You want your customers to feel the same way about your brand as you do, but that isn’t always the case. Few companies are self-aware and willing to take the right steps to improve their reputation, both online and offline. Your brand’s reputation is the one variable that frequently changes with the passage of time, and you can either take control of the driver seat or let others take control for you.

Companies that ultimately want to stay ahead and keep their business afloat will have to actively monitor and improve the feedback they receive from the internet and filter out the negativity that online haters could be actively propagating.

As is true with everything else, you have to follow several practical steps to make sure your business has a spot on the front page,  NOT  what your enemies are pushing. There are two ways to work on your online reputation, the first is to  monitor  what is being said about you online and the second is to  improve  your brand image by confronting negative reviews.

Let’s explore how you can take charge of your online reputation.

It is important to find out what your brand image looks like. This should be your first step because if you’re unaware of what’s working and what isn’t, it would be tough trying to improve anything at all. It’s like shooting in the dark, and you are likely to miss your target.

How you monitor your brand’s online reputation depends on your business model. If you run a restaurant, tourist attraction, or lodging facility, you will need to spend time monitoring online review sites such as Yelp, Google Reviews, and TripAdvisor. If you have an e-commerce business that sells physical goods, you will have to keep an eye on eBay, Amazon, and other online retailers that allow customers to drop reviews.

Next are popular review sites, independent blogs, forums, social media pages, and news sites. Tracking all of these conversations can quickly become burdensome, depending on the scale of your business. If you are extremely popular, then you will need a professional online reputation management expert (or a team of them) to keep tabs on your online information. Different strokes for different folks, as they say.

Let’s talk about some of the tools you can use to monitor what is being said about you.

GoFish Digital Complaint Search and ReviewTrackers

Think of  GoFish  as a review aggregator that compiles and updates reviews from different websites on the internet. GoFish allows you to perform search queries that pull results from over 40 websites to help you actively monitor what people are saying about your brand. The reason you should concern yourself with these reviews is that Google and other search engines also take them into account before ranking your brand on their search indexes.

GoFish also provides you with a neat, clutter-free dashboard that ranks the most popular reviews, so you can prioritise which reviews to spend your time on and which ones you could afford to ignore.

ReviewTracker monitors online reviews of about 100+ sites, allowing you to set up email alerts as soon as a review is posted about you. The platform has a mobile app that lets you monitor reviews and respond to them on the go.

Depending on whether the reviews are true or false, you can flag and remove them if they are not an accurate representation of your brand. This can be done by asking different websites to pull the review down, sending them a legal letter, or asking an  online reputation management specialist  to remove it for you.

SEO SpyGlass to Remove Bad Backlinks

While backlinks don’t directly target your brand’s online reputation, they play one of the most important roles in search engine ranking. Search engines like Google and Bing use backlinks to decide if your brand is trustworthy. The use of spammy and low-quality backlinks is an obvious sign that something is wrong with your brand.

SEO SpyGlass  allows you to not only track but also analyse the authority of all the websites that are linking to you. It provides you with a metric called “ Penalty Risk, ” which gives you a numeric representation of what each backlink can do in terms of damaging your search engine results.

SpyGlass has a free version that lets you track a limited number of backlinks, while paid plans start at $124.75 per brand.

SpyGlass isn’t the only tool on the internet that lets you track backlinks. You can also use  SEM Rush ,  Ahrefs , and even  Google Analytics.

Once you have tracked the websites that are linking back to you, you should find their webmaster’s contact addresses and send them a letter requesting to remove the link. You should be getting a response from the webmaster, but if you don’t receive one within a reasonable period of time, you can ‘disavow’ the bad links and report them to Google.

Grade.us  for Review Acquisition Campaigns

One negative bad review is enough to offset 10 good ones. Keeping this in mind, you can always ask your legion of ‘fans’ or happy customers to drop in 5-star reviews to help you bury the clout of negative reviews into obscurity. Do keep in mind to not incessantly press your customers to write positive reviews as it could annoy them just enough to leave a bad review instead.

Targeting all your customers across different channels – whether it is social media, email, or text – is not going to be a walk in the park. A good idea instead is to use tools that can help you initiate a  review acquisition campaign,  where you can send multiple requests for positive reviews to your list of clients. One such powerful tool that lets you do this is Grade.us, which not only lets you monitor reviews and send requests for them, but also provides you with an easy way of quickly responding to them with an app.

This is a great way of letting prospective leads know that you are easy to reach in case the product or service isn’t what they were initially promised.

In the case of negative reviews, you should adopt a conversational tone, apologising to the disgruntled customer that their feedback has been noticed and requisite steps will be taken to help them. A good way to structure your response is by giving them subtle reminders that your brand is otherwise known for good products and services that almost always hit the mark.

Try taking the conversation offline to discuss the problem with them because it is best to keep the heated debate off-screen and resolve it there. Once you have managed to resolve their query, write a finishing comment that says, “We are happy to let you know the problem has been solved.”

This strategy establishes two things: i) you can be easily reached and are hospitable, and ii) you provide prompt remedial services. Both these traits encourage prospective customers to subscribe to your business model and become long-term clients.

Social media is all about leveraging from the exposure that influencers bring to the table. Most ‘micro-influencers’ offer their services in exchange for a small fee, free service, or even a shoutout. Great online influencers can persuade customers to drop negative reviews about you and postpositive ones instead.

Getting in touch with influencers is a proven way to expand your outreach to customers who would otherwise have never have trusted you, but since the media personality they have subscribed to is vouching for your products and services, it can’t all be that bad right? It also adds a layer of credibility to your reputation because they may not trust you, but they do trust their favorite influencer.

Getting an influencer to do all the marketing for you is the definitive, surefire way of trumping bad press. Imagine a competitor using its digital marketing prowess to spread negative agenda about you, only for heavyweight influencers to bury their reviews under a flurry of positive ones.

A few great examples of micro-influencers are Pewdiepie, LinusTechTips, Markiplier, and other YouTube channels that have a large influence. This also applies to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media websites.

It is important to find the  right  influencers for your business model. Someone with a more mature audience like Pewdiepie may not be ideal for a toy business. Or someone with a toy review channel isn’t ideal for a restaurant business because their content is geared toward toddlers.

It isn’t possible to please them all, but you can be more consistent, live up to your promise, and ultimately build a good online reputation. If your customer hasn’t been pleased with your product and service, drop them an apology note that acknowledges their grievances and promises to address their concerns in the future.

There is a possibility that your business faces negative publicity due to fake reviews. Perhaps it is time to clean and brush up on your services and products instead. It is important to not treat bad customer reviews with negativity, but to integrate them into a positive feedback loop system for better customer experience. However, if you believe the reviews to be fake then it is best to request the review website to remove such comments.

Using negative reviews to improve your products and services is an effective way of improving your brand’s online reputation, and it alerts more savvy customers to notice and keep coming back for more.

It helps to focus on issues that are bigger than the rest of us, such as the community and environment. If your brand creates a ‘green’ or environmentally safer alternative of an existing product on the market, it will resonate well with your target audience.

It is important to look into some of the problems that plague society and take steps to address them. The byproduct of all this ‘community service’ is that your brand image will be associated with positivity and more people will want to do business with you.

One of the most distressing components of online reviews is the lack of transparency. This is why it is so easy for a person to create a fake profile and disparage their competitors with little regard to the truth.

What’s worse is that some websites refuse to remove fake reviews even after being presented with evidence and this only adds to the growing frustration. More reputable review sites like Yelp and Google allow you to remove fake reviews by reporting them, but obscure websites and blogs dedicated to hate speech require a different approach entirely.

While everyone is entitled to their opinion and criticism of products, services, and public personalities falls under fair use, hate speech itself isn’t legal. If you identify hate speech on the internet with the specific intent of spreading negativity about you, as opposed to reviewing you or your brand, you can report this to Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other websites.

In the case of blogs and other sites, you can get in touch with the webmaster by looking up their details on Whois.com. You can send them a polite request for content removal or use a legal letter to talk some sense into them.

Your aim is to not appear confrontational, but more approachable. The last thing you need is to provoke the person into adopting a more hostile attitude towards you, making it more difficult to get the negative, fake comment removed. Worse still is that you could end up amplifying their efforts to marginalise your brand’s reputation.

At the end of the day, you can always ask an online reputation management firm to handle fake reviews for you. These experts know the ins and outs of the law in regard to online reputation management and use a comprehensive approach to get rid of fake reviews.

Another effective strategy is to use SEO to continuously churn out positive content about your brand. This will not only increase your website’s domain authority but make it more difficult for online haters to spread negativity.

Forcing someone else to remove content on you is not easy. If not handled by the right professionals, it may backfire because most of these webmasters usually have access to a network of people who are more than willing to disclose details of your private spat. This could cause more bad press.

Our strategists specialise in the removal of unwanted information, illegal content without the risk of bad press. The abusive online material is removed discreetly, efficiently and affordable. Speak with our strategist today.

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