How does online reputation effect your business Craig Murray DigitalImagine owning a business where outside the shop stood angry customers or dissatisfied customers complaining about your business. It would not do good for you or your business and in turn would drive business and potential new customers away from your premises.

The same thing occurs online when users post complains or bad reviews about your business.  Just like users being directed away from your store if people stood outside complaining, users may keep away from your website if when they search your business name , brand name or product name and see these bad reviews.

So your business website may show up in the search engines, but what if a customers bad review shows up below your listing or even above it? This would not look good for your company and users interested in your product who are presented with search results saying “avoid” or “keep away from” certainly will do that.

So why is it that so few companies pay much needed attention to their online reputation?

This is a hard question to answer, perhaps they don’t see it as a major concern. Maybe they do not even know it is their at all.  The reality is that the internet is a large place and users will always find information on a business if they need it. Keeping the information that they find on you positive is a very important thing t do and helps to drive even more business to your money site. Remember Big G is always watching..including review sites.

Why do people leave negative reviews and never positive?

This is one of the issue most companies are facing when actually paying attention to their online reputation. They can never seem to get their customers to  leave positive feedback about their products. This is the same with everything in life. Think about it, everyone knows that if someone is happy with a product or service  they very rarely give credit to the business from which they were satisfied with. On the other hand if the customer was unsatisfied with the product they will let everyone know and find ways to voice their anger.

This is just human nature. Think about it, if you were in the queue at your local post office and you were waiting for a long time and you were not happy with how long you were waiting , you would turn to someone beside you , without saying anything your face expressions would show how unhappy you are. You would make sure that everyone would know how unhappy you are.  However if you were in and out in to minutes , would you go around and tell everyone how great  the service was? Properly not.

So you can see my point it is a lot harder to get people to leave you positive reviews than it is to receive unwanted negative reviews. With the internet at the fingertips of people all over the world and with so many social media sites, review sites, forums blogs etc giving users an easier way to front their anger and share their experiences with their friends and followers, it is no wonder that more and more businesses are feeling the effect of  negative publicity online.

So how do we deal with this? how do we get users to post positive feedback and have search engines pick up on the positive news and not the negative? All this information will come in my next updated post on Tuesday September 11th