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What Should You Do If Your Online Reputation Goes Bad?

Online reputation management might seem like something that only large corporations should be aware of, but this isn’t really the case. If you want your small or medium enterprise to become successful, you need to take some steps to protect its reputation on the web and ensure that existing customers and prospective clients will see mainly positive things about you and your business.

 

This can be easy to say, until you come across a couple of bad reviews that threaten to destroy your reputation. If this happens, you need to take the right steps to take control of the situation and ensure your brand will remain untarnished. Some of the steps that you can take include:

 

Showing your human side

One of the worst things you can do is to ignore the problem. Sooner or later, it will snowball into an even bigger issue, so it’s better to solve it now no matter how uncomfortable it can make you feel. You can start by:

 

• Expressing your apologies. “I’m sorry” are two of the most powerful words in the business world. By uttering them, you’ll show your customers that you’re willing to take accountability for whatever you or your staff did wrong.

 

• Explaining your side of the story. Many customer complaints stem from misunderstandings with your customers so, by stating the facts from your end, you can clear up the confusion and save your business from a lot of hassle.

 

• Offering to make up to your customers. Obviously, this should be done only if you know that your customers have made perfectly reasonable complaints and aren’t saying outrageous things just to spite you. Offering discounts or free products or simply offering to fix the problem (like sending them a replacement product if they were shipped a faulty item) can help assuage many clients and restore their trust in you.

 

Keep on doing what you do best

Negative reviews and comments lose their power when they’re surrounded by mostly positive feedback. Because of this, you should strive to improve your products and services and take care of your customers well. This way, you’ll gain more positive reviews that can balance out the negative ones and improve your online reputation.

 

Improve your SEO techniques

When you have excellent SEO methods, your website, blog, and social media pages can rise above the other results and reach the top spots in SERPs. These, in turn, mean that you’ll inevitably have the first say about your business, and you can have some control over the things that searchers will see. Instead of seeing a bad review about your company on Yelp, for instance, customers can focus on exploring your website and reading your blog since these are the first things they see when Googling your business name.

 

Hire professional reputation managers

This should only be done when you’ve taken all the right steps but still haven’t fixed your online reputation. Hiring these experts can cost a significant amount, but the expense is worth it when they help you overcome the damage to your business’s reputation.

 

Take these steps now to deal with blows to your online reputation and fix it ASAP.