How to Repair a Damaged Online Reputation Today

No matter how popular your brand is or how honest you have been towards your client servicing through offering products and services, getting negative comments indeed remains the part and parcel of online business operations. Sometimes, your client writes a negative review about your company or its products and services without thinking about the effect of the damage.

So, you need to get such annotations to go out of search as negative comments online might very quickly damage your digital reputation thus bringing doom. You cannot delete negative comments by simply deleting them as unwelcome entries. There are certain steps that you must take to minimize damages caused by such unnecessary comments.

Whenever you receive negative or bad comments or online reviews which you want to be removed, start with focusing on the polite re-reviewing or commenting to make sure that while doing so you don’t dishearten even those who actually try to damage your reputation. In this digital business atmosphere today, you have online reputation management (ORM) solutions. This process professionally supports you to remove negative comments and to get such reviews out of a search for your benefit.

Effective ORM strategies help you minimize such damages. On the other hand, they start repairing your online reputation. Repairing the online reputation of any company or brand is not child’s play though. You require following effective and highly strategic planning plus their implementation to get the tasks done. It is equally a time taking process thus you must maintain patience while the process is underway.

Related: How to Remove Bad Reviews from Search Engines

20 Tips to repair your online reputation

Online reputation management experts who have teamed up with us and work on different projects have tailored the below mentioned common strategies. They are considered perfect solutions which can surely help you manage your online reputation. They would restore your online authenticity to the best. Apart from a cost-effective strategy, these would take minimal time to start showing results.

1. Research on what is being said about you or your brand

Firstly, try to understand what coaxed a particular person to start writing negative comments about you or your brand. Try to resolve the issues and request him/her to delete the negative comments. If the person is adamant or out of reach, then wait for the discussion to end. You can start the repairing process once the controversy ends.

2. Request to delete the comments or reviews

When you find something inappropriate about you or your brand, you should consult the site owner and request its removal. You must elaborate on your reasons for wanting the defamatory material to be removed and thus develop a rapport with the owner of the site to let one understands your point. If the information is inaccurate, you should explain that. Getting the negative feedback deleted by the review writer is the best solution. If not, then you should consider ORM service.

3. Apologize if necessary

Satisfying each client is next to impossible. So, apologizing can also work for you in such instances. One of the best ways is to apologize as quickly as possible. So, you don’t inflame the conversation ahead. Or you can also promise to refund the price.

4. Choose Link building

Create and launch a link building campaign through the websites, blogs and social media channels. It would be helpful to improve the ranking of your website and to dishearten the negative reviews. Use keywords and keyword phrases to rank higher in the search engines. According to search engine journal, link building is still the number one activity to improve the ranking of a website.

 5. Hire an ORM Agency

When you are busy, it would be useless or unnecessary to spend your precious time and resources in managing your online reputation. Instead, you must hire an online reputation management agency for the said purpose. Such companies would have a team to analyze your requirement to create the solutions which best meet your need as quickly as possible.

6. Generate positive content to boost online presence

Generate a lot of positive content about your brand and its products and/or services. It will not only you to improve traffic and support your ongoing SEO strategies, but also build your online reputation. In order to restore your reputation, you must generate positive content instead of suppressing negative reviews all the time.

7. Push down negative reviews that you can’t remove

There are situations, when you are unable to remove the negative content. In such a situation, you should generate positive content and optimize the content for search engines. Once your content starts appearing on the search engines, then the negative content will automatically start going downwards.

8. Earn positive reviews

You should learn ways how to generate maximum Google reviews for a brand. Earn and appreciate positive customer reviews and thus you can push the negative reviews down in your search results. If you get a master in dealing with the unsatisfied customers, you will start getting positive reviews in no time.

9. Get Local

Take the advantage of local search on Google Maps and other sites as Google gives priority to local searches now. While concentrating on local search, make sure you use only authoritative platforms and avoid spammy sites. It will also help you to repair your damaged online reputation.

10. Optimize Your Website

Find out the terms in which your website has negative reviews and optimize your website pages and blogs to counter those terms. A bit tweak in meta titles, meta descriptions and alt texts will help you improve the ranking of your own pages and thus you will suppress the negative reviews.

11. Be Transparent

Though showing your weakness is complicated, hidden or understated defects are supposed to be a primary cause of bad reviews. So, what strategies for repairing your company’s online reputation should be adopted—bogged down with this question? You need not bother any further. We have observed that transparency policy works—those businesses get the best results that make their weaknesses obvious but don’t stop there and explain the best to overcome them.

So, if you happen to be a small business, you should stick to these strategies for repairing your company’s online reputation. It has been found that even a little more transparency upfront win customers who are more forgiving, loyal, and will, in all likelihood, write positive reviews.

12. Before You Get Negative Reviews, Set Up Your Online Profile

You may try as best as you can, but this fact can’t be ignored that to please all the customers all the time is well nigh impossible. However, It’s also a fact that given the proper preparations, your business won’t be affected by bad reviews if you are well prepared to handle such situations. It might help you repair a damaged online reputation. You might be pestered with the thought of how to repair reputational damage. In such cases, the best recourse is to get out in front of the negative reviews by claiming and developing your online reputation sooner than possible.

You May Also Like: How Negative Reviews Can Impact Online Reputation & Organic Ranking?

Instead of waiting for bad reviews to appear and then hurrying to repair your online reputation, take the timely steps with a positive vibe. It is the best and most appropriate step to cope with the typical situation of repairing reputational damage. In addition, to help you improve a damaged online reputation, its additional benefits are worth counting.

13. Responding to the Negative Review in a Proper Way

For the business, negative reviews can prove highly painful and personal. But have you ever thought about how can you improve your online reputation to overcome such unwelcome situations? Responding the right way will pave the way for you possibly to help prevent damage to your online reputation and, at the same juncture, bring a significant improvement in it. It will equally help you fix the personal reputation repair for an overall solution that you should consider a positive sign.

Engaging a reviewer and establishing a human connection will help you find the customers’ minds changed drastically. You may feel a little startled to see how often a polite response to a bad review can change your reviewer, giving your business a second chance. Thus, you will feel pleased to see how you can improve your online reputation, in addition to fixing the personal reputation repair that will resultantly matter the most.

14. A Large Number of Reviews Helps

In business parlance, it has been observed that having many reviews can prove a highly effective tool and a beneficial affair. So, far as earning the trust of prospective customers and improving conversion rates is concerned. Therefore, for an online reputation repair, even if you get a negative review, it can be taken in the context of your dozens, hundreds or maybe thousands of happy and loyal customers. In the long run, it will help you greatly in fixing such issues to boost the business operations.

15. Don’t Pay for What You Can Get for Free

Make sure that your primary business profile on review sites remains free. You must avoid those services that ask for the charges to remove negative reviews or complaints, or it may even tempt you with the promises to “manage your reputation.”

Intending to rebuild a damaged brand, it is equally important to avoid those sites that apply charges on the number of reviews you collect. They may even force you to collect a certain number of reviews for earning higher star ratings. Rebuilding a damaged brand requires you to adhere to the essential tips and focus on the positive elements.

16. Create Social Media Profiles

It is no hidden fact that pushing the harmful content down in search results is an online reputation management’s main and vital goal. This way, you will help to fix a lousy brand reputation with support through social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, to name a few. Go ahead and create a variety of social media profiles to help them regularly update with new content. It will ensure that this is what people find first when they search for you or your brand. Once you have fixed a lousy brand reputation, the harmful content will go down in the search results.

17. Create YouTube Channel

No one can afford to disagree that video is king in the present world we are living in. Google search algorithms favour video content, and so do they tend to rank higher in search results. If you want to bolster your ORM efforts further, create a video blog instead. Go through the Tips to rank your videos on YouTube to get ranking and thus traffic.

18. Earn More Positive Reviews

It is undoubtedly the best way to improve your reputation. Keep in mind that the number of stars won’t improve unless you get maximum positive reviews. Great reviews should outnumber the negative ones by a large margin. It will pave the way for your reputation to bring in more leads, and customers get ensured. You should also ascertain the first step to fixing a bad brand reputation. Once you know this and handle the scenario, you should prioritize implementing the plans to obtain new reviews from satisfied customers.

19. Keep Your Eyes Peeled

To let the negative reviews hang out there for an extended period without responding to them is indeed detrimental to your reputation. To repair the damaged reputation, there are a couple of ways that keep an eye on the mentions of your business. The most notable among them is Google Alerts. Suppose you don’t have it yet. Set up that now without any further delay. Once such damages get repaired, it’s time for you to count on the reviews coming in.

20. Correcting Reputational Damages

Reputational damage can have devastating impacts on organizations—from small to powerful multinationals. Companies can have their ups and downs caused by disparate factors. They may lead to far-reaching consequences. Companies whose reputation was damaged overcame the crises by the crisis management strategies that they implemented. Suppose the companies whose reputation was destroyed failed to handle the situation. In that case, their fate could be the same as that of the companies that had to fight aggressive reputational concerns, leading to billion-dollar losses.

Final Say

Whether you manage a company or you are a celebrity, it is obvious that you would be prone to receiving negative online reviews and feedbacks. The moment you get such things, you need to find out the ways or hire a company to take the comments and reviews out of the search. Negative comments will not only mar your reputation, but also decrease your sales. Vendasta reveals that 84% of marketers believe that they have to build trust to survive and grow in the future

Reputation management services would also prove helpful to improve the ranking of your website. So, you can opt for it for dual benefits. If you do not wake up at the right juncture, you might end up paying a very high price later. There are many organizations offering the service, but a bit of carefulness and evaluation strategy will help you get high-quality services from professionals at cost-effective rates. SEO Content India is also an emerging company for a number of online reputation management services, including celebrity reputation management, brand reputation management, among others.