It has become inevitable for businesses around the globe to maintain an online presence, as more users are relying on the Internet to get reviews on various companies prior to making an engagement with the company.
Undoubtedly, Google is the highest generator of web traffic, and the source of reviews or ratings found on the same are powerful enough to promote or harm the reputation of your brand. The negative reviews could be submitted by someone who is annoyed by your services or even by your competitors to degrade your image.
Are you the victim of negative reviews?: Its time to act fast and try to do some online reputation management task, as the negative reviews appearing on Google and other major search engines are harmful enough to devastate your online existence. Although not impossible, it sometimes gets frustrating to remove negative reviews from the top pages of Google.
Let us explore some ways in which you could proactively fight the negative content which in turn will save your website from a face-hiding act.
Promote Positive Reviews: Encourage your customers who could swear by your products and services to write some positive words for you so that the ratio of both positive and negative reviews becomes well-balanced. Apparently, this is the tactic which will work for you the most as a majority of your satisfied customers will spare a little bit of time to endorse you if requested which helps in suppressing the negative reviews.
Employ an investigator: You could use the services of someone who could investigate on the reviews associated with your brand. They should be well versed in finding out the threats and tracing cyber-attacks, if any, towards your image. The analysts should be regularly checking out the reviews site and trained to respond to the reviews positively.
Responding applies to all: When it is said that you need to respond to the reviews, it means that each and every review or comment should get a prompt and honest reply. Regardless of the review being positive or negative, the visitor should feel that their suggestions or reviews are considered with the highest regard.
Be Honest and Humble: Customers will only spend time to write negative reviews if they feel that they have been very badly betrayed by you. They would never go to a consumer discussion forum or any other reviews platform if they were willing to continue to utilize your services.Be very modest and give upright responses to their comments, suggestions or negative reviews. This step is for the unsatisfied customers and also for prospective customers who would come to know how caring you are towards them.
Removal of Fake Reviews: If some false claims are made about your brand which is clearly aimed to disrupt the image of your company, you could always contact the review sites and request them to remove such reviews from the website, provided that you have enough evidence to prove that the reviews on the website are completely false and intended to degrade you. Such drastic measures are often resorted to by your competitors.
Aggressive SEO & Social Media: An effective SEO and a Social Media campaign collectively will work to create more brand awareness, which eventually will drop the negative reviews way down in the search engine’s ranking. It is better to make the customer view the best part of you rather than letting them see what could not be controlled by you.
Develop a system for Customer Care: As the old proverb goes, “Prevention is Better than Cure”, the same applies for your online reputation too. It is always better to keep a check on negative reviews or comments rather than responding to them after a heavy damage. Conduct your own customer feedback surveys, complaints follow-up and make a user-friendly system for the customers to enter their feedback so that they would directly interact with you rather than to going to other review sites.
Online Reputation has always been a serious issue and should be considered as a high priority for any business. More number of people are resorting to the information found on the web to make a decision, and majority of them change their minds after seeing a negative review. I hope the tips mentioned in this article will help you in reducing the number of negative reviews and also to bring them way down in SERP’s.
