Reputation Management Can Help Small Businesses Succeed - The Great American Small Business Challenge | The Great American Small Business Challenge

Article submitted by Reputation Stars

Online reputationmanagement (ORM) is incredibly important for small businesses because it reflects the amount of time, money, education, equipment, staff training and marketing you have invested. Unfortunately, many businesses fall victim to angry staff and crazy customers ranting about them online, whether the content is true or not. Most customers use online review sites like Amazon and Yelp to determine if they want to even set foot in your door to buy your products and services. 83% of consumers report that online customer reviews helped them formulate their decisions. Even one false review can dramatically decrease your sales, especially those placed on high ranking sites like RipOff Report.

Reputation management helps reduce the impact of negative reviews showing up in search results. When a user types in their name, if they see negative comments on your business on the first page, it’s a strong deterrent for them to contact you for business. Strategic use of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media Marketing helps businesses push down these negative reviews from the top search results pages. Try entering your business name in a Google search and see what comes up. If you are finding negative reviews on the first page, you may be losing thousands of dollars without even knowing why. Pushing these results off the first page to the second page or even further down with SEO techniques prevents these reviews from attracting so much unwanted attention.

While negative feedback is always bad for your reputation, taking it into consideration may be useful for your business. While reputation stars helps push down negative reviews, reading and understanding customer comments helps prevent negative reviews in the future. Being proactive about customer complaints and responding to them in a polite and timely manner helps prevent the majority of negative review posting online. Sometimes, negative reviews can alert you of employee misconduct. Not every customer will be speaking with you directly if you have a staff over 5 people. If you have established good relationships with customers and are experiencing negative reviews, it could possibly be an employee that is preventing these relationships from staying positive.

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Article submitted by Reputation Stars. Reputation Stars offers online reputation management services and can help you cealm up negative reviews.