Our marketing webinars are always awesome. We host 1-2 webinars each week. But last week our webinar with Michael Fleischner was particularly awesome. To watch the entire webinar click here, and to watch the other 70+ webinars in our webinar library, click here.
The purpose of this blog is to provide a brief recap of the webinar in case you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing. In no particular order, here are a few salient points:
Control Page 1 Of Organic Search Results
“The ultimate goal of reputation management is control. That way if something changes with the algorithms, you’re in control. Reputation management could be ignored in the past but today people are checking you out, they’re checking your business out. You can’t underestimate the importance of a clean online reputation. I like to think of Page 1 as your business card. It used to be just business URLs, now it could be videos, pictures, authorship and slides.”
Proactively Managing Reputation
“If you’re not proactively managing your business reputation, someone else is managing it for you. Everyday we get calls that someone says, ‘Hey someone wrote a negative review about me on Yelp, etc.'”
“The idea is to proactively manage your reputation instead of just responding when someone writes something negative about you. Your business can be destroyed if someone finds a negative review when they search.”
No Reviews
“No reviews can be worse than bad reviews. If you’re going to go to a restaurant and they don’t have ANY reviews. You’re not going to go that restaurant.”
Prevention
“Successful online reputation management begins with reputation. Focus on your Centers of Influence, socially and locally).
One way to do it is to give your unahppy customers a place to vent that isn’t in the public forum and online.”
If You Already Have Negative Reviews
“If somebody leaves a bad review you could, in many instances, leave a positive response. Or you could solicit positive responses to push that down. The other thing to do is to look at company assets–content assets–and optimize those to appear on page 1.”
“Local and social are big keys to managing reputation. Have optimized and updated accounts. Make sure you have accurate local listings.”
“The key is really listening and responding quickly to the noise that’s out there. What tends to turn into the biggest issues for a company is a negative review or bad customer experience that goes unanswered.”
Getting Reviews
“The goal of any site, but Google Places specifically, is to get at least 6 reviews. Once you hit 6 reviews it really starts to impact your organic rankings. Solicit feedback from your customers and have multiple reviews. I get the question all the time: which is better 1 5 star review or several 3 out of 5. I like to go with several 3 out of 5. The reason is that people are mostly looking to ensure there are not negative reviews.”
