Reputation management is the act of supervising the way customers and users perceive your business. Naturally, the stronger your perceived reputation, the more likely you are to be considered a trustworthy brand.
The most common way this is done is by monitoring your online reviews, responding to both positive and negative feedback, and providing timely customer service where needed. Though the majority of this will happen online across your social media and business profiles, your online reputation can be impacted and influenced by interactions happening offline. Therefore, it’s vital that every business employ a customer success manager to oversee their customer success team or personally ensure client satisfaction.
How is business reputation measured?
In the context of local SEO, a business’ reputation can be measured by review sentiment (or sentiment analysis). This can be calculated by dividing the number of positive customer mentions to the number of total mentions.
You can calculate this manually, by adding up the total of 4 and 5 star reviews across your business profiles and dividing that to the total number of customer reviews. That’s pretty time consuming though.
You can conduct a quick and thorough sentiment analysis using Direction Local. Our system will also provide a “reviews analysis” which pairs sentiment with keywords so you can learn what parts of your business are thriving and which parts need to be improved.
Why is this important?
Having a good online reputation (lots of 4 and 5 star reviews) has a few positive effects; the most significant, of course, is that search engines are more likely to show your business as the best possible option for customers using their platform. Why? Because they know that customers already love and trust you, so they can confidently recommend you as a viable option.
If, however, you have a fragile online reputation riddled by 1 and 2 star reviews, or reviews that don’t have any replies, then search engines are much less likely to recommend you as a good option for their users.
Look at it this way, Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, etc. all want to provide their users the best possible experience. They do this by generating the best possible results for their customers based on their query and intent. Why would they damage their reputation by recommending a business that, by the looks of things, doesn’t care about their customers. Short answer: they won’t.
