Importance of Reviewing Your Company’s Online Reputation: How and Why?
Strategies to improve a company’s online reputation are as vital for its success as offline reputation strategies. However, it’s not easy to discover what brand image you’ve built in the online space.
Customers have dozens of ways to express their opinions. That’s why some brands deploy various strategies ranging from review monitoring to tracking social media mentions.
If you are wondering how and why to review your company’s online reputation, you’ve come to the right place. Here’s everything you need to know about it.
Why Online Reputation Matters?
Customers in this day and age are comfortable using the internet. They often research products they want to buy. Most of them extend their research to learn a thing or two about the brands that stand behind the products.
You stand to lose a lot of your potential customers if your online brand image is low. The same goes for your potential business partners. Online reputation is one of the strongest signals that affect customers’ purchase decisions. All of it makes reviewing and improving your company’s online reputation via various processes such as review monitoring is very important.
What kind of issues should businesses monitor online?
Most of the business leaders and owners are unhappy about their company’s online reputation because their company is perceived due to their Google page one search results. The way of communication has been changed a lot with time, and there are many online risks that businesses should monitor online. Let’s see those issues which can affect any business online reputation.
Negative Reviews Online(GMB reviews or any other listing reviews)
Almost all mid-level and small size businesses have their GMB(Google my business) listing which plays an important role in online reputation and bringing customers to your physical address.
If customers give you negative reviews on your GMB listing then that can be a concern for your business. Positive reviews about your service, product, or business will help you to rank higher on the listing locally and you will get more customers.
Sometimes our competitors give negative reviews about us so businesses should aware of that and try to fix those false negative reviews online.
Social Media
Social media is the mirror to the audience about your business nowadays. Most of your potential customers are on social media platforms so every business should keep their social media profiles up to date and reputed. Businesses should be aware of the risks surrounding potentially using false or defamatory information and other risks.
If any bad information goes viral on social media it can harm your business a lot and your online reputation will be damaged a lot.
Removing Negative Reviews and Content Online
Maybe your competitors are publishing fake reviews and negative online campaigns about your product, service, or business. The content can be in the form of blogs, negative online content on social media platforms, bad review publishing.
So businesses must check from time to time that no one is publishing any content about their business.
The best way to track that is using google alerts simply set alerts for your brand name, products related names, etc on which you want to track the online content publication. And then you can track and takedown them easily.
Things You Must Pay Attention to
The online space is vast, which makes it really hard to know where to look. As we mentioned earlier, customers share their experience with your company in various places. Here are the most important things you must pay attention to.
Online Reviews
Online reviews are the first place to comb for your brand, products, and services mentions. There are several major online review platforms to target. However, if you want to cover all possibilities, you should consider extending your research to less popular ones as well.
A technique businesses commonly use to do it is review monitoring. There are two ways to do it – manually and automatically. We will come back to it in just a moment.
Social Media Mentions
Consumers also love to chitchat about their shopping experiences and share them with others on social media. Half of the planet’s population uses social media platforms regularly – it’s an excellent spot to look for your brand mentions.
They often wind up in comments sections in public consumer groups. The tricky part is identifying where to look for.
Blogs
Consumers’ blogs are as old as the blogging industry. There are lots of people out there that make their living by reviewing and comparing products. If your product, service, or brand as a whole gets a negative spotlight on some of the highly popular blogs, your online reputation will suffer a major blow.
Keeping tabs on popular blogs and looking for your brand mentions is very important. You can learn what people think about your products and services and address negative feedback as early as it emerges.
Monitor Online Sites
There are lots of forums and specialized review websites where consumers can leave their comments about the products they’ve purchased. It’s essential to monitor review sites if you want to completely cover your grounds and monitor your brand’s online reputation.
What is Web Scraping?
While web scraping sounds too technical, it really isn’t. It refers to a process of extracting data from online sources. Web scraping leverages scraping bots, a specialized software able to imitate human user behavior to enter a website undetected, find the target data, and store it on a pre-configured drive (local or cloud storage).
Web scraping encompasses a wide but highly targeted initiative. For instance, if you are running a review monitoring operation, you can configure scraping bots to only look for reviews and extract only those that mention your brand name or specific product or service category.
How Web Scraping can Help With Review Monitoring
Web scraping can help with review monitoring in a couple of ways. First and foremost, it can enable you to run an ongoing review monitoring operation without getting temporarily or permanently banned from review websites.
Scraping bots can appear as human agents and avoid being detected by anti-bot software on websites. They are often deployed via residential proxies because these proxies have legitimate IP addresses attached to a location in the real world.
Web scraping can also help you go through millions of relevant reviews in a short period. You can use the scraped data to analyze consumer sentiment or discover what exactly your consumers don’t like about your brand, products, or services. This data empowers you to respond to customer reviews and properly address their concerns quickly.
Finally, you can use web scraping as a competitor analysis tool. Via review monitoring, you can learn about the mistakes your competitors made in the past and make sure that you don’t repeat them. All this data can help you build and maintain a stellar company’s online reputation.
Conclusion
As you can see, maintaining a good online reputation can help your business thrive and build trust with the consumers. As long as you pay attention to the online locations we went through and use web scraping to comb through the data efficiently – you’ll have everything you need to keep your online reputation pristine.