Online reviews can have profound impacts on your company’s reputation. For better or worse, there are many ways they can affect other people’s opinion of you, your business, and how you do business. Below are five ways online reviews can affect the reputation of your business.
- Increases or Decreases Profits
The thing about online reviews is that they can be good or bad. Your goal, as a business owner, is to make sure that you use effective online reputation management for businesses to create winning strategies that work to increase rather than decrease your profits. Developing a solid strategy to manage your online reputation can make a world of difference for your profits and help you avoid unnecessary losses based on negative reviews.
- Builds Your Brand
When you have a good reputation built on positive reviews online, it helps to build your brand and make it stronger among those researching your business. That is why it’s so important to actively seek to remove bad reviews whenever possible and to make sure they are at the bottom of the search engine pile whenever you cannot remove them completely. Always remember, though, that your response, or lack thereof, is equally telling to people reading the reviews.
- Determines Search Engine Rankings
Believe it or not, search engines use reviews about your business to help determine your search engine ranking. They feel that businesses that rank high in their results are essentially recommended by them. Since they do not wish to recommend businesses with bad reputations, they will rank businesses with multiple negative reviews lower in their results.
- Drives Customer Decisions
Customers often use online reviews to make decisions about whether or not to trust your business or buy your products. If the overwhelming indication is that people have not had positive experiences with your business, then potential customers are likely to take their business elsewhere. A good public relations strategy can be an essential tool for encouraging customers to choose your business instead of others you’re competing with.
- Reveals Areas for Improvement
One of the most important, and often overlooked, ways online reviews can affect your business is by showing you areas where your business could improve. Mixed within most of these complaints is the opportunity to provide a solution. Most people only complain when they are dissatisfied either with the product or service your business provided (this included customer service). When you take the reviews to heart and implement changes in the way your business operates, everyone wins. Plus, it gives you an opportunity to let the original reviewer and others reading the review, know that you are working to improve for the future.
Net Reputation understands a thing or two about managing online reputations and how reviews affect the reputation of your business. Contact us today to learn more about how your online reputation relates to real dollars for your business and what we can do to help you get your reputation back on track.
