Reputation management

Online reputation management: a beginner’s guide for SMEs

Online reputation management (ORM) is the practice of monitoring and improving how your brand is perceived across the web.

If you’re a small business, online reputation management can improve trust, attract new customers and even grow your business.

Whether you’re concerned about negative reviews or just want more control over what people are saying about you, ORM is a good place to start.

What is an online reputation?

Your online reputation includes anything that people will find when they search for your business online. This includes Google My Business reviews, social media mentions, media mentions and Reddit posts. 

More recently, it also includes AI-powered search results. If you’re not sure what you online reputation is, the easiest way to find out is to read your business’s Google search results.

Why does your online reputation matter?

Whether you have a large business or are a SME, people are talking about you online. Just as negative reviews can turn customers off your business, cultivating a positive reputation is also important. Your online reputation helps to:

Build trust: Positive reviews are one of the best ways to organically build trust with prospective customers.

Influence buying decisions: Most customers will choose a highly rated or well-reviewed business over an unknown competitor even when your prices are higher.

Rank higher in AI search: The more ‘credible’ your business, the more likely you’ll be included in AI-powered summaries or search results. 

Reduce sales effort: Positive reviews help new customers go from considering a purchase to making one a lot faster.

What does online reputation management involve?

ORM isn’t about stopping negative press, it’s about being part of the conversation. Managing your reputation includes:

Monitoring the conversation

This might sound creepy but hear us out. If you don’t know what people are saying about your business, it’s harder to make improvements. Monitoring tools are also useful as they can help you avoid bad press (like scams using your business’s name) before it becomes a problem. 

Media listening tools allow you to gather content from across the internet — often in real time — about your business. There are lots of ways to incorporate these into your ORM strategy. 

• Google Alerts: These alerts tell you every time your business name or product is mentioned. It’s an easy way to stay on top of good press and increase awareness around your online reputation. Google Alerts are free to set up, and you can track as many words or phrases as you like.
• Sprout Social: Lets you manage all aspects of your social media from posting content to monitoring all tags, mentions, and replies in one place. Sprout also lets you set up hashtags so that you can monitor words or phrases linked to your product or brand. 
• Meltwater: Gathers intel on your business from across the web. Meltwater tracks, analyses, and measures earned media (the stuff you haven’t paid for) and makes it easy to stay on top of real-time mentions of your business.
• Tracksuit: Tracks brand awareness. While it’s a tool more suited for marketing than gathering intel, it’s an incredible tool for tracking how people think and feel about your brand and helpful for tying data to your brand marketing. 

Monitoring and responding to reviews

Online reviews are more important than ever, especially to SMEs. Changes to the Google algorithm mean that the more positive reviews you have (both on Google My Business and in general across the web) the higher you’ll rank in AI-powered search. Your ORM strategy should include:

Protocol for responding to bad reviews: Bad reviews suck. While you can’t delete them, you can respond intentionally. If you are at fault, your business should reply with an apology and an offer to correct the situation. If you’re not at fault, you can reply by politely addressing the miscommunication. The goal should be to reply and move the conversation offline as fast as possible.

Responding to good reviews: Don’t forget to respond to the good reviews too. It’s not just polite — customers are more likely to trust brands that respond to reviews in general.

A strategy for generating more reviews: Asking for a review at the right time is one of the best things you can do. Reputation monitoring software like Birdeye send automated review requests. They also make it easier to manage negative feedback.

Responding to customer feedback

Managing your reputation isn’t just about responding to the bad stuff. If you’ve got social media channels, direct messages or enquiry forms, you should be engaging and responding to messages on a regular basis. Otherwise what’s the point of keeping these comms channels? 

Social media replies: People are wary of AI or bot-generated replies. While you don’t have to reply to every message on a social post, make sure when you are acknowledging or responding you’re not just using a copy/paste response.

Direct messages: If there’s no one to monitor Facebook or Instagram messages, you might be better off disabling these features. If you’ve got your social media accounts linked on your website or GMB, expect potential customers to use them.

Email forms: If there’s one account you don’t want to ignore, it’s your form inbox. You or your team need to reply in 24 hours to anything that hits your enquiry inbox.

Suppressing negative search results

Bad reviews are one thing. What’s more difficult is bad press — especially when it’s published somewhere that you can’t respond. Negative articles and Reddit complaints can also be tricky because they can appear in organic search results. There are a few ways to deal with this:

A strong SEO strategy: The stronger SEO and AEO for your brand is, the less likely one bad review or post will appear above your brand in organic search. Consistent, fresh content — including blogs posts, articles and new reviews, will help your business rank first on Google.

Content that uses negative keywords for good: If your business is trending for all the wrong reasons, using the same search terms and keywords can actually help dilute the bad press. 

Monitoring positive content

Online reputation management isn’t just about dealing with bad press. Positive stories, mentions and user generated content build trust with your audience without you having to do a thing. You should also think about:

Reusing user generated content: Promoting UGC is a great way to show that you care about your customers. Make reposting and responding to Instagram Reels and TikToks part of your content strategy.  

When to stay in your lane: Positive content is great but be wary of inserting yourself into the conversation. Responding to positive comments or reviews on places like Reddit or that random tech-review forum you monitor can come across as creepy.   

Need help managing your online reputation? From AEO strategies to software for automating the review process, drop us an email at hello@ambitious.co.nz to see how we can help.