What is Online Reputation Management?

By Miriam Ellis, Local Search Marketer at Moz, 1st Nov 2023.

Online Reputation Management (ORM) is the action taken to manage online sentiment so that it reflects more favorably on your business or personal brand. Reputation management may be engaged to restore a damaged reputation, or to identify strategies to encourage the amplification of positive sentiment.

Two common definitions that presently exist side-by-side for online reputation management:

1. The practice of actively improving brand reputation by encouraging, analyzing, and acting on consumer sentiment. This context largely hinges on the role online reviews and testimonials have come to play in brand reputation, necessitating ongoing management of this type of content. It can also include the publication and marketing of other types of content that support the image, expertise, authority, trustworthiness, and reputation of the brand.

2. The practice of attempting to restore a damaged reputation by creating and promoting brand-positive content so that it becomes more visible to the public than brand-negative content. In this instance, a brand may need to hire ORM professionals to assist with reputation management objectives.

Nearly all businesses will take a variety of actions geared toward developing a positive reputation, both online and offline. Local business models that serve customers face-to-face have unique opportunities to do so via the format of local business reviews. However, only those brands that have experienced a significant loss of good reputation are likely to need to invest substantially in ORM services or tactics designed to demote negative brand sentiment.

Reputation management for individuals, solely online businesses, or brands operating outside of the local business sphere is outside of the scope of this article. You can learn more on this topic by reading Samantha Heald’s Online Reputation Management Playbook.

Read on to discover strategies for creating a sustainable, proactive online review management program for your local business, including:

• How does reputation management normally work for local businesses?

• What to do if your local business experiences a review spam attack.

• What to do if your business experiences more widespread reputation challenges.

• How to protect your brand's good reputation.

So how does reputation management normally work for local businesses?

Offline, in-person, real life experiences tend to have the largest influence on the reputation of local businesses that serve customers face-to-face. Nothing can replace your customers enjoying great in-person service when it comes to building an excellent reputation! However, the experience customers have with you online also contributes a great deal to your reputation. A website that isn’t easy to use, missing or inconsistent information about your hours of operation on your local business listings like your Google Business Profile or Nextdoor profile, or your brand’s social media accounts publishing content that doesn’t appeal to your audience can all detract from customers’ good opinion of your company. All of these factors can then contribute to what has become a key seat of local business reputation: reviews.

Reviews on platforms like Google Business Profile, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Nextdoor, Facebook and other sites are highly visible on the web. The individual ratings customers leave are then typically averaged by the platform to give your business an overall star rating out of 5. Both 4 and 5-star ratings are considered a great or good reputation by the majority of consumers. Yet, hope can be found in the fact that about ⅓ of consumers may still give you a try if your overall reputation is only 3 stars.

Both the overall star rating and the individual ratings and sentiments of customers can have a surprisingly powerful impact on your local business’s visibility and success. Moz’s large-scale survey and report, The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior, found that:

• 96% of people read reviews

• For gauging trust, 86% of consumers say reviews are either “the most” important or “somewhat” important factor

• Only 11% of consumers trust brand messaging over public sentiment

• 52% of respondents say their negative reviews stem from false or incorrect online information on assets like local business listings

• 65% of respondents write negative reviews because of rude or poor customer service

• Sharing experiences and gratitude drive the overwhelming majority of reviews

• 90%+ consumers are influenced to a moderate or extreme degree by owner responses to reviews

These are robust figures that boldly illustrate why management of such powerful sentiment is a local business norm. Reviews must be:

1. Acquired, either without outreach or via active outreach to customers

2. Analyzed, so that the sentiment of each customer is understood and negative sentiment is acted upon whenever possible by the business

3. Responded to, so that every customer who takes the time to write a review receives a response.

These three steps outline the core of most online reputation management work local businesses will need to engage in on an ongoing basis and usually do not require external, professional assistance unless the brand receives such a high volume of reviews that it requires help from third-party marketers to manage response and analysis.

However, there are two instances that fall outside the scope of normal, everyday review management and we’ll cover those next.

Most local businesses receive some percentage of legitimate negative reviews. If a pizza is cold, a service person is late, or a patron has a really disagreeable experience, it’s quite normal to receive some justified negative reviews and you can learn more about responding to them in this article. A legitimate negative review is totally different from a “spam” review that violates the guidelines of the platform on which it was written. For example, most review platforms don’t want non-customers to leave reviews. An example of this might be a case in which someone who has never patronized your business leaves you a 1-star review because they are having personal problems with one of your employees outside of work. That would qualify as spam.

Unfortunately, it’s also a norm of review management that most local businesses will receive a certain percentage of ratings and reviews from suspicious accounts. A suspicious account might:

• Have zero, or only one or two other reviews left by the account

• Have multiple reviews of the same industry - like 20 reviews of used car lots

• Have reviews of a single industry all over the world - like 20 reviews of dentists spanning the US, Poland, Thailand, Japan, India, and Canada; it’s unlikely that most reviewers actually visited a dentist in all these countries

• Leave reviews mentioning incidents none of your staff believe occurred

• Come from a profile you know left a spam review for you in the past that was subsequently removed.

If you’re certain a review violates Google’s guidelines, don’t respond to it. You have these options for requesting removal. It’s important to understand that Google does not guarantee that they will remove spam reviews you report, but at least you have options for reporting them in hopes of removal. And, you can always be working to acquire new, positive reviews from satisfied customers so that the negative impact of a few low-star reviews on your overall star rating is greatly lessened.

However, there are extreme cases in which a local business becomes the subject of a spam review attack in which:

• Either multiple low-star reviews and ratings suddenly appear over a very short period of time on a listing for no apparent reason

• Or, multiple, suspicious, less-than-five-star reviews or ratings appear over the course of a few weeks or months with the goal of more gradually eroding the high star rating of the business.

These reviews might stem either from:

• An identifiable competitor

• A third-party source that has been paid by an unknown party to spam your business

• A large group of non-customers who are spamming the business due to a trending event associated with your business, such as the appearance of the brand in a news story.

Follow this process in the event of a large-scale review spam attack:

1. Don’t respond to the reviews. Instead, create a Google Doc filled out with your Google Business Profile URL, the URLs of the spam reviews, the URLs of the profiles that have spammed you and a screenshot of the spam reviews. Also, if your own detective work has turned up evidence of why your business is being attacked (like a social media post threatening to retaliate against your business) document that.

2. Next, report each review, one by one, via the process outlined by Google:

3. You will typically receive a response in about 3-or-less days; if your request for removal is denied, use the appeals process described in the linked-to help document, above. You will be given a case number. Add it to your Google doc.

4. It can take up to a couple of weeks to hear back on appeals. If your appeal is denied, bring your case number to the Google Business Profile Help community. Create a post with a title like “Large-scale review spam attack” in hopes that a Product Expert (PE) with a silver-or-higher status will help you escalate your case to Google for resolution. Be sure to include your document in the post so that the PE has all the necessary information.

5. If even the help of the PE doesn’t result in removal of a spam attack, your next option is to go public with the story by:

   • Blogging about it

   • Getting other bloggers to cover it

   • Going to your local press to see if they will cover it

   • Getting picked up by national press if the case is egregious enough.

   Sometimes, negative publicity of this kind may cause Google to act when no other form of request for action yields results. Our Local Business Content Marketing Guide covers these strategies in more detail.

6. Finally, if none of the above steps result in removal of large-scale review spam, your business may need to consult with a lawyer for further guidance.
   

In general, this process can be handled in-house, but if you are finding the experience too difficult or too time-consuming, you may want to hire an experienced local SEO consultant or agency to help you with the work of recovering from a review spam attack.

There are other cases, however, in which severe damage to a brand may require more action and more professional assistance.

One possible cause of being the target of a spam review attack, is if your business appeared in a trending news story which has angered some portion of the public. In some cases this can result in non-customers violating Google’s guidelines by negatively reviewing a business that they haven’t actually patronized. Such activity could also stem from a negative story about your brand appearing on social media. Such occurrences are, unfortunately, very common and being reported on a regular basis.

You now have the above step-by-step process for reporting a review spam attack, but what if the damage to your brand has gone beyond reviews? What if organic search engine rankings and social media channels are now filled with negative publicity about your brand whenever anyone looks it up or when they try to understand whether your business matches their values?

Whether your brand is large or small, local or virtual, if an incident involving the business fills its online footprint with negative or controversial press, it is a threat to the the viability of the company and requires a response. Each case will be unique, but if the scenario is severe, it is likely that the brand will need to hire both legal and ORM consultants to find a way forward.

Attorneys will be there to assist you with any legal requirements, and ORM professionals may be able to help you with:

• Understanding the causes that contributed to the damage of your brand’s reputation

• Implementing new practices and policies to prevent similar incidents in future

• Rebuilding an improved reputation that is reflected in your online presence

The reality is that large brands repeatedly recover from reputational challenges. The public either forgives or forgets over time in many cases. Social media channels are continuously filled with trending boycotts of global companies, but most brands outlive these incidents. Smaller businesses can sometimes experience the same timeline, though it can be more difficult to re-establish a good local reputation in a small community after a serious controversy. In most of these cases, advice from experts will be your best resource for helping you understand your options and opportunities for recovery.

Totally blameless businesses experience negative review attacks and reputational damage from bad actors, and this cannot be predicted or prevented, but there are many steps you can take to ensure that you are proactively building a strong, positive reputation that can withstand many storms. Here are some suggestions to get you started with your own reputation development plan.

1) Be transparent

Anger at brands frequently stems from a feeling of surprise and disappointment. The public may have loved a chocolate bar for years and be shocked to see its maker accused of practicing slavery to produce candy. Business models that depend on secrecy will experience reputational damage when hidden practices are revealed, and the best protection against this is to engage in operations that can withstand public scrutiny. Be transparent in how you operate and live up to your company’s mission.

2) Be human

Researches suggest that one reason consumers get angry at brands is because they lack sympathy for non-corporeal entities.

“Another reason the general public is more likely to direct anger, but not sympathy, toward corporations is (because) they lack biological bodies.That makes it difficult to imagine how exactly corporations could suffer…” Kurt Gray, Author

Local businesses have the greatest opportunity to make one-on-one human connections with customers, but larger brands may struggle with this scenario. AI, chat bots, automated phone systems and other mechanisms that distance brands from customers can contribute negatively to the sense that there aren’t real people working for businesses, and therefore, it’s fair play to criticize them without any boundaries. Strive to build the most authentic relationships you can with customers so that customers associate real and good people with your business.

3) Be responsive

Actively engage with the public on both social media and in reviews. Customers who are ignored may decide your brand is indifferent and take to the web to be heard in the form of social media complaint posts and negative reviews. Use software like Moz Local to be alerted when new reviews come in so that you can respond quickly, and practice good social listening so that you can join in conversations about your brand whenever appropriate.

4) Be detail-oriented

A bad online experience with your brand = bad customer service. Be sure your online presence is functional, accessible, and accurate so that customers aren’t frustrated, disappointed, or misdirected. And pay closest attention to the complaints you receive, both in-person and online in reviews and form submission. Analyze negative sentiment from customers to help you implement structural fixes at your business that will ensure a better rate of customer satisfaction. No one enjoys hearing complaints, but they are some of the most valuable business intelligence any brand possesses. Get the small details right of pleasing your customers and you’ll have gone far towards building a reputation for excellence.

Check your listings on Google, Bing, and other local search engines.

Keep learning

• Responding to Customer Reviews
• Implementing a Review Acquisition Strategy
• Building a Local Business Website
• Content Planning for Local SEO
• Local SEO Certification - In this six-part Certification, you’ll receive nearly six hours of on-demand, instructor-led content, covering the fundamentals, local competitor research, location data management, reputation management, and measuring and tracking success.
• In Real Life: Local SEO Tactics - In this course, local business owners learn how to get the most out of their SEO strategy using skills and knowledge they already have.
• The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide - A comprehensive beginner's guide to SEO marketing for small businesses.
• The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior | SEO Industry Report - Our local business review survey outlines key takeaways regarding the impact of reviews on consumer behavior and local business success. Learn more about the fundamentally important inclusion of online local business reviews in any local SEO strategy.