By James John
Overlooking online reputation management is a grave mistake that corporate giants and small enterprises should not fall to. A reputable and amiable online interaction with clients has the potential of catapulting your business to unprecedented online customer-rating standards. The overall outcome is the competitive business image with a likelihood for soaring customer in-flows and more positive customer reviews across search engines. On the contrary, a negative online presence can lead to scaling down your operations, or in the worst event, the eventual closure owing to the irreparable dented business image. Critical as it may sound; here are some of the mistakes that you should avoid.
As a business owner or manager, try your level best not to use auto-generated answers to your customer questions. Sometimes referred to as canned responses, they carry the potential of denying you the chance of capturing the much-needed customer feelings and attitude towards your products and services. Failure to get a personal touch with your customer experiences may negatively affect your online presence.
Though online reputation management software like Podium, Birdeye, and Trustpilot may text-enable your website to webchat and manage the clients’ feedback from a single interface, you should avoid at all times giving a blind eye or aggressive responses to malicious negative feedback from customers. Your responses should be professionally calm, devoid of any personal emotions or feelings. Ranting to a customer’s response or an angry response may negatively compound then the problem. Emotive responses to prompting feedback will likely soil the image of your business, as web searches are likely to expose the bitter exchanges. As search traffic grows on your website, more prospective clients are likely to take note of the heated exchange emerging from a dissatisfied customer.
While using online reputation management software, steer away from using black-hat SEO strategies. Euphemistically referred to as ethical hackers, black-hat hackers can completely damage the reputation of your business. The internet age has led to the adoption of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics that have yielded priceless benefits to online marketers owing to wider and cheaper customer-reach strategies. Driven by the urge to draw large traffic on their web searches, businesses use unfortunate black-hat strategies like the insertion of visible texts, cloaking, redirect pages, link farming and stealing or literally pasting content from competing websites. This has the potential of toning down the relevance and credibility of your web content. At worst, if a search engine like Google takes notice of your black-hat tricks it can penalize you by either suppressing your web presence or pulling it out of the entire relative ranking system.
Avoid the temptation to plant in fake reviews by ghost reviewers or customers. With global market research emphatic on the role of positive customer reviews in driving up sales of targeted products, it is automatic that businesses will put extra effort into getting the best reviews. Nonetheless, the danger of using ghost reviewers is outright. Search engines like Yelp or Google have developed mechanisms and tailor-made algorithms to detect fake reviews. A business captured with fake reviews runs the risk of losing customer trust while credibility erodes.
Another mistake that can dent the image of your business is failing to monitor your online presence reputation. The world, currently, is a global village courtesy of the internet. A small comment whether positive or otherwise can go viral within a short duration of time. As is the case, you should always remain alert of any mentioning of your business on mainstream media, social medial, blog outlets, and review feedbacks. This will put you in control and possibly address any issue before escalating into a crisis.
