Your brand's online reputation is not helpless from negative reviews on consumer complaint sites. Though it's nearly impossible to remove them from the Internet, there are online reputation management strategies you can use to deal with these pesky complaints.

Don’t engage site or users directly

Don't send emails demanding to have the content removed or engage with the person who posted the content in an attempt to resolve the issue. The main reason: both users and content posted are not verified.

There have been reports of users posting fake reviews in an attempt to solicit money from businesses they criticize. A few of these sites also claim to offer paid services to remove bad reviews but business owners should be extremely wary of any site offering to remove or edit a review in exchange for cash.

Get on social media

If one of these negative reviews makes its way onto the first page of Google’s search results, create social media profiles to bury it. Not only do active and relevant social media profiles outrank negative reviews, they also provide your past, present, and future clients with better information.

Even if you already have a Facebook and Twitter account, don’t be afraid to expand beyond that to Instagram, LinkedIn, and even Quora. It’s also a good idea to get on Foursquare, Google+, and any other sites where reviews are verified by real users and not nameless people who don’t have to be accountable for what they say. Remember to update these regularly to ensure they stay at or near the top of the search result rankings.

Encourage positive reviews

You need to encourage customers to post positive reviews on verified review sites. Like social media profiles, positive reviews from credible review sites will outrank negative reviews from defamation sites.

Depending on what your business does, sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Foursquare, Angie’s List, or even Facebook are great places to have satisfied customers leave reviews. Of course, getting them to do that can be difficult.

Consider offering a discount to customers who post a review of your business on any of these sites. Doing this will help you climb up in search rankings while increasing customer loyalty.

Combine efforts with an SEO strategy

To optimize your brand's search results, you will have to create positive content that is search engine optimized. Aside from social media profiles and good reviews on verified sites, optimizing search results for your brand start with its website. Promote a positive message about your brand with benefits and customer reviews.

Strengthen your website with regular content such as newsletters, case studies, and blog articles. Content is about building consumer trust by being helpful. An informative blog is the best way to start.

Avoid “selling” your brand on every piece of content. The best practice is keep this down to 20% of your overall content, or two out of ten blog articles.

Try posting helpful videos on your company’s YouTube and be active on all your social media. It also won't hurt to partner with influencers on social media platforms such as Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram to spread positive comments about your brand.

These are just a few strategies companies use to manage their online presence. For more ways to get positive search results, call our team of experts today.

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Are there surefire ways to attract prospects to your website and to convince them to sign up for your product or service? The first step is always to make your website easy to use. Read on for 5 tips that improve user experiences, site trustworthiness and conversion rates.

Make it mobile-friendly

More people are now surfing the web on the go – via smartphones, tablets, and laptops. If you want a piece of this traffic, you need to make your website's design responsive to all mobile devices.

To give your visitors an enjoyable mobile experience, make sure your website design fits the screen of any device. Additionally, all elements of your website – pages, resources, actions, and so on – should be easily accessible. If not, visitors will get frustrated and click away to a competitor. And who can blame them? You’d probably do the same.

Make it easy for customers to contact you

This means displaying your phone number in the upper-right corner of every page and providing a simple, easy-to-find contact form. While some people prefer not to give up their email address for fear it will be picked off by spambots, it can serve as another contact option for those who hate web forms. Ideally, you will provide more than one way for your customers to contact you. Give your visitors a choice, make it easy, and they will come.

Keep it simple

Have you started to notice a theme here? Proper web design can be summed up in one word: easy. People are always busy. They don’t have time to navigate a complicated website, dig through dozens of pages to find a contact number, or try and figure out what it is that you’re selling because your mobile site doesn’t display content properly.

So when it comes to design, simplicity makes sense. When producing a simple website, every page, word, and image you create must have a singular purpose: to get visitors to contact you. Don’t waste time distracting them with excessive information, silly games, or flashy animations. Instead, have a nice clean layout so they can understand what you’re offering quickly and can contact you with a click.

Include personal photos whenever possible

Say you have to choose between two different websites. They both sell the same thing and look virtually the same. The key difference is that one uses real photos of the owner and his or her staff, while the other uses generic stock images of business people. Assuming images from both sites are of the same quality, which one will you more likely choose? Undoubtedly, the one that looks the most authentic.

So next time you have to choose between stock images and shooting photos of you and your staff, invest some time and money in quality pictures taken at a studio – it’ll be worth every penny.

Move social media icons to the bottom of the page

Everyone loves throwing social media icons on their websites, and it’s not a bad idea to show your credibility. However, if you put these at the top of the page, your visitor is more likely to click on them immediately. Sounds cool, right? Wrong. When this happens, you just created an exit for them to leave your site and never return – and we all know how easy it is to get distracted on social media.

Instead, place your social media icons at the bottom of the page or in the footer area. Remember the goal of your website is to convert. If your visitors leave before they get a chance to explore your services, content, and offerings, you’ve lost them before you even had them.

Need a website or another solution to enhance your digital presence? Give us a call and leverage our IT expertise for your business.

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