Reputation Management

Reputation management is a topic that any online business ought to be paying attention to here in Greenville,SC, as the more successful you become online, the more of a target you become for reputation hackers. There are currently over 100 businesses in the downtown area, all competing for the same dollars, in many cases, and just keeping the doors open for business can be a challenge sometimes.

People are sometimes very fickle and they don't always worry too much about the dollars you as a business person on your business to provide a pleasant and congenial atmosphere for their pleasure. They won't hesitate at times to provide a nasty and unfavorable review aim directly at your business, for no good reason except for the fact that they can.

When was the last time you checked your reviews on Manta, Yelp, YP, Google Plus, Facebook, SuperShoppers, or Merchant Circle? And if you find that some of the reviews aren't showing your business in the best light, what on earth can you do about it, anyway? Obviously, you can't please everyone, and it is impossible to make 100% of your customers happy all of the time, but when you consider the amount of time and money you put into your business, is it fair that one or two negative reviews always seem to filter to the top levels of these reviews?

If you don't believe that this is happening, just go onto a search engine right now and type in the name of a business, yours or anyone else's and type "review" after the name and see what happens. You may or may not be surprised, but if you check enough times you will see that it is sort of an epidemic. The days of being polite are gone, especially since people have smart phones, and they don't think anything of trashing something instantly, because it can be done anonymously.

Remember you mother saying, "If you don't have something nice to say, don't say it all?" Today, it is just the opposite, so here we are. The sooner business people accept that this is going to happen, no matter what they do in the attempt to appease customers and provide a good buying experience. There needs to be a better strategy that will not only assist in the promotion of a good online reputation, but one that will keep it that way.

The first thing to keep in mind is that when most people key in a bad review, whether it is true or not, do you ever see a response to that bad review by management? One or two negative reviews in a sea of good ones is not something to get too excited about, but if you only have three or for reviews and two of them are negative, then maybe you have something that you should be concerned about.

Most business owners simply ignore the reviews altogether, thinking that maybe they really did mess up, but that they will just try harder to do better next time. If a prospective customer sees a bad review, most of them take them to heart, and move on to a business who has more positive reviews. Customers are review readers today, and they follow the tweets, fan pages and reviews when making a decision as to what business to visit.

Responding to the negative comments that a customer makes is very critical because it shows that you are not used to getting negative comments about your business and here is a public venue where you can show your concern, and perhaps offer a free meal or something to make up for the bad experience. This has to be done professionally, and while stating that over the years you have had the privilege of serving thousands of customers and over 95 percent of the like the product so much that the return, or something like that.

This shows other prospective customers that you do care and that you are aware of the problems that people can run into anywhere they shop. People aren't stupid, and they have experienced egocentric people too who tend to complain over anything, so in many cases they take the side of the merchant. If the complainer leaves a name, they may have a legitimate reason in their own eyes for the complaint, so by you taking notice and offering to fix things, it is possible you can keep an irate customer simply by making a kind gesture.

This attitude does present another problem, however, and that is when you run a business, you have a lot more to do than just answer complaints. You have plenty of day to day duties to handle not the least of which is managing your business, making payroll, and dealing with your employees.

This is why hiring a firm such as SEOGreenvilleSC can be a good idea. As far as handling your reputation management, we will take care of it, because that is what we do. The strategy that we use involves much more than merely responding to the bad reviews, and we will certainly do that, and we will respond to each and every one of them.

However, that is not all that we will do, as that is only a small part of the puzzle. If that is all that is done it is like putting a band aid on an already bleeding major wound. The main idea is to avoid any more wounds by assisting you with the process of putting up protective barriers that will prevent any future wounds from occurring.

What we will do will be to create and manage strategies that will help to move your customers toward the right direction and make them happy long before they might decide to write a bad or negative review. We can help customers find ways to respond in a positive manner long before they even come into your establishment. We will put together a presence online that will be positive way beyond your current company's website and it will be visible to potential customers.

We will also have a very positive presentation of your company on all of the social media sites, and we will present enough positive attributes for your business with appropriate public responses that will overshadow anything that appears on some of these other directories, and in fact most of them will not show up anymore on the first page of the search engine. There is much more to having a website, a Facebook page, a Twitter account and a Pinterest page. The crux of the matter is to manage them correctly, and that will get you back on track as far as your public online reputation.

Even if you feel that currently your business is doing just fine, and perhaps you don't need all of that extra fine tuning, but the whole idea is prevention of any future problems that might crop up at any time. Plus, by adding these additional management features, we find that we can stimulate more business, which translates to a bigger bottom line, while at the same time keeping out those negative reviews!