How Reputation Management Can Help Keep A Competitor From Sabotaging Your Business
Imagine this: you own a thriving business
Imagine this: you own a thriving business. You offer a better product than your competitors, and at a better price to boot. Your business plan is solid; your for capacity for expansion nearly limitless, because your online sales are strong. You pride yourself on your customer service and willingly post feedback, comments and reviews on your own website.And then in happens. One of your competitors, frustrated at consistently coming out second best in sales, decides to sabotage you. Posing as a customer, they log onto various online consumer review sites--possibly even one on your very own website, and starts spreading negative information. They may claim you exaggerate in your advertisements, that your product is shoddily built or fails to perform at all, or that they never received their order but were charged for it anyway. They may lie about your customer service, claim you refused to honor your promises, kept them on hold, or refused to answer emails.
If they're really dedicated, they may create or utilize a popular blog to discredit you as well. Some of these sites receive hundreds or even thousands of visitors each day, and some of their fans might reprint or summarize the negative content on their own sites, or through social networking sites like Facebook.
Before you know it, unfounded complaints have blossomed into negative information scattered across a hundred websites. Now when people search online for your company name or product, at least half of the first few pages of results contain negative reviews or opinions. This is crucial because less than one in a hundred potential customers will look at any site beyond page three of the search results.
Your online sales plummet. Not only are you losing money right now, you're also losing the opportunity to impress these people and gain their repeat business. Even if your online reputation improves soon, these customers have already gone to your competitors, and assuming they receive decent service, there is a pretty good chance they will never do a web search for you again, and never hear all the good news about your product.
Finally, to cap it all off, the lack of customers means you have fewer people who can be impressed and write positive reviews, which is going to slow the recovery process dramatically.
What can you do to prevent this happening to you? The good news is there is a simple answer: online reputation management. This service looks through the search results for your product and company, and isolates the sites which contain positive information. Then, using a variety of techniques, they build these sites up in the rankings, moving them forward on google and other searches. Boosting these positive sites makes the good information more available to your customers, and pushes the negative ones back into those little-seen later pages of results.
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