge or trying to harm your business without a valid complaint, address the issue head-on. Ask for details. If none are forthcoming, explain to others that the negative experience couldn’t have happened (and why). Reputation-harming inaccuracies damage your business even if the claims are false.

You can use all of these strategies, as appropriate. Don’t just stop at one. The more active you are performing online reputation management, the more likely you’ll have a stellar reputation that draws customers to your website and your business.

Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business to succeed. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters, and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.