With the rise of reviews in local search, it's become impossible for businesses to hide from their reputation. The key to rising to the top isn't to just manage your reputation—you need to develop and improve it.
Ignore online reviews at your own peril, as they greatly influence prospects who are looking to do business with your brand.
Many local brands are leaving money on the table by choosing to ignore online reviews, which are great vehicles for brand building and reputation management, and serve as excellent customer retention tools.
Whatever services you provide, whether it be pizzas or hosting services, you should learn how to communicate with your audience, build up a positive image and react to negative reviews and comments of unsatisfied customers (or probably evil competitors!). This post focuses on some recent online reputation management tactics that can be useful for any website.
Complete courses to master SEO basics
Learn Keyword Research like the pros
Win rankings and traffic from your competition
Under the new Google Plus Local system, reviews are sorted by default to display the "Most Helpful" as opposed to most recent, as they had been with Google Places. According to a recent field observation, this means that any review left by a verified Google Plus user is much more likely to be the first, and possibly only, review that your potential customer will read when searching on Google Local.
I'll start with a simple question: have you ever thought that linking to your Twitter profile can be very difficult? Probably your answer is "not really!", and in this case maybe you could find what I'm going to show you useful.
I love using Google's Suggested Search feature for spell check and to find answers to nifty questions like these: ...
Last week I visited Milan, Italy thanks to the generosity of the US State Department and Marco Montemagno, organizer of Social Media Week. I was, first off, impressed that the State Dept. had a formal program to encourage digital entrepreneurship and the promotion of Internet use as part of their m...
There are some new rules to SEO and PR. In his effective work “The New Rules of Marketing & PR”, David Meerman Scott highlighted how marketing and PR have evolved to be more effective when used together...
How can your company provide the best customer service possible while protecting your brand? Easy, by monitoring the Internet and not let any customer complaints go unanswered. When a customer is not happy with a company, they generally tell their friends about it. With the Internet, it has become a lot easier to spread the word to thousands of other people. Take Twitte...
Last week I spent Wednesday at ad:tech in London where I spoke about advanced analytics and online reputation management. I thought the online reputation stuff would make a good Monday morning post. The audience was mainly brand and advertising people so I didn't assume too much knowledge of SEO or ORM, but instead ran through why you would want to monitor for your brand, how to determine if something is going to be a problem and some tips and tricks we've picked up along the way. I wanted to start with something topical so I used some examples from London Fashion Week (including brands and models) to demonstrate the impact of news events (interestingly, I found no significant correlation between spikes in search volume for the brands or models during fashion week).
Dear @UnitedAirlines,As you are well aware, @DaveCarroll has released a well-produced music video about lousy customer service that he experienced. The video is thought-out, witty, satarical, and (most of all) it strikes a chord w...
Recently SMX London 2009 happened. I was too busy feeling ill to attend but I did my best to follow what happened. One of the talks that sounded really good was by Mikkel deMib about hiding your site from competitors. He suggests emailing them, then using the email headers to get their IP address. I'm going to cover the code you can use to "deal with" such spies.
Let me start off my stating that while this post is obviously geared towards online reputation management, it is not focused on handling negativity in the search engines. While this issue is of incredible importance, my main focus here is total online reputation management and not doing SEO to remove the negative content in SERP’s.