For both in the public eye and search engines, your brand’s reputation is perhaps its most important aspect. Harmful comments or reviews can destroy even the strongest businesses and can send them into costly damage control, thus stressing the importance of investing in reputation management to stay ahead. Even if your business appears to be in good public standing, arrogance breeds susceptibility and can lead you down a dangerous path.
Virtually, a brand’s reputation carries significant weight. Search engines are intelligent and utilize powerful algorithms that are designed to weed out pages with a poor reputation.
What constitutes poor reputation is something we will dive into below. Regardless, it remains essential to monitor and work to improve your brand’s reputation. In the ever-evolving digital terrain, it can be beneficial to hire a firm with reputation management services.
Below are some of the areas where a reputation management service can help your business preemptively and post-incident.
Negative Reviews
Product or service reviews are critical to a brand’s image and are often one of the most important things customers look for before purchasing. E-commerce platforms such as Amazon or T-Mall, among virtually every other player, direct users to the reviews section as they hold some responsibility for the products they feature on their sites.
If a customer is dissatisfied with a product, it is incumbent upon the e-commerce platform to provide a space for the customer to give honest feedback. Some e-commerce platforms will even adjust their search result rankings based on review scores and comments!
The response to receiving these comments is what separates profitable brands from those that fail. A professional service provider will help you comb through negative comments and identify which have worthy feedback, plus they can advise on how to respond to these customers in a professional manner. In some cultures, failure to respond to negative comments is viewed even more negatively than receiving the comments in the first place.
After following up with a dissatisfied customer, you will work with your service provider to formulate ways to improve your product or service based on the negative comment.
Since the comments on 3rd party websites are there for everyone to see, addressing the issues and performing meaningful adjustments will boost your brand’s reputation.
Page Rankings
Search engines such as Google or Bing similarly have a responsibility to boost the ranking of pages with good reputations. There are obvious issues on some pages, such as malware that Google will intentionally avoid, yet there are more subtle factors that also need proper attention and may require the guidance of a reputation management firm.
Among these are two factors search engines comb pages for are E-A-T and YMYL.
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness, all facets of a page’s content that boost its quality, or reputation. Writing content that delivers high levels of E-A-T will undoubtedly bring value to your page.
YMYL is an initialism for Your Money Your Life and encompasses pages related to a person’s wellbeing. Any page that offers advice or information that can directly affect a reader’s health and wellbeing will fall under the YMYL umbrella. YMYL pages need to be written by experts and with high E-A-T levels; otherwise, they will be lost among the many pages of search results.
Ensuring your web pages maintain a good reputation by search engine standards can be the difference between a thriving business and one struggling to survive.
