In this episode, we will expand on all you need to know when it comes to managing your reputation online. In this day and age, a bad review on Yelp or Rip Off Report can kill a business. Maybe the word "Scam" even appears in the auto-suggest right after your name. You might have bad reviews out there and you don't even know, you just feel that the phone stopped ringing. This information is crucial to every business owner.
Online reviews have become the main factor in our judgment before we do business with anyone or even buy a product. You might don't even know what have happened, you just know that your phone stopped ringing. Without a proactive approach, you can sink down.
In this episode you will find these subjects:
01:00 General information about reputation management
05:00 Key sites you need to know about (like Yelp, Google My Business, Rip Off Report and more)
09:00 How to deal with Google auto suggest (If google suggests words like "Scam" or "complain" right after your business name)
10:00 Correction strategy
12:00 Important information for a call center
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Thanks for tuning in. We're going to talk today about reputation management. If you don't know what we're talking about, you definitely need to listen in because this could impact your business drastically. It's the difference between the phone ringing and the phone not ringing. It's the difference between actually having a company that's growing and having your employees and your team enthusiastic about where With your company, or people that actually want to go work somewhere else, this is so vital right now. I mean, so many people are concerned about their reviews and actually getting good customers. And this could actually take away customers that ignore it. So your reputation online is so critical to the future of your business. This should be number one, as far as your priority when you grow your company and your brand on Google, because in this day and age, they say that like 97% of people that are shopping online, actually look at reviews. And they look at what other people are saying about you before making a purchase online.
Right? Yeah. So I guess to get started, you know, what exactly is reputation management? And why is it so crucial today?
Yeah, so when somebody goes to look for a product or service, like let's say somebody was going to look for a construction company, and they were to go online, reputation management is doing all the things you should be doing anyway consistently to create content that actually supports your business and when people look at a website, they either justify why they want to do business with you, or why they don't want to do business with you. So if you give them an excuse to like work with your company, and you put out all your positive information, your testimonials, things like that, then people feel good about actually giving you money and actually working with you. But what happens on Google is the reference point of the customer visiting your site can really impact them on some subconscious level, where maybe now they're having doubts about whether or not they should actually do business with somebody.
So it can either negatively affect your business or it can be you know, what grows your business, right? So paying attention to these things is pretty critical these days. And now what happens when a company is passive with their reputation management?
Yeah, you know, most of the time when when people come to our company, it's when they're passive, right? Right. And they have this urgency. They feel the pain. Oh my gosh, I just lost a $27,000 sale. I need to do something about this now yesterday, it's a wake up call. Yeah. So, but nowadays, like people don't even have coffee with somebody, unless they actually Google their name like, they're not gonna come and meet them. So you're definitely not going to give somebody your credit card. If you like Google somebody and
best, of course, nothing comes up.
Right. So from a reactive approach, we have a lot of people that will reach out to us where they're on like a ripoff report or complaints board or their Yelp reviews. A lot of the people that do business with general public about a, you know, contractors, roofers, remodeling architects. Every time they're like, can you get any more reviews? You know, reviews have become so crucial in this day and age, when it comes to business. Probably even more so than a website.
Really getting into reputation management, you've given us a bit of a breakdown of what it is. Now going forward, how Can businesses be proactive about managing their reputation?
Right? So when when anybody wants a proactive approach and they want to start their company, there's a couple of key things. So first of all, your website needs to have a good first impression. They say that most people within three to five seconds judge whether or not they want to do business with you based on the impression of your website. I mean, they say you have to become what you want to attract. And so if you want to attract great customers, gotta have a great website. The other thing is the website needs to have things that build trust. When someone visits the site like testimonials, a lot of people have video testimonials. They have document documentary style videos, talking about the process of how they work with customers, and then credibility, I'm sure you know,
from the past and what was their experience working with you so testimonials are huge.
Also content like blogs. A lot of people say well, why do I need a blog and I think a blog if you do it the right way. It shows your passion about like the services that you Offer, as opposed to just a business out there to take somebody as money,
right. It's a fully comprehensive approach, and it has different angles, you know, and then it's also informative for the viewer, you know, they maybe they don't know what it is your company's doing and all the different aspects. So that's a great way, a great medium to kind of get the message across,
right, and having those in different forms, whether it be written videos, and also utilizing even images and graphics off of Yelp and Google reviews, social media, social media. I know a lot of people have this whole doubt or this fear that if I invest my time and my money into social media, is that actually going to give me a return. But social media is actually a really big trust factor and social proof, they say actually lends to a lot of people making purchases. So when people go to your website, a lot of times they'll click on your social media, which should be linked to your website. And then people get a little bit of a transparent parent like window into your company and kind of What what's important to you, so if they look at your Facebook and you're putting up helpful things for customers, you know, they feel like wow, they're really giving people value. So having social media, whether that be Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, to, again, give them reasons to do business with you, I mean, they say on life, the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. So it's really important to put the attention to detail in it and really put the care in your business because that will translate into getting more customers, right. And, you know, with content creation out, it also helps push out positive factors on Google, whether it be not just SEO, but when people go and search for your company. If you're creating this content, then what's going to happen is they're going to see a whole bunch of evidence they like you guys are excited about what you do. Right and people like to work with with excited people. So
I just read a recent statistic saying you know 45% of all potential customers are looking at young before they You've been decided to do business with somebody, whether that's going to a restaurant or choosing a car service or etc.
And these days, I mean, we have Yelp, we have Google reviews. You know, there's Angie's List. There's so many different ones out there. Yeah. So somebody actually ignores you know, their reputation. It could cost people millions. You know, we were working with a consulting company that was doing about $900 million a year, they estimate they were losing somewhere between 13 to $15 million a month, by the fact that they weren't even taking care of this, and they were actually on ripoff report. They were on complaints board, but ripoff report. If you're familiar with ripoff report, and you've been on this site, it's painful when you lose a client and they call you back and cancel or do a chargeback on their credit card. Because they're like, Oh my gosh, they're on ripoff report and people get scared. This silly thing that people don't know about. SEO is like when you respond to bad content, it actually drives the rankings up. And so I many times have to tell people listen, I know you're angry, I know you're upset, do not respond, do not comment on it. So it, it takes some strategy to like pull people back and do things that are actually going to drive the ripoff report down. Once you're on a ripoff report or a complaint sport, there's definitely urgency, because now it's impacting your bottom line and your revenue.
Yeah, it's it's something to deal with right away.
Right. So this this consulting company that was doing $900 million a year, literally within a month, we were writing about 500 social media posts, every single month, we were actually writing another 500 tweet, you know, Twitter posts every month. We were doing 60 articles a month and 1000 words each. And we did this literally for three years. They were in something we call the the Google auto suggest. So if I go into Google right now, and I type in, we'll put in some words corporate consultant. And see as we put in the corporate consulting, we see that there's a bunch of suggestions that come up. A lot of these companies that get on ripoff report and they have a lot of complaints. If let's just say the company was called pq R. Roofing, right, when they put in pq r roofing right after that comes up complaints, right?
Or scam, that's the first deterrent right away. Exactly. So that red flag for any potential customer is like, Okay, this is obviously writing really high, they must have a lot of negative reviews, exactly. They won't even get to the search page,
you know, that's going to impact that. And we've actually cleared the auto suggest, which actually has to do with creating a lot of content. And then we would post those on different sites like Tumblr blog spot, and there was so many different sites that we would post it on. I'll show you actually spreading
You know, throughout a bunch of different mediums so that Yeah, yeah,
like, here's a list of the content. And you can see how frequent it is. And so all these are all in the same day, but it just keeps going and going. And we're putting these up on WordPress, Storify, Tumblr, these are high domain authority sites. And this what this does is it creates what we call a digital firewall. So that way there when people type in the name of your company, now the content is coming up first versus like, all the bad stuff, right? And you've got to do it consistently. You just don't do it for a week. And you're good. And it takes time for it to actually happen months, creating a certain behavior. And then it takes a lot of work. It's it's not simple. Yeah, to get there, because what Google does is they look at the trends on your company, and then they start to auto suggests that so the question is, if you are on ripoff report, even if you push it down to number nine or number 10, the question is how far down Do you want the real Off report to be most people wanted on like the fifth page of Google. So nobody finds it. And I can tell you that I've heard some crazy stories of people that had huge deals that were happening. And then all of a sudden, the client went ghost, like, nobody wants to talk to you. And you have no idea what happened. Yeah. And this happens. I mean, the sad part with a bad reputation is Google can't send you a postcard saying, congratulations, you just lost, you know, $2.7 million last year.
Yeah. could happen within a week or overnight, basically, exactly.
I think we shifted into a society where like, every little thing of business is important, because of Google, and the microscope is really on,
you know, I mean, that's the thing. There's no hiding if you're doing for business. So it's exceedingly crucial to make sure that across the board, all those things are being met, and nothing is being you know, left, right.
So another site that they were actually on what's called pissed off consumer. And this is online consumer reviews. And you know, many times, people do all sorts of weird things. So that's why you have to like, really monitor like what's going on. So this is one called pissed off consumer. If you look right here, we're looking at Google My Business. Now, this is really important, because when you're trying to get ranked online, on a mobile platform, they call it the local four pack. Because a lot of times you just see the top four. But there's actually some ranking factors on Google reviews. One is like how many reviews do you have? So if somebody is out reviewing you, a lot of times they can show up before you again putting fresh content on there. And then having some kind of strategy in place with like your existing customers. There is actually a lot of different software out there, where when someone actually does business and transaction is process. Immediately they get like an auto email, like a leader review, right. The other thing I was We're going to talk about a little bit, if you're if you have a sales organization, or you have like a call center, or you're calling a lot of people, a lot of times people don't do any reputation management on their phone numbers. So like actually googling the name of your company, or googling the number, because like, if you're making a lot of calls in a call center, there's some preventative measures that you can do to actually switch out numbers. And so I think from a preventative measure, you should always check the name of your company. Because if you're not doing reputation management, and you're not building out your social media content, and you start to lose business, so you should have a Facebook In fact, this report that I was showing you with this one client, besides the content, we're putting stuff up on SlideShare. slideshare is actually LinkedIn. And a lot of business people on LinkedIn. We are also putting stuff up on Pinterest, and Pinterest is known to have a lot of you know, shoppers that are looking for information
visually dominated. Yeah helps a lot of designers or artists or people that are imaginary user creatives,
right? And then there's Twitter, we would do Twitter posts. Also YouTube. Videos are important by building out these links. Like for example, for one of our clients, they had about 700 videos, and we took 700 videos and we split it into audios. And then we pushed it out on 15 different platforms for podcasts. So if you take you know, 700 times 15 it's roughly 10,000 links, which most people never put up one or two links of a podcast. What happens is iTunes will come up above the negative stuff as you do this consistently. Now when someone types in the name of your business, they get all these great things like iTunes and Stitcher and I Heart Radio and YouTube and you know the activity doing it consistently really does pay off and then people go wow, this is a great company devil podcast.
I could listen to this I it shows they care. It shows that there again, well rounded and Exactly,
put some time into it.
Okay, and then going into content creation, you know, at its core, what exactly is content? What does it do for us? What? Why is it so important right now?
That's a great question. You know, many people get lazy. And they'll just copy and paste, but they'll find something online. In fact, I worked with a business owner who I actually did reputation management for two. But what he used to do is he had all these different companies, and he would find a website that he liked. And he would copy the paragraph and just put it on his website, right? Like he had, he had people reach out to him going, Hey, what? There's actually tools out there. One is called copyscape. And so when we start working with clients, we actually do a scan of their website to see if they have any duplicate content, right. And Google doesn't know whether to rank you or the other person, so they won't rank anybody. And it doesn't actually help you. So that's why you need content is important. The other thing is where you put content, like putting it on your blog, and your domain is important, but also putting it on high domain authority publications, whether that be like a, you can put articles on Facebook, Evernote, LinkedIn, really, when we do reputation management, we do SEO, we just do it for your brand. And what is SEO, SEO stands for search engine optimization. And what that means is when you go to Google, and you put in high end, organic catering, then you don't just come up for that you actually have to write content. So your website has to have content about organic catering, you've got to write blogs that are on site, you've got to build some off site.
And in those blogs, you know, using target keywords that you know, you know, the potential customer or client is going to type into Google so right you know, the forethought to think oh, somebody might search for you know, avocados and we want to do 20 different variations of Avocados and this county and avocado, catering and all this kind of thing, right? That's going to generate a lot more results than just
plugging in your business name. But then also, there's software out there where you can actually look to see what is being searched. So you should do that before you start building content. Because how do you know what kind of real estate the build if you don't know who's gonna show up, and I'll actually tell you like, what volume of searches will happen per month. And then we also use a tool called sem rush. And you can put keywords in there too. And it'll actually give you suggestions and give you like different types of content and questions that people are asking. Right? So you have to know like, where the traffic is. The other thing that you want to do to when you're doing SEO is actually looking at your competitors. Because most of the time if you start from scratch and you like try on your own, you're going to cost yourself a lot of money. But by using sem rush and some of the tools that our agency has, we can actually look at your competitors ads and try Cut that path, so that we're actually on
the right track and then develop a comprehensive strategy that's going to target all these things. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, to close our seminar, so to speak with us.
Yeah. You know, the hardest thing about this when I talk to owners of companies, is you can't measure all the business you lost, because those people aren't going to call and tell you, so many owners that call me up and this like really gets in their side like a thorn. I mean, there's so many sites out there. Even for jobs. I mean, sometimes, even when I hire people for my company, like, I'll Google their name, and I'm like, oh, there's a lawsuit. Right? Like, oh, man, I wonder what happened there. You know, and so they show up in her mug shot. Yeah. I mean, I, I know even companies these days, a lot of them do background checks with everything going on in the world. And they also they do Google Chat.
They also do Facebook checks now. Exactly. They're looking at like, as a whole. What is this person likes It gets pretty intimate.
reputation management can literally like haunt you. Like, I know people, they get up, you know, early in the morning like, Oh my gosh, it's still there.
Well, and it plays into the psyche to you know, right. It's not what your
reviews are like, the oxygen of business is. Exactly.
Well, awesome. Thank you for all that.
Yeah. And if anybody, you know, wants information, we invite you guys to reach out, you can message us on social media, we'll make sure that we interact with you. And if you haven't, if you have any questions that you want, I mean, we're happy to like respond to people and help them out.
It's a relatively new thing that everyone's kind of now understanding is huge. But if you can have the knowledge, like what we just talked about, that's gonna make or break,
whether you hire us or not, like do a free evaluation and let us just open up, you know, open up what is being worked on, as just a third party. advice, right? Because many times, like, we'll talk to companies, and they'll be like, I'm totally fine. I got it covered. I got somebody in house or I'm working with the company. And then we get in there and we look at it, and we realize they're missing 90% of what we do. And that owner would have never had any idea that they weren't getting all the other stuff, right. I know a lot of these calls that we do people go, oh my gosh, this calls worth like, $10,000. Like,
is that a free consultation? Yeah, it's
a free consultation that we do for people. And then it's totally up to them whether or not they want to work with us. I mean, cuz what we do takes a lot of work. It's not like pressing a few buttons right here and there. We put a lot of thought into it. So if someone doesn't have the right mentality, which I call just like a long term marathon mentality for business, then they're not going to be be in business too long. Right? Yeah.
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