After your local customer has found you on Local search, probably on his phone or maybe his PC, the next thing he wants to know is whether you have a good reputation.
If you have sufficient positive reviews, your Google entry may display the five stars. That is very valuable and should massively improve your click through rate and conversion rate too. You may also have reviews on many other sites, where the customer might look and of course there is banter on Social Media such as Facebook. All of this has the potential to make or break your business overnight unless it is carefully managed.
Unless you are encouraging customers to leave reviews you won’t receive enough. Unless you are watching for negative comments and reviews, they will sit there and do you lots of damage. Well-handled negative reviews can be turned to your advantage,
It gets worse, Google are also reading and analysing your reviews to decide how high they rank your site.
There is an increasing practice among less reputable SEO to attack competitors by placing negative reviews and damaging links. If this is not monitored and managed, it can shut off your traffic overnight. We have seen this many times over.
In addition to all that, behind the scenes, search algorithms grade your website reputation according to the number of citations and approved listings and most of all how accurate they are. We are all familiar with computers that have a silly fit over some small thing that shouldn’t matter, well see what happens to your website ranking if your address says “22 Grantham Street” on one site and “Classical House, 22 Grantham Street” on another. You will be heavily penalised over such a trivial error and it gets worse; you can spot this problem on Monday, fix it and on Wednesday, a data-aggregator you know nothing about will change it back to the wrong format.
This is why a reputation management strategy is an absolute must for everyone whether a local or a global business.
PR is another higher level of the same process, but it requires a different background and skill-set, both for Online PR and traditional PR, where the aim is to maintain a good perception of your brand and your products through doing and saying things and being seen in the company of people that make subtle ,but telling statements about you, your business and your products.
We don’t provide PR services, but we can make recommendations.