Ladies and gentlemen, I have seen the light and I wanted to write this article today in order to inspire all of you to come along with me, if you haven’t already. I am talking about the online reputation of your company, something which is more important than I had ever realized. It all started after a partner of ours dragged our name through the mud because of their illegal practices, and the world assumed that somehow we were involved, which of course we were not. After reading some reputation management consultant reviews, we settled on a company to help clean things up and the result was better than I could’ve believed. The reputation was cleaned up and improved, so much so that our sales went through the roof. If you don’t know why an online reputation is so important, here is why.
Organic Search
Whether your business operates online or not is irrelevant, organic search online is the way that people are finding out about new companies and which business they wish to use. Let’s say that you are a plumber in Denver, when someone searches ‘plumber Denver’ you may feature on the search rankings and if your reputation is poor, nobody will decide to give you a call.
Social Media
Social media is an awesome tool which can bring in more customers to your business but it is also capable of causing a firestorm which could destroy your online reputation. Let’s imagine that you have a restaurant and one day a customer finds a fly in their food, they could share that on social media and within a matter of minutes the world and his wife will have seen the picture and shared it with their friends. You may have started dinner service with a positive reputation and by 9pm that centre reputation could be destroyed.
Reviews
We have always relied on word-of-mouth to attract new clients and that is still the case, albeit that reviews are now published online rather than through a friend or family member speaking to another. These reviews are so important and you need to be on top of them if you wish to maintain a positive reputation for your company online. Even if a negative review has been left you can still comment and engage with the person who left it, in order to fix the issue. If you can do this then you will be able to turn a negative situation into a positive one, but you must be aware of it in the first place if you want to be able to do this.
Sales
Ultimately it all comes down to how much money your company can make, if you have a positive online reputation then this will help you to make more sales and more money, if you have a negative reputation online then you will lose market share and make less money, it is as simple as that.
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