When your reputation has been badly affected on Yelp or any other online review website, you need to employ a reputation management strategy that will be effective. Reputation management can provide damage control and reduce how noticeable these negative reviews are. Your reputation will be preserved and your online presence will be improved. A quality reputation management strategy would promote good reviews and comments that surround your company while pushing the negative reviews deep into the search results on Google and Bing. Below, you will find some things that you can do to start making a difference immediately.
Press releases have the potential to rank well in search engines and they can easily outrank a negative review that has been left about your business. By writing and submitting a quality press release to a top PR syndication site, that press release will end up on hundreds of other websites. Each website that it is syndicated to has potential to rank in search engines.
After you have submitted the press release, it’s a good idea to build links to everywhere that the press release ends up on. In doing so, you will improve the press releases search engine rankings and within time, they will outrank any negative reviews that are currently at the top of the search results. These negative comments will start to fall back, likely landing on page two or three of the search results, where very few people navigate to. A great way to build links to these press release page is through guest blogging.
Damage control keywords are phrases such as “YourBusinessName reviews” or “YourBusinessName testimonials.” By creating these pages and search engine optimizing them, those pages will be far more likely to rank for those search terms than any other website would be. It’s important to incorporate phrases like this into the press releases that you are submitting as well. This will create more than one positive result for your business while reducing the effect of any negative results.
By encouraging your present customers to leave reviews for your business on Yelp and other similar websites, you can significantly improve the reputation of your business. Any negative comments will quickly be diffused because of the sheer volume of positive comments. The “overall” rating of your business will also improve. On a 5 star system, the positive reviews will still maintain a good overall score if there are much more of them than there are negative. Most customers are more than willing to lend a helping hand, but you just have to ask. You can even encourage your customers to take action by offering some type of incentives such as a discount or coupon. Some businesses do this for little actions such as “liking” their Facebook page. When it comes to reputation management, the necessity to take action and do something to promote change is even more important.
If you receive a negative review there are steps you can take to rectify the situation. The first thing you should do is to reach out to the customer and learn more about their experience. Once you have all the facts see how you can make the situation right in the customer’s eyes. Show your concern for the situation. Quickly discuss what you can do for that customer. Once you make the situation right ask the customer if they would consider deleting their review or at the least updating their review.
If you treat the customer with respect and swift action there is a great chance you can get the customer to make the changes in your company’s favor.
It’s important to take an active response to fixing your reputation. If you don’t, the damage being done to your business could escalate and get even worse. Reputation management companies employ strategies like what is seen above and they do the best they can to get negative reviews and comments off of the first page.
