If you have decided to take a step towards marking your digital presence, it becomes essential that you prioritize your online reputation above all. In the digital landscape, online reputation plays the most significant role in ensuring that your business reaches out to probable customers and impacts their purchasing decisions. Your digital presence is marked by the Google My Business account, which is vital in attracting customers and building trust among valuable customers. However, one of the biggest loopholes in this is the negative reviews, which can be a burden that significantly impacts the businesses’s image.
In this blog, learn about how online reputation management works and what are the steps towards removing negative reviews from Google:
Google reviews: Impacts and advantages
Most customers follow the norm of buying a product after reading reviews online. The authenticity and versatility of the Google reviews by fellow customers serve as the foundation for most purchasing decisions. However, as much as positive reviews can be beneficial for businesses, whereas negative ones can be damaging to the brand’s image. Negative comments can eliminate the prospects of a business engagement along with hampering the reputation of the business.
Advantages of Google reviews:
Google reviews are an effective way of reflecting the customer’s opinions about a business or brand. These reviews can be advantageous for a business in the following ways:
- It helps you get useful insights from customers that could help you achieve customer satisfaction.
- It can create a positive impression in the online landscape.
- Boosts the SEO ranking.
- It helps to create an impression of trust and loyalty.
- Enhances the website traffic.
- It helps to improve the sales, ROI and leads for the business.
- Reviews also play an important role in improving your business’s local SEO.
- Google reviews are a great way to help your business stand out from competitors.
- Finally, word-of-mouth is an effective marketing strategy that attracts customers.
Impacts of Google reviews:
Google reviews can have both positive and negative impacts depending on the type of remarks or comments received on the listed business. Since Google reviews are a prominent deciding factor in the purchasing decision of probable customers. Thus, it becomes essential to remove or address unfavorable reviews promptly. You must initiate the following steps for the effective impact of the Google reviews:
- Validate: Before you decide to remove unfavorable reviews, it is essential that you validate their authenticity. In many cases, negative reviews are part of competitors’ negative marketing and not genuine comments. So, you need to check the reviewer’s profile, analyze the content for inconsistencies, and engage with the reviewer to resolve the issue.
- Address: After you have validated the authenticity of the reviewer, you must try to address the concern raised and try to resolve it as far as possible. Many times, deleting a review is not the most appropriate thing to do, so in such cases, you can mitigate the impact by addressing it.
- Response: Make sure to provide timely responses to both positive and negative reviews to demonstrate a commitment to customer satisfaction. Take the opportunity to reassure, and offer solutions or apologies for improved service in the coming times. When the customers are satisfied it impacts the business positively.
- Encourage: You should also make it a point to encourage your clients or customers to leave behind feedback or reviews for the business. When customers are satisfied and convey the same through their reviews, it can boost the overall sales and reputation of the brand/business.
- Implement: Finally, you should consider implementing a review management system for seamlessly monitoring and responding to the reviews. These tools help save time and make the process more streamlined.
Deleting a Google Review as part of Online Reputation Management
When we suggest online reputation management, one of the most important aspects is deleting negative reviews from Google My Business. If the negative reviews contain contents that promote hate speech or is explicitly unrelated to the brand or business, you can flag them for removal. The detailed steps will include:
- Flagging the review posted in the Google My Business account with appropriate reasons and also providing any other details available.
- Next, monitor the evaluation process to track the updates on retention or removal.
- And if, even after flagging the review, the review is not removed, you can submit an appeal. Your appeal should be supported by reasons that clearly state the violation of Google’s policies.
Why should you invest in Online Reputation Management?
Online reputation management can be of great help in managing the digital identity of your brand/business. Here are the following factors that the ORM can help in managing and keeping your digital reputation unaffected:
- Manages negative reviews efficiently by addressing them or removing them by flagging a concern to Google as a damage control step.
- Monitors the different online platforms for customer feedback and replies promptly to resolve any issue.
- It helps to maintain transparent communication with the customers by prioritizing their queries and feedback and replying to them.
- Filters the reviews and suggestions that are positive and highlights them on the website for word-of-mouth marketing.
How can you enhance your ORM through digital marketing strategies?
The versatile and enormous space of digital marketing offers many possibilities in terms of online reputation management. In addition to addressing and managing online reviews and devising strategies that help to enhance the brand image, digital marketing is all you need to survive in the online space. Here are a few activities that you can include in your digital strategies to enhance your brand reputation:
- Implement SEO techniques to enhance the search engine rankings for better results.
- Draft a comprehensive content strategy to reach out to maximum customers.
- Stay active throughout the social media platforms for regular updates and prompt replies.
- Make use of online advertisement platforms crafted to drive traffic and increase the visibility of the brand.
Final thoughts
We understand how important it is to maintain and manage a positive reputation on the online landscape and so promote the use of ORM solutions for your business or brand. A negative review can thoroughly impact the reputation of a brand, so it becomes all the more important to address or remove those reviews from your brand profile. By efficiently using ORM and strategizing your digital marketing game, you can achieve your goal and pose as a successful and positive brand online.
