A positive business reputation is critical for ensuring a long-lasting, durable customer base. Consumers want to buy products from brands they trust, and they want to feel good about the products they buy. What’s more: People who love the brands they buy from will often recommend those brands to others. Cultivating a positive reputation online can help your company build a larger consumer base and a more well-known name in your industry.
There are many things you can do to make this happen. By managing your reputation online, using smart search engine optimization tactics, and by working with a company of experts like Status Labs, you can take proactive steps to cultivate and manage a good business reputation.
Build a Positive Brand
Building a positive brand is the first step to ensuring a positive reputation. There are many steps to building a positive brand. Understanding your brand, enhancing the customer experience, being good corporate citizens, and creating positive content are all things you can do to build up a brand that consumers recognize and trust.
Understand Your Brand
Conduct research to learn more about your brand. Consumer perceptions of your brand may be different from the brand you intended to cultivate. During your research, learn more about who your customers are and what they say about your brand.
Enhance the Customer Experience
Know your brand’s unique selling points, vision and values, policies and goals. Once you understand what consumers think about your brand, you’ll be able to speak with them more directly, either to reiterate the brand they know and love, or to help direct their perceptions in a useful way.
Show integrity when working with customers. If your brand is built on quality and customer care, then make this your company’s priority. Take steps to ensure that your products are as high quality as possible, and refine your customer care policies so that any clients who purchase from your business will have a good experience from start to finish.
Once you know your brand, take actions that are consistent with your brand. Maintaining consistency makes your company seem more trustworthy and can help deepen client’s loyalty over time.
Demonstrate Corporate Responsibility
Ethical companies will enjoy a good reputation. There are many things you can do to demonstrate corporate responsibility, and they don’t have to be grand gestures. Recycling waste products, using recycled materials, donating to causes you believe in are all small things you can do to demonstrate corporate responsibility. Your customers will want to know that you’ve taken these steps, so make them aware when possible. Label your recycled shipping materials, for example.
Create Positive Content
Put positive content on your website to tell your story. What is your brand? What are your company’s origin stories? What does your company stand for? How can your company help clients? Addressing these issues and others can help create positive content that can bring in clients and capture their attention. Use articles, press releases, blog posts, videos and more to build up your content library that will rank your website higher in searches.
Manage Online Reviews
Managing online reviews is an important part of reputation management and can help ensure that only positive content appears on the first pages of internet search engines when people look up your business. Here are a few ways to help accomplish this.
• Know which channels your customers use to publish reviews.
• Monitor online reviews.
• Respond to reviews using a consistent message and voice.
• Learn from negative reviews and develop better products.
• If possible, dedicate a team of people to managing your online reviews.
Manage Your Reputation With SEO
Use SEO to put your website first on the search results when people look up your company online. Using good SEO can be challenging, so it’s best to work with a team of experts like Status Labs. A team of experts will structure your website for clarity, using keywords in titles, tags and content. This will help increase your website’s ranking and keep it at the top.
Suppress Negative Search Results
Although it’s not as simple as it sounds, you can suppress negative search results by implementing tactics to push positive search results higher. This can be done with SEO and through backlinks. It’s always best to use a white-hat approach when trying to suppress negative content.
Most important is to remember the importance of using good SEO tactics and creating lots of positive, relevant content. Using these methods can help ensure that you’ll maintain a positive reputation online.
