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These days, it is critical for any business owner to monitor their company’s online presence and know how their brand resonates with existing and potential customers. The metric used to measure this part of marketing (and brand) is often known as your reputation score.
Knowing your reputation score not only gives you a broad overview of your brand’s online performance and sentiment, but can also create a powerful starting point to boost your image, generate leads, increase sales, and so on develop critical social evidence needed to build consumers. to trust.
Below I’ve put together a list of factors you can use to estimate your online reputation score and better understand your brand footprint on the web.
Related: 7 Powerful Ways to Boost Your Brand Reputation and Recognition
What factors should you consider when calculating your score?
While there isn’t an exact formula to calculate your reputation score, you can collect data from a variety of sources to help shape and understand your brand’s overall online impact. Here are five factors to consider as you add up your score and how you can use them as you measure your larger branding efforts.
1. Customer Reviews
Few things influence your score and attract more online attention to your brand than customer reviews. Search engines, niche industry specific review sites and general review pages are everywhere. Your score can vary drastically from page to page and bad reviews are inevitable. How you deal with it is much more important.
Related: Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Worry About Your Business Getting Bad Reviews
Most consumers comb through 10-15 reviews before taking the next step in the sales tunnel. So keep a close eye on your reviews and develop a review management strategy. The more you know about the customer experience with your brand, the more valuable feedback you have to improve it.
2. Employee Reviews
Sites like Indeed and Glassdoor allow current and former employees to rate your company anonymously. Many job seekers base their decision to apply on employee ratings. If they use this information to gauge your company’s reputation, so can you. Here are a few questions to consider when counting employee ratings in your reputation score:
- Are there more negative than positive reviews?
- Can you find similarities in the negative?
- Does your current work environment reflect the comments left by employees?
- Do reviews bring to my attention things that require a change in leadership tactics?
Related: 5 Highly Effective Leadership Traits That Even The Best Leaders Can Forget
Transparency is a valuable business asset and modern consumers will turn their backs on a company accused of mistreating employees. So no company can afford to ignore employee reviews.
3. Local listings
Local listings have a major impact on your business’ reputation score, especially as it outperforms competitors in local search results. For example, if you own a hair salon, search for “get a haircut near me” or “hair salon near me” for a quick overview of your visibility on local search pages.
Related: Expand your marketing reach with Google SEO and SERP doing the heavy lifting
How do you improve your local search ranking and, by extension, your local search reputation? Start with your local listings. Is the information up to date? What do the reviews look like? Almost all consumers click on links that appear on the first search page. Therefore, your SERP position clearly indicates how you rank on local search pages.
4. Long-tail search terms
Long-tail keywords contain between three and five words to attract consumers looking for answers to specific questions. Ranking well in a long-tail search can have a significant impact on your overall reputation score and conversion rates.
Scoring yourself long-term terms is as simple as typing questions or phrases relevant to your industry and common among consumers. Once you know how you rank, you can develop SEO content to improve your rankings and position your brand higher in the industry.
Related: SEO and content marketing is the perfect marriage for your business. This is why.
5. Social media presence
Your social media presence often has a major impact on your reputation score. And in an era where so many consumers interact with brands on sites like Facebook and Tik Tok, it also tends to consume a large slice of the brand reputation pie. For example, a single viral complaint video or data breach can turn your business upside down in an instant. In addition, customers use social media to connect with companies and will not hesitate to make their experience public.
Your social media presence also yields a wealth of data. With efficient analysis, you can paint a more complete picture of the quality and quantity of attention your business generates. This is also a place for requesting reviews and resolving issues you discover through them.
How can you improve your reputation score?
You can use collected data to benchmark your business against competitors and develop better outreach strategies. Consider some steps you can include in your approach to boosting your reputation:
- Ask for more positive reviews by asking for them yourself or using a service to get them.
- Reach out to your customers more often and show them that you value their experience over your bottom line.
- Create high-quality content to drive convertible traffic to your website and social media.
- Answer good and bad feedback professionally and quickly.
Your reputation score can change just as quickly as your marketing strategies. That’s why consistent monitoring is key to staying in control of your brand reputation and addressing issues before they become more credible threats.
Related: How To Deal With Negative Social Media Comments
Worried about your reputation score?
Building a successful brand and influential online presence requires a multi-channel approach to improve customer experience. Businesses of all sizes can benefit from brand specialists and staff dedicated to online review management. When online engagement increases and customers are excited about your products or services, growth is on the horizon. Monitoring your reputation score is an effective means of getting you there.
