How Important Is Local Reputation Management?

Local businesses typically rely on a smaller audience to drive sales, which means that maintaining a spotless reputation is critical for success. Taking this into consideration, a local company may not be as resilient to negative online reviews as a company acting regionally or internationally. 

Misinformation can spread quickly in a local area, and what’s said online can spread like wildfire among your audience. 

The solution?

Local reputation management.

Managing your online reputation can help safeguard your name, preserve your online standing, and by extension, improve your overall brand perception in the eyes of the local community. 

What Is Local Reputation Management?

Local reputation marketing (commonly known as reputation management) is the practice of building and maintaining a positive brand perception in a local market. It’s the most effective way of ensuring prospects looking for products or services in a particular area get a good impression of a business when looking for them online. 

A solid local reputation marketing strategy can drive local success for small businesses operating in practically any industry.

What Are The Basics Of Reputation Management?

It’s super common for businesses to have a burning desire to focus more on their online standing but have no idea where to begin. 

You can start with a simple Google search. The logic here is that you first need to understand how the target audience perceives your brand when looking up your company. Put yourself in their shoes and note down everything you see. Before long, you’ll figure out the best approach. 

Impact Of SEO On Your Reputation

But what does SEO have to do with local reputation marketing?

A lot. 

You can manage the discourse around your business by optimizing your digital properties for the keywords your customers use when searching for you online. This not only helps “bury” the negative information but also increases your overall visibility and improves user experience. Your prospects will have an easier time finding the information they’re looking for instead of going through irrelevant content. 

Since you’re looking to target a local market, localized SEO may be your best option. Using location-based keywords allows you to target a laser-focused audience in a particular area instead. General keywords are rather difficult to rank for, so if your main goal is improving your local reputation, you should dedicate all your time and effort to ranking locally. 

How Important Are Online Reviews?

In this day and age, online feedback is everything. According to fresh stats, 98% of customers revealed online reviews played an integral role in their buying journey. These numbers make perfect sense. 

Remember the pre-internet era? We all asked our friends and acquaintances for recommendations. This rarely happens nowadays as Google has become our go-to source whenever we’re researching a service or a product.

Positive reviews are a good indication of the quality of the offering, value for money, and overall convenience. They signify to your prospective customers that real people see value in what you’re offering and that choosing you is the right choice.

As a business, you can pay attention to common threads in what your customers are saying to further improve your delivery and pinpoint where you should focus more of your attention.

On the flip side, negative reviews, although seemingly defeating, are also a good opportunity for growth. Sure, an unhappy customer may seem like the end of the world and yes, if left unaddressed, this review can cause you to lose business. Fortunately, you can remedy the issue through local reputation marketing, which transforms a negative review into a method of identifying common pain points in the overall customer experience. 

You can use this data to make adjustments necessary to boost your brand perception and improve customer satisfaction - slowly improving your service and minimizing the chance of having more unhappy customers. 

How To Manage Your Online Reviews

It’s straightforward:

To boost your online reputation, you must grow on highlighting your positives while working to minimize the damage from any negative reviews. Here are some of the best tips:

1. Track Your Online Reputation

At the core of effective reputation management is tracking your current online presence and monitoring the sentiment of your brand. This can be overwhelming considering the number of review platforms you must track.

Luckily, there is software that can unify the feedback on all these platforms into a single dashboard. With a tool like ReviewArm, you’ll be able to manage everything in one place without shuffling between multiple review platforms.

Plus, you will receive a notification when your business gets a new review, allowing you to react consistently to any form of customer feedback, negative or positive. 

2. Always Respond To Reviews

Responding to reviews is critical if you want to maintain a positive brand image. This is relatively easy for good reviews as you only have to say “thank you” while responding to negative feedback calls for a nuanced approach. 

ReviewArm has got you covered here too, as you can automate this aspect of managing your reputation to save time without sacrificing the quality. Our in-built AI tool automatically crafts the perfect response with just a single click by using the information in the review. The results are never the same, and the auto-generated response will perfectly address the issues mentioned by the reviewer. 

3. Generate New Reviews

Since a single negative review can affect your overall rating, you must generate a consistent stream of new positive feedback. This is easier said than done as happy customers often forget to leave a review even.

However, by timing the review request when your customer is at their happiest and simplifying the process, you can significantly increase the number of customers who leave positive feedback on your review pages.

With ReviewArm, you can send out automatic SMS or email requests, allowing you to amass a higher amount of reputation-building reviews.

Manage Your Local Reputation With Ease

Combining SEO with review management is something that will form the crux of your local reputation marketing strategy. As such, using technology to speed up the process and automate some of the repetitive tasks will pay off in the long run. 

The biggest benefit of using tools like ReviewArm is the consistency you’ll achieve. Many businesses that manage their reviews manually end up eventually giving up due to the laborious nature of the tasks. Yet, with a tool in place that does most of the work for you, you’re more likely to stick with it, making ReviewArm the logical way to build and manage your local online presence. 

Want to take ReviewArm for a spin? Start your free trial now.