The online reputation of your brand is essential for its success. From Indeed to Facebook, you can find a variety of comments on websites that rank customer experiences. These public comments can affect how well your brand is received online.
BRANDefenders can help you deal with comments left on these sites that are affecting your online reputation. Below are ways reviews can impact your reputation when left on the five most popular review sites: Indeed, GlassDoor, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google.
How Review Sites Can Affect Your Reputation
Have you wondered how much power review sites have over your brand’s reputation? Websites like Yelp are swarming with positive and negative reviews, but people are more likely to leave a review describing a bad experience than a positive one.
When you see a company’s ratings on websites like Glassdoor, the reviews create an average star rating. Negative reviews can bring down the reputation of a brand. Low ratings on Indeed can bring down the reputation of a brand. When people leave Google reviews for products, they will bring down their reputation. Review sites are improving at requiring purchase confirmations or creating an account before posting. This is to cut down on fake reviews.
Negative reviews have a lot of power regarding people searching for a new job on Indeed or looking for a new brand to purchase from. Even reviews left on TripAdvisor can sway travelers from staying at a different hotel or visiting another park if they find locations with a better rating.
Consumers are more likely to trust local businesses with positive online customer reviews. The comments left by verified customers are comparable to suggestions from friends and family. This indicates that comments on review sites hold as much power as personal referrals, leading to a majority of a brand’s sales. This influence can encourage someone on Indeed to choose one job over another.
Suppose an influx of bad reviews is affecting your brand’s reputation online. In that case, BRANDefenders offers several solutions for repairing the damage they’ve caused by removing or suppressing these reviews with positive ones.
Why You Should Monitor Popular Review Sites
Word of mouth will always be one of the most powerful marketing tools, but the widespread reliance on review sites has a comparable amount of influence on potential customers. Negative reviews on trusted sites like Google can easily change someone’s mind about a business.
Trusted, high-profile sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor have been around for years. They have credibility and are used by a variety of users. Well-known websites like these are the ones you want to monitor the most as they have the biggest impact on your brand.
Some of the high-profile review sites include:
- Glassdoor
- Yellowpages
- TripAdvisor
- Foursquare
- Indeed
- Amazon
- Yelp
- The Better Business Bureau
- Angi
Knowing which sites to monitor based on your industry or niche is the first step to doing anything about it. There is most likely more than one website that you should keep up-to-date with, so do your homework on all relevant sites. BRANDefenders can help you determine which sites are the most relevant to your brand and provide resources and tools to monitor online reviews.
Once you have decided on the sites you want to monitor and the best strategies for doing so, you want to monitor them regularly according to the volume of reviews you’re receiving.
Monitoring websites like Glassdoor can give insight into team member experiences and affect hiring. Reviews left by employees on this site and Indeed can affect the application and turnover rates. It may also prevent customers from supporting your brand if they don’t like what they read about how you treat employees.
Turning Negative Publicity into Positive Publicity
Negative reviews are almost impossible to avoid. Every business has had to deal with its fair share of upset customers or fake reviews on its websites. One of the best ways to handle this situation is to respond to the negative comments rather than ignore them.
BRANDefenders can help you navigate the removal of negative comments or reputation management strategies regardless of your industry. The niche of your brand and the site can determine the best strategy, but it won’t prevent you from getting help.
Consumers are more likely to trust a brand that responds to negative reviews rather than ignore or fully remove them. Your first plan of action should be to resolve the issue, but that isn’t always possible. However, you can reduce some of the damage to your rating on Google or another platform by letting the reviewer know that you are empathetic to their concern.
Replying to reviewers with assurances or the offer to reconcile the issue looks much better to the person who posted a review and to readers considering your business. This may not be possible on sites like Glassdoor or Indeed, where previous employers use the site to review their previous work experience.
You can still respond to these negative reviews, but the approach has to be different from the one a Yelp business might take. Smaller businesses on these sites have more control over their customer experience and how they deal with concerns. Locations listed on TripAdvisor can clarify an issue brought up by a customer or make amends to a visitor who may consider returning for a second chance.
Serious customers can easily spot fake or defamatory reviews on Glassdoor and other sites. These comments can be ignored or suppressed because customers know which posts won’t offer them anything positive. This can help highlight the past comments on TripAdvisor and other popular sites.
Push For Positive Reviews From Verified Customers
Customers are more likely to leave a negative review after a bad experience, but you can incentivize customers to leave positive ones if you need to improve your ratings. You want to be diligent in pushing for positive comments on Google and other sites that your customers frequently use.
Most of the time, acquiring more positive than negative reviews will be enough to suppress the negative feedback affecting your average rating. BRANDefenders uses this as one of their many strategies to help brands recover and grow their online reputation.
However, this can be difficult to do alone, especially on sites like Glassdoor and Indeed that are used for team member reviews. You won’t have the same opportunities to get former employees to write positive reviews as you would for a product sold by a business or a popular destination featured on TripAdvisor.
The best time to ask for reviews is shortly after a customer has visited your business or made a purchase. Customers that have a positive experience may be emotionally motivated to take action and share their experience with others. Yelp is one of the primary sites customers turn to for these reviews. Pushing for these positive reviews can be as simple as pointing out a survey link on a receipt or encouraging customers to leave one on Google as soon as they get home.
Encouraging verified customers to post pictures of their product or experience can help encourage others to post their own or engage with those left on the site. Posts featuring pictures on TripAdvisor give potential customers a better idea of the experience they will have at a location. The same thing helps customers using Yelp.
Don’t Be Tempted by Fake Reviews
Brands have the option to turn to fake reviews that can be left on Google and added to their website, but this is typically considered unethical. Some websites can remove brands from being listed on their sites because fake posts violate their terms of service.
Replying to negative comments on any site your brand is listed on or getting enough positive comments from verified customers to suppress the negativity can be your most powerful marketing tool. The team at BRANDefenders has the experience to find the best strategy for your brand to improve its reputation organically.
Websites like Glassdoor and Indeed may be more challenging to navigate due to the nature of the system, but a brand’s rating can be organically boosted with the right solution. Customers can easily spot fake reviews left on Yelp or other sites. This can cause your brand to lose authority and business. A TripAdvisor post that leaves relevant details or references a different location will raise alarm bells for potential customers.
BRANDefenders offers a variety of strategies that will prevent the temptation of soliciting fake reviews on sites like Google to make your brand more appealing. You can’t make everyone happy on Glassdoor, but you can do your best to encourage positivity in the future.
How BRANDefenders Can Help You Monitor Your Online Reputation
Not every post on Yelp or other websites is going to encourage business. But BRANDefenders can help you outweigh some of the bad with the good. BRANDefenders use guarantee strategies to help your brand keep a positive reputation. Our team helps you monitor what’s being said about your brand online and how to respond to what’s being said in a way that works out in favor of your brand.