The basics of managing your reputation online (and why it’s important)!

People make decisions about your business every day, based on what other people are saying across the web.

Online reviews have a huge impact on both businesses and consumers. The impact can be positive or negative. For example, for every star a business gets in their rating, their sales revenue will increase from approximately 5-9%. At the same time, 22% of consumers will not purchase a product after reading just one negative review about it.

In fact, last year, Google announced that it too makes decisions about which businesses to show based on what other people are saying.

Google said the 3 most important factors to local rank are:

1. Relevance,
2. Distance, and
3. Prominence.

In this case, Prominence is defined as a business’s reputation, which includes review count and rating.

So what Google is saying is that it’s literally ranking your business in the local pack based on how many reviews you have, and how good those reviews are. If you don’t manage your reviews, you’re risking whether your business will even show up in search.

Next is Reviews. Now, remember before when I said Google openly announced last year that ratings and reviews — or what it calls Prominence — influence how your businesses ranks in search?

Well, reviews are a hugely important set of public facts about your business, and our review solution allows you to unlock their power.  Reviews are the new key to starring in search.

Now, let’s face it — bad reviews happen from time to time. There are really two ways to handle this, and our review solution helps you with both.

The first is what we call the “Hug your Haters” approach. You may be helping your customers with this today: when they get a low review, respond, and provide thorough customer support to make the person happy. That’s table stakes in customer service these days.

But, there’s another thing your customers can do, regardless of whether they respond — and we call that approach “Fire Up Your Fans”. It’s supported by data that suggests that 70% of consumers will leave a review if they’re asked.

Most of these customers generally wouldn’t go out of their way to leave a review — simply because the business provided the service they expected. On the contrary, unhappy customers are more than happy to leave a review if they feel dissatisfied.

So, by asking for authentic reviews from consumers on your own website, you can actively improve your public presence and your opportunity to acquire new customers.

Our Review Generation solution lets you Fire Up Your Fans to request authentic reviews that you can add to your own website. We call these first-party reviews.

And our Review Monitoring feature gives you the visibility to see all the reviews of your business that people leave on sites across the web. It leverages our PowerListings® Network relationships, over 100 direct data integrations, to pull in those reviews from across the web in real time, so you know anytime that anyone leaves your customer a good or a bad review. You can also respond to the first-party reviews you generate, as well as to reviews on Google and Facebook, directly from the dashboard.

Contact us today to start managing your reputation and responding to those online reviews!