The online world is cruel. It neither forgets nor forgives. You can work all you want, but one mistake here or there, and your established reputation will crumble like a house of cards.
In some cases, one mistake is enough to ruin your brand’s reputation. While in other cases, the gradual accumulation of bad reviews and feedbacks lead to your downfall.
It is hard to create a name on the internet, harder to sustain it, and hardest to get it back once it’s lost. What is the internet if not ‘fierce competition?’ Once you are down, you will be trampled by your competitors, who would make sure that you never resurrect.
However, building your name back online is possible. But, make no mistake; it is a painstaking process. The reward is scarce, and the way is long, but if you are tenacious, you might win back your customers.
In this blog, you’ll learn ways in which you can use SEO to turn your negative reputation and make it something people will love to use, share, and talk about.
1. Reply to reviews
A survey reported that customers trust positive reviews on the internet as much as they consider a recommendation from a close friend.
A positive review will not just help with your brand’s reputation; it will improve theranking of your website too. The more good reviews, the more clicks your website will get.
Search engines viewit as a plus point and improve your ranking. Similarly, bad reviews can harm your ranking as well.
How can you ensure that reviews are having a positive effect on your website’s SERP?
Just like in real life, if you appreciate the good stuff, you’ll be blessed with more. When you get a positive review, Google takes notice and add you in its good books.
However, bad reviews should be carefully dealt with. Firstly, listen to the concern of your customers. If the fault is on your end, apologize. The next thing is to reassure them that you can solve the issue in the quickest possible time.
If you feel that the problem wasn’t from your end, then too, explain it to the customer patiently and inform them about the ways to get the issue resolved. Once the issue is resolved, check it with the customer to confirm.
Google also keeps an eye on fake reviews intended to bring harm to a brand. It checks certain elements of reviews like the frequency, wording, recurrence, etc. If it finds that the review is out of malice, it disregards it, and your ranking isn’t affected by it.
2. Focus on customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction has a direct impact on the website’s ranking. With a massive amount of user-generated content out there, Google uses it as a sign to understand how satisfied a customer is with a brand.
If the user is spending a lot of time on the website, it means that the content of the website is useful. When you write high-quality content, it engages users, and Google considers it as a good sign.
This means that you need to add value to every page you want to rank. Just like the content,you must keep an eye on the analytics. How many customers are visiting your website at one moment,what page are they viewing the most, and how long are they staying?
When you take out some time to consider these questions and create a website experience that engages the visitors, you will automatically improve your rankings.
3. Become a brand authority
When people search online for something, their first choice is a brand with anauthority. Say a visitor finds your link on the Amazon blog, it means that your brand has agood reputation.
The simplest way to gain brand authority is to start a blog. When you blog often, it gives a clear signal to the visitor that you are adding value online, which means that you have some authority on the niche.
When the customer search ‘services related keywords,’ your brand must appear on the top three results. To do that, you need to do personal branding and take help from a professional link building agency.
You need to pick a niche and specific keywords and make efforts to rank on them. For instance, if you are a copywriter, you can use “conversion copywriter” which is a good phrase to rank your brand. If you make it as a primary keyword, it will be easy for you to increase the rank of your website in the search results.
When your brand becomes a name of authority, more and more people would like to feature on it. You can allow guest posting to improve your ranking further. However, you should tread very carefully when basking in the glory of your success.
You should be very careful about who you are allowing to guest post on your website. Set criteria that every guest post must adhere to. According to Growth Proton, ‘mistakes that most websites make is to not have a proper criterion in place.’
Don’t let anyone and everyone to post on your website and bring disrepute to your name.
In the end
It’s all about engaging the customer in the right manner. There are millions of brands out there who are doing what you are doing. You need to figure out your unique identifier. Something that gives your brand an edge over your competitors.
It can be a feature, a service, or something that only you can give. Try to write as much as you can on your unique selling proposition. This will make it clear to Google what is the unique identification of your brand.
Whatever you do online will leave an impact on your brand reputation. As a professional business, maintaining a positive online reputation is a real challenge. But if you can satisfy the customer, this challenge becomes easy.
Lastly, there is no such thing as a perfect brand. When you do online business, you’ll meet every type of customer. Satisfying them all should be your goal.
That’s why it’s important to stay positive despite customers being mad at you. It’s your job to serve the customer in every possible manner.
