Online Reputation Management
Do you need help with your online reputation?
We provide online reputation services in Perth WA.
It is often mistakenly thought that online reputation management is a term that applies only to the likes of celebrities and public figures in relation to scandals and how their agents and representatives clear up the mess afterwards.
While strictly speaking you could say that online reputation management would be part of that and we can certainly help with that service, what we are generally talking about here is more applicable to a business, and specifically, what comments, reviews and feedback exist online about that business and its owner.
Online reputation management (ORM) is something that many business owners are completely unaware of until the day comes when they discover someone, or worse, several people, have written something negative online about them or their business.
This can arise for many reasons, with some being legitimate concerns and issues that customers have, and others arising as a result of somebody wanting to deliberately damage the reputation of a person or their company.
The latter can be from a disgruntled ex-employee who wants some revenge for being let go.
They make it their mission to go around every forum and social media site that they can in order to pour out vitriol about how bad that business is.
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Another way in which negative comments about a business can arise is from competitors making a deliberate attempt to harm others they see as a threat to them.
If you think about it, any individual who works for that business or even the owner’s cousin could write false reviews or complaints and you’d never know it was instigated by that competitors business.
One of the things that make negative comments so damaging is that these are the ones that potential customers tend to focus on when they are checking out a company.
They take for granted all the positive ones, even if there are hundreds of them, but if there’s just one or two really disparaging comments or reviews, it can be enough for them to move on to another website or business.
Negative reviews hurt a business in two ways. The obvious one is that potential customers read them and go elsewhere.
The less obvious one is that reviews feed directly into local search: your rating and review volume influence how prominently your business appears in Google’s local results, so a poor review profile can quietly cost you visibility as well as customers.
The biggest problem with all of this is that it can genuinely harm a business, and most especially can have a detrimental impact on its sales, with the implications thereafter for its profitability.
It is not unknown for a small business to go under, simply because its reputation was destroyed, be that deservedly or not.
This is why ORM should be a priority.
For a small business, it can be the difference between trading and closing.
Some of the ways in which ORM can help a business include:
- Retaining and enhancing its online reputation
- Identifying damaging attacks on their reputation and pursuing removal where the platform's rules allow it
- Protecting the good name of the business, and its ownership
- Establishing the business as a trusted online company
- Improving the search engine ranking of the business website
- Giving potential customers the confidence to make purchases
- Establishing the brand identity of the business
- Putting monitoring in place so future problems are spotted early
ORM and SEO work together, and each one strengthens the other. Reviews and reputation feed directly into local search performance, which is where most Perth businesses win or lose their customers.
By that we mean if your online reputation is sound, it will enhance any SEO that is taking place.
Conversely, an SEO campaign which is set up and being implemented professionally can go a long way to boosting the reputation of a business, especially in the eyes of Google.