Reputation House: Effective SERM Use For Handling Customer Reviews

It’s well known that people are much more willing to leave negative reviews that affect a company’s reputation. This is evidenced by statistics: on average, 15 Americans share their experiences of poor service, whereas only 11 people are willing to leave a positive comment. As a result, negative reviews appear more often in search results, so when potential customers enter branded queries into the search engine, they see comments with a negative tone.

How much do negative reviews affect the reputation, figures, and income of a business? Let’s go back to statistics: 60% of customers are willing to refuse to make a purchase or cooperate if they encounter a negative review about a brand or person. And only 5% of people look beyond the first page of Google, and the resource that is in the first place in the search results gets 31.7% of traffic.

But there is good news: it is indeed possible to control and manage people’s opinions on the web. You will achieve the greatest results if you turn to professionals – to the Reputation House agency for SERM. This is Search Engine Reputation Marketing, the value of which can be defined in one phrase: everything that has a negative impact on business should be hidden from the consumer.

Reputation House: Customer Reviews Are the New Driving Force of Commerce

One of the alarming signals that a company should definitely pay attention to is the large amount of online negativity. But before you start actively taking action, you need to understand who and why is spreading such information about you. If these are reviews of your dissatisfied customers, Reputation House recommends finding and eliminating the cause, identifying weaknesses of the company, its products, or its services.

The second possible reason is paid reviews from competitors. If before businesses used to spread rumors to free up a niche, now they are trying to destroy the reputation through online reviews.

It should also be taken into account that the unknown scares people no less than information about negative experiences. When a client is faced with a company that is unknown to him, and about which no one has written anything, he is highly likely to choose a competitor with at least a minimal number of reviews.

Even if you are satisfied with the overall tone of the search results, you should not rest easy. The Reputation House agency is certain that work on customer reviews should be done regularly to control the positive image of a business or person. The results are sure to please you: getting an extra star on Yelp leads to a 9% increase in revenue. And 49% of customers will only decide to cooperate if a company has a rating of at least 4 stars.

So if you want to attract the maximum number of customers, increase your income, and build a positive online image, you need to work with the top of the search engine results. SERM technologies from Reputation House will help you solve this task. The agency has been in the market of reputation marketing for more than 10 years, has 8 representative offices around the world, and has many successful cases of different complexity.

SERM: steps and outcomes

In order to manage online reputation, it is necessary to instantly react to the emergence of news about the business, changes in customer requests, and the general situation on the market. Therefore, it is not only current customer reviews that are taken into account when developing a strategy: Reputation House monitors the slightest changes in the informational space around the client’s business.

The agency staff follows a 4-step strategy:

1. Analysis. This is the first phase of work within the Reputation House’s SERM. Agency specialists study the weaknesses of the client’s image, analyze search results, and prepare comprehensive reports. Cooperation with the client’s marketing department is a prerequisite. Joint activity helps to identify what problems a service or product has and what requests consumers make more often.
2. Strategy Formation. The team prepares a list of resources where it is necessary to change the tone of the content. It determines what exactly needs to be displaced from the first page of the search results, how much content should be displaced, and what is better to replace it with. Tools are selected for each client individually, taking into account the task at hand.
3. Creation of positive content. It is not only about writing and publishing reputation reviews, although this is also an important and necessary component. A whole team of managers, editors, marketers, and copywriters works on the content of new comments, articles, and discussions. Content is created taking into account the tone of voice of the brand or person, their internal policy, and their desired positioning on the market. Experts at Reputation House publish customer reviews, biographies, releases, and other information on selected resources. They monitor how the audience reacts to the content and provide feedback. If inaccurate data or content that is aggressive in its nature gets published on websites, the agency’s employees make a removal request to the resource’s administration and provide refutations. Preference is given to pre-trial conflict resolution, and resorting to court is an extreme and rarely used measure.
4. Strategy Correction. This is a mandatory stage of work with SERM from Reputation House. Having completed the cycle of measures, specialists analyze the results of their work. They study what content received the greatest response and what channels were the most effective. The collected data set then becomes the basis for making changes to the strategy, which will be implemented in the next cycle.

Using SERM tools, Reputation House publishes only reliable information on the Internet. Each company or person has enough good qualities, successful cases, and strong positives of their product or service. This is the topic of the new positive content, which gradually displaces the negativity from the first page of search results.

Reviews determine reputation, but they can be brought under control. Then the level of customer confidence will increase, and the audience will become more loyal, which will lead to an increase in income for the company or person.