Written by Don Sorensen. Don is an online reputation management authority whose expertise has been featured in the New York Times, USA Today, CNN Money, Forbes and other publications. Don has helped numerous direct selling companies improve their online branding efforts. He is an associate with Strategic Choice Partners.
Increase Sales by Improving Your Company’s Google Results
Does this issue come up in your company meetings? “When I search our company’s name in Google, I see negative websites. What can we do about this?”
Everyone should be aware of your company’s online reputation and understand that you can take steps to manage it. Your online reputation can have a dramatic effect on not only your brand perception, but also your company’s revenues.
Years ago, I met with a company that had a severe online reputation problem. When potential customers searched their company name, seven out of the top 10 Google rankings were negative. After a careful review of their rankings, and prior-year revenues, I determined that they were probably losing more than $2 million a year in sales due to negative search engine results. The company confirmed the fact that my estimates were indeed accurate—but low.
Direct selling companies face a unique challenge in protecting their online reputation. It’s something I’ve written about here before. And because your success or failure depends on not only how potential customers perceive you, but also how confidently your salesforce can share your brand with those customers, I want to cover the basics of managing and improving your online reputation.
What We Mean by “Online Reputation”
Your online reputation is determined by the top Google rankings a prospect sees when they do a search on your company name. If a lot of those websites have negative content and complaints about your company, it will automatically diminish your company’s reputation. For instance, if a prospect is excited about joining your company after talking with one of your Distributors, but then is exposed to negative results near the top of the rankings for your company name, even the best of Distributors has a hard time overcoming the reputational hit. But if they see a list of websites with positive comments and testimonials, they’re more likely to sign up without further hesitation.
Because most people rarely look past the first page or two of search engine results, your online reputation is determined by the top 10 or 20 search results.
How a Few Complaints Can Hurt Your Online Reputation
You might think that if you have thousands of happy customers, a few online complaints shouldn’t matter. But the math doesn’t work out that way.
Consider that a Google search returns 10 results on the first page. If just three of those are websites with complaints or criticisms, it means nearly a third of the search results are for negative websites. They may still be in the minority, but when a curious prospect sees a link that promises to reveal the “dirt” on a company, it’s hard to resist clicking through.
I know this sounds dire, but basic human psychology is at work here. All it takes is one negative review to give them a reason to say no to the opportunity.
What It Takes to Have a Good Online Reputation
Fortunately, there are steps you can take to manage your online reputation so you are not at the mercy of your company’s critics. Start out right by following these three steps:
Step No. 1: Accept the Fact of Online Reviews.
Short of outright slander or libel by the reviewers online, you really don’t have much legal recourse to make the negative postings go away. People have a right to complain, and these days it’s all too easy for unhappy customers to vent their frustrations and share their opinions with the whole world (regardless of how accurate you believe those opinions may or may not be).
When you see a negative review about your company, the instinctive reaction is to post a response to set the record straight. I understand the human need to respond, but you have to consider Google’s point of view. Here’s why:
Search engines rank various websites high for a few reasons, one of which is relevant content, especially when that content is updated on a regular basis.
When you post a comment on a website, you are in effect giving it new content. And if you get into a back-and-forth discussion with someone on a review website about your company, Google thinks “Ah, there’s a lot about this company here, so we’ll rank this website high for searches on their company name.”
Now when someone does a search on your company, they are even more likely to see the negative review. You want to avoid that. In fact, you want the websites with negative comments to slip further down the Google rankings so they don’t appear on the first page or two of a search. The next two steps help you with that.
Step No. 2: Focus on Getting Positive Content.
A major part of online reputation management involves pushing the negative websites off of the first page or two of a Google search. How? By posting positive content and getting those pages to rank higher than the negative websites.
You need to direct your marketing or PR department to make online reputation management part of their regular duties. That means they should always be looking for, gathering or creating positive content that can be used to continually update your websites. Don’t put everything onto one corporate website. Instead, set up different websites for different purposes.
For example, you can have a website for new distributors, a website about your charitable giving, a website about conferences and meetings, a website for photos and perhaps individual product line websites. This gives you a nice stable of websites that you have control over.
Step No. 3: Push Positive Websites Higher.
In the online world, your reputation is all about who owns the top-ranking results in a search for your company name. You want that space to belong to you—or at least be shared only with websites that have good things to say about you.
If you can do that, then the negative websites will be pushed off the first page of a Google search. And since very few people look past the first page of a search, those negative websites may as well not exist.
The best way to accomplish this is by performing search engine optimization on the positive websites to make them rank higher. Carefully review your websites’ content and the meta title tags to be sure they contain your company name. The magic of ranking higher in Google is relevant content and gathering a substantial number of links from other websites that point to your websites. These links are anchored by your company name.
There’s a lot to optimizing a website for search engines, and the algorithms change often. No single article can cover it all. It’s not always difficult to understand, but optimizing a website can be very tedious work. For this reason, my experience has been that it makes sense to offload that responsibility to an experienced third party. That said, there are definitely some basics you can manage in-house. Most companies don’t even properly address these most basics components, and doing so can help you make great strides relatively quickly.
The goal of getting all the positive websites to rank higher than the negative websites can be a hard one to reach. But considering how important your online reputation is, and how quickly sales can deteriorate due to negative reviews, achieving this goal is well worth the effort. In an online world, you could make a strong argument that it should be a primary focus of the corporate office. This is not always easy, and it can take many months of steady effort to achieve. Still, consider that the alternative is to let the complaints and negative reviews dominate the search results and trash your online reputation.
Managing your online reputation is just as important as keeping your books in order or delivering excellent support. It’s something you need to set aside time for, and assign a team to handle. By following these guidelines, you’ll be well on your way toward developing a positive online reputation that will improve your company’s bottom line.
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