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Your business reputation plays a critical role in how new customers interact with your business. Internet savvy consumers are doing internet searches, gathering information, and making their buying decisions in seconds. Underestimating the value of a five-star reputation is a mistake small businesses must avoid, especially when competing with larger companies with bigger marketing budgets.
With a poor online reputation, money spent on marketing your business is a huge waste of resources. Customers are looking for information before the purchase that will give them a sense of how their experience will be if they do business with you.
Online reputation and reviews have become so valuable and readily available that new customers will either hold off on making a decision until they feel comfortable or choose another business that gives the impression of providing a stellar customer experience.
When you build and maintain a business reputation that demonstrates high levels of customer satisfaction, you’ll find that customers are willing to spend more with a company that trustworthy and customer-centered.
Providing top-notch customer service for quality products and services is the foundation for a good business reputation. Actively gathering and promoting five-star reviews is what separates your business from competitors when customers are searching for new providers for their needs.
For a small business to thrive in a competitive local marketplace, it has to place a priority on creating a business reputation that attracts new customers and inspires referrals. Growing your business reputation online has a direct relationship to increasing revenue, increases your credibility, and demonstrates the value of your products and services. Ensure your business has a system in place to improve your online reputation and create a shorter path to purchase by creating confidence in your consumers.
Reputation Management and Reputation Marketing can seem a little overwhelming when added to all the other things you have to do for your business. Luckily automation makes managing your online reputation one of the easiest business marketing processes you can add to grow your business.
Once you have a reputation management process, proactively managing your business reputation involves a few crucial steps:
To build a stellar business reputation, you need to know what your customers think. You do this by proactively seeking feedback, which you can do in a variety of ways. When you know what your customers have to say about your business you can resolve issues quickly with dissatisfied customers before they post online. At the same time, you can persuasively encourage happy customers to post their positive reviews on the review sites that matter the most to your business.
There are online reputation monitoring services and tools that will let you know what customers see online. You can opt to manually do this yourself, but you MUST monitor the online comments and conversations about your business, so you always know what customers see online. Starting with that knowledge, you can work to correct or handle any negative information in the form of negative reviews, complaints, or inaccurate business information such as wrong phone numbers or addresses.
For small businesses that automate their reputation management, the only time-consuming part of monitoring your business reputation is responding to the best and worst reviews in a way that prospective customers reading reviews know you value the customer. Care has to be taken with review responses because negative reviews are trusted more read thoroughly giving you an opportunity to win over customers.
Create and promote your business’ profile on the third-party review sites important to your industry as search engines pull ratings to feed their results pages. Also, ensure that you promote your business’ pages on social media networks where consumers are increasingly turning for reviews and suggestions on businesses before buying.
What customers think about your business has never been more important to small business success. Advancements in technology have made it easier for customers to share their experiences and luckily there have been even bigger advancements that make managing your business reputation more simple than it was in the past.
Reputation management ensures you are controlling much of what is being said about your business online and lets you influence those conversations towards positive messaging. Your online reputation serves as 24/7 advertising, getting the word out about your company to customers in your community searching on the internet.
With a reputation management system like Reputation Loop, you can set up an almost hands-free system that contacts your customers via email soon after purchase to get their feedback. Positive feedback is routed to the most impactful review sites for posting and less than stellar feedback is routed back to the business for special handling to resolve issues.
Automated reputation management can also help you spread the word about your business by socially sharing your recent positive feedback and new reviews with your Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ followers. You control what’s being shared with our manual or automatic settings.
Zach Anderson is the co-founder of Reputation Loop (helping small businesses grow by generating customer feedback and online reviews) who loves online marketing and golf.
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Whether you are a small business owner or a small business marketer, digital marketing lets your business compete with larger and more well-known businesses. If you haven’t tried or used theses 11 free small business digital marketing tools, the time is now.
Of course, you’re using some of the free small business digital tools like Google Analytics and Buffer or Hootsuite. Who isn’t? But these 11 free tools can add a new level of expertise and detailed insight to your digital marketing campaigns.
Facebook evolves so fast it is hard for social media marketers to keep on top of all the “improvements” going on. It’s rare that a small business has a large enough budget to dedicate staff to optimize their Facebook page. LikeAlyzer runs a quick check and gives you a free Facebook assessment and a grade so you can make the improvements you need to get the most out your Facebook page.
As a free small business digital marketing tool, Facebook Audience Insights is a must. Use this tool to do market research and to dig into the content that converts. A multitude of options let you view demographics that will shape your Facebook campaigns.
Part of keeping your small business relevant is listening to what is going on in your industry and creating content that people what to engage with. For free Social Mention lets you set a virtual listening station to keep abreast of the topic related to what you are selling.
SocialRank helps you understand your Twitter and Instagram followers. By understanding your audience, you can create the engaging content that increases conversions. This tool lets you sort your followers by who is most influential and most engaged, filter by bio keyword and hashtag use, and pinpoint the right people by number of followers and activities. The free plan includes filtering and sorting followers, connecting multiple profiles and viewing full follower profiles.
Enter your business information and Reputation Loop’s Local Score Report analyzes your business’ online presence. Get detailed analysis and a grade on your business listings and online reviews on one easy to understand report. It scans all the top directories to show you how accurately your business information is showing up online. Identify inaccuracies with your business name, address & phone number and identify the directories that your business are not currently listed in.
Local Score Report also scans and collects reviews across the internet and aggregates them into one place, so you can easily see how good or bad your online reputation is. Extract top terms from your online reviews for analysis and see which areas of your business your customers are happy about and which areas you need to work on.
Moz’s Check Listing Tool runs an audit of your NAP (name, address, and phone number) as it appears across citation sites like Yelp, Facebook, and even Google. After a quick analysis, you will know where to make changes that ensure your business listings and citations are correct across the web.
This site crawler searches up to 500 URL’s per crawl for free and gathers key onsite data to allow you to make informed strategy decisions. Find broken links, analyze page titles and meta data, discover duplicate content and more. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider also generates XML sitemaps and integrates with Google Analytics.
SEMrush is on this list of free tools because while they are leaders in competitive research with reasonably priced service plans, you can also search a domain, keyword or URL for free from the search box on the SEMrush homepage. A simple search will give you a comprehensive view of the data available for any given website, large or small. Get detailed domain and keyword analytics with your free search for an in-depth SEO audit of your website and your competitors’ websites.
Open Site Explorer is a powerful free small business digital marketing tool from the experts at MOZ that helps you understand your link profile. What makes it so powerful is it also gives you insight into your competitors’ link profile. To build up your domain authority part of your strategy should be to look at what sites are linking to your competitors but not to your website. Open Site Explorer will show you the “get-able” links to go after.
Worried about duplicate content? Siteliner does a quick duplicate content analysis. Just enter your URL, and you get data on duplicate content, internal links, external links, average page size, and more.
SEOptimer is a truly free site audit tool that gives you an ACTIONABLE SEO REPORT. Enter a domain and SEOptimer creates an SEO report you can download as a PDF. You’ll want that PDF so you can check off the SEO improvements listed in your personalized audit.
Zach Anderson is the co-founder of Reputation Loop (helping small businesses grow by generating customer feedback and online reviews) who loves online marketing and golf.
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No one likes to see a bad review about their business. But for even the best of us, some customers will leave a negative review, deserved or not.
It can be frustrating, and costly!
The only real answer is to bury a bad review with good ones.
That is why you need to develop a strategy to get your existing happy customers to post positive 5 star reviews for you.
Here is a quick video that explains what I think is the best system on the market to do just that.
This powerful Reputation Building system starts with a free no obligation trial.
How is that for confidence? Prove to yourself that it works, before you need to plunk down even a single dime.
Reviews can make or break your business. And their role is growing daily.
92% of consumers read online business reviews and 33% do so on a regular basis.
Once you have this system up and operating, it will cut back on the number of bad reviews. But if one gets through anyway, your constant stream of good reviews will bury it quickly.
Plus, people understand that errors can happen, and that sometimes the people complaining are just having a bad day themselves. This is especially true when they see that you have dozens and dozens of positive reviews.
And that is a good thing.
One that will keep new customers coming, and your cash register ringing.
Get RepPilot’s Review Velocity today
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Chances are pretty good that your next new customer will come from a customer journey that included an internet search rather than a stroll past your storefront window. A diversified local SEO strategy puts your business where new customers can find it in the exact moment they are making a buying decision.
You already know how critical ranking high in local search is for the growth of your business.
(If you don’t, read Local SEO Checklist: 9 Basic Tips to Get Found in Local Search)
You probably already have some form of local SEO strategy worked out.
(If you don’t, read Local SEO in 2017 – How to Rank Higher in Local Search).
What do you need to add to your 2017 Local SEO Strategy to improve your visibility in local search results and conversions from your local digital marketing?
As mobile search surpassed desktop searches, studies show that 70% or more of your traffic will come from mobile. With a lower return on investment from print advertising, marketing dollars are better spent on mobile SEO and the digital advertising that puts your business in front of qualified shoppers.
Your mobile advertising (including SEO) spend should be proportionate to your mobile revenue. To get that number you will need to track sales, clicks, and conversions from mobile local search whether they occur in-store or on the phone. Mobile user analytics help you determine the right budget for improved R.O.I.
Watch out for the ramp up for Google’s mobile-first index as it shows that in 2017 mobile-friendly websites and content will soon be the only competitors for the top spots in search engine results. First use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool to see if Google considers your website mobile-friendly. Then ensure you’ve applied local optimization to your mobile pages.
If your business has been established for over a year, then your locations are already listed in hundreds of local directories, networks, and websites. Search engines and search engine users are relying on these listings to find your business and verify your contact information. It is vital that your business listings are accurate and consistent across the web to avoid lower rankings and confusion with shoppers making split-second decisions on which business to choose.
Since these business listings and citations are an important part of your business’ online presence, Business Listing Management needs to be part of your local SEO strategy. With thousands of directories and networks out there, it’s time to automate the process of building and monitoring your business listings and citation.
Google Voice Search allows you to use Google Search by speaking. It’s a hands-free way to get the information you are searching for faster. When you are in a hurry or driving, voice search is a handy mobile tool to find local results for your immediate needs. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced in May 2016 that 20 percent of searches on its mobile app and Android devices were voice searches.
Google Voice Search is growing, and you can get a jump on the competition with local optimization tactics to rank higher in search results. Note that voice search queries are more action-based than typed queries. Meaning (in a simplified generality) we do more voice search to accomplish something, and we do more typed searches to learn something.
Local Optimization for Google Voice Search includes:
When the customers who buy your products or services are located in your geographical area, a local SEO strategy is a must. It ensures you optimize for local search which makes up around 50% of search queries on mobile phones and tablets. Build a more comprehensive 2017 local SEO strategy to keep up with the changes in search engine marketing so you can meet customers where they start their shopping – online.
Zach Anderson is the co-founder of Reputation Loop (helping small businesses grow by generating customer feedback and online reviews) who loves online marketing and golf.
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Complete and accurate Google My Business listings bring customers to the storefronts and websites of your business and there are new Google My Business listings to explore. By optimizing your Google My Business listing, you can expect higher ranking in local search, an increased click-through-rate to your business website, and a better search (and find) experience for the user. A search user, if you can rank high, is likely to become your next customer.
Looking at the new Google My Business features, you’ll find opportunities to build more complete listings for your business and more insight into how customers are engaging with your listings.
Here are new Google My Business Features for 2017:
The “Photos” section of your My Google Business insights now shows the number of photos associated with your listing. You’ll also see how often your photos were viewed compared to photos of businesses similar to yours.
The lines on the graphs compare your photo data with photo data for businesses like yours. If you manage a restaurant, your business would be compared to other restaurants in your area. If there aren’t enough businesses like yours nearby, you might not see any comparisons on the graph.
A “Photo views” graph shows the number of times your photos have been viewed by Google users. The “Photo quantity” graph shows the number of photos uploaded by you.
The drop-down menu in the top left corner lets you adjust the timeframe and see data from the last 7, 30, or 90 days. To see data for a specific day only, hover over that day on the graph.
The Google My Business platform has expanded its attributes for your business. Next time you log in you may be asked to update options such as “Has Wi-Fi” to show customers more about your business.
You can review and edit all these attributes at once from your dashboard by accepting all Google attribute updates. Once you complete your initial review, you will have fewer attributes to review when you log in for routine maintenance.
You can accept, discard or edit Google updates for multiple locations by following these instructions from Google:
You may not be able to accept or discard Google updates in bulk if:
Using Bulk Upload
If you’re updating locations using your bulk upload spreadsheet, you can import your locations without resolving Google updates. Keep in mind that:
There are two kinds of menus you can add to your Google My Business listing.
Menus must follow these guidelines from Google:
Developers who write applications to manage Google My Business data sign up for the Google My Business API. With the API they build applications that interact with your business location information on the Google My Business server. If you are a small business owner, this won’t mean anything to you. If you are a small piece of a larger, tech-savvy company you may want to ask about using the Google My Business API to automate actions such as:
Complete Google My Business listings influence search engine user behavior so it is important to maintain, review and update your listings as Google rolls out new features and updates. These new Google My Business features give you an opportunity to build a more user friendly and informative listing that draws more customers.
Google likes to keep things in-house as much as possible, so it favors its own accurate and current business listings when giving local search results to its users. More importantly, if you want any chance of showing up in the Local 3-Pack which prominently displays the top three most relevant results for local search, you have to verify and optimize your Google My Business listing (preferably with dozens of five-star reviews).
Zach Anderson is the co-founder of Reputation Loop (helping small businesses grow by generating customer feedback and online reviews) who loves online marketing and golf.
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