By Jim Clanin
Small businesses know just how important it is to maintain a business well and have a good online presence. If you get negative reviews, your business suffers much more than a larger business. While you cannot put so much focus on negative reviews that you lose sleep, it is a good idea to use search engine reputation management to build your brand and gain more positive reviews.
Search engine reputation management is the process of saturating a negative review, so it is lower in the rankings than the content you publish or other positive reviews you’ve solicited.
Make Sure Your Online Reputation is Monitored Well
Monitoring what people say about your business will give you the ability to respond to reviews quickly. If you keep up with the public conversations about your business, you can stay on top of anything negative that pops up. Responding to positive reviews can also help your reputation.
Search Engine Result Pages
Your search engine result pages or SERPs are the top ten pages of a search about your business. If the top results are all positive information about your business, negative reviews on the second page will have less of an impact on your potential customers. You can do this by creating content that is engaging and useful. If someone searches for your business, the top ten results could be blogs, profiles from your social media accounts, directory listings, and guest blog posts. When your potential customer sees the results of your SERPs, you will probably not have to worry about the negative reviews as much.
Use Social Media
Using social media will help potential customers find you and interact with you online. You can build relationships with current and potential clients to create a bond that can boost your revenue and keep your online presence fresh. Once you are registered on all of the social media sites, get creative, and draw people in to interact with you. You may do a live stream at your business or hold a contest to get people excited about the products you have to offer. Social media also gives you a way to reach out to unsatisfied customers. Many times a customer will try to get through to you on a social media platform before they make a call or send an email. Stay current on your social media sites, so your customers know you are engaged.
More Reviews
Obtaining more positive reviews can help you ward off negative reviews. If you use customer review software, it is easy to see your reviews increase from your efforts. If you focus on increasing the positive reviews for your company, negative feedback won’t matter as much.
