How to Improve Your Brand’s Online Reputation

Every company, whether they are an e-commerce business or not, has an online reputation. In many cases, shoppers will research your brand before completing their purchase with you, so being proactive in reputation management is imperative to the health of your business.

Today, we’ll look at some ways to get an overview of your online reputation and most importantly, we’ll share some tips on how to improve it. With a strong reputation, new potential shoppers researching your business will be encouraged to complete their order with you.

Research your current online reputation

Improving your online reputation begins with getting an overview of its current state. Begin by checking your own customer review score (rating). Assuming you collect service reviews, do you manage them and keep track of your rating?

If you don’t collect reviews, we’ll get to that shortly. Otherwise, begin by searching for your brand’s name and domain in Google and see what pops up.

Once you’ve done that initial search, include additional words related to feedback in the search of your brand. For example, type “your brand/domain” and the following words behind it:

• reviews
• ratings
• reputation
• experiences
• feedback

Most of these searches will most likely bring up some review sites. Bigger brands might even have some video reviews in the results (via YouTube) as well, but let’s focus on the reviews and ratings sites that contain customer reviews from normal online shoppers. After all, these can be the most influential to consumers, especially for smaller and medium-sized businesses, as they often appear at the top of the search results.

Google display ratings in the OneBox (top-right) as well as in the search results.

Aside from the big review platforms, see if any bloggers or influencers have talked about you. Continue scrolling the search results and check your social media platforms as well. Has anyone tagged you recently? Make sure you check in on this. It could be great news to capitalise from or it could be something negative, which you might want to address.

Once you’ve got a great overview of your current online reputation, you’ll know where to focus your efforts. Let’s take a look at some of the most common tactics:

Make sure your Google Business Profile is up to date

If you haven’t claimed your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business), make sure you do. It can directly impact what is seen in Google, particularly with brand-based searches. Consumers that search for information about your brand on Google are often shown Google OneBox – that “box” that appears at the top of search results. In brand searches, it displays your brand information.

For that reason alone, it is one of the most essential elements of your online reputation. What Google knows and displays about your shop can help form the first impression on users researching your brand.

If you own a physical shop, you can include more images of your shop. This can boost trust and improve foot traffic. Whether you sell online or offline, you should make sure your phone number, address, logos, opening hours, and anything else is accurate and up to date.

If you want to learn more about Google Business Profile, consider downloading our whitepaper:

Collect your own customer reviews

As we mentioned earlier, there are probably a few review services already collecting reviews for your online business and displaying them in Google's search results. However, it’s also important to collect your own online reviews and display them directly on your site.

Outside of friends and family recommendations, consumers rely on customer reviews more than anything else. If you think about it, it makes total sense because customer reviews are social proof; not marketing lingo or buzzwords coming from the brand. It’s honest advice from fellow consumers and, therefore, deemed quite trustworthy.

In fact, a recent survey (The Digital Trust Report) from Trusted Shops revealed some interesting information:

• 66% of respondents said positive online reviews influence them to make a first purchase in a new shop
• 90% of European consumers agree that genuine reviews increase trust in a company
• 79% of respondents read customer reviews before making a purchase (most of the time or every time)

You can read the report itself for even more insights:

Customer reviews can generally be broken down into two types:

• service reviews
• product reviews

Both are important, but they benefit your shoppers and your brand for different reasons. In fact, Google treats them differently too, so you should aim to collect both.

Impacting your online reputation in search engines

Although Google is important for your online reputation, customer reviews are the source of what Google displays in terms of star ratings, so actively collecting reviews (with a Google reviews partner like Trusted Shops) will influence the ratings that appear in Google.

As we mentioned, Google treats service reviews (aka seller ratings) and product reviews separately. Service reviews generally pop up when customers research your brand as you saw in the examples above. However, if a user searches for a particular product rather than your brand, the search results may well display Google Shopping ads, which often appear with product ratings. And if multiple retailers sell the same thing, the user can also see their service ratings.

Impacting conversions on your site

Customer reviews are the next best thing to having a personal recommendation – heck, sometimes they’re even better. Displaying customer reviews directly on your site is like having a friend (or a very kind stranger) inside the store with the shopper.

Why wait for them to get on Google to research your brand? If you ran a physical shop, would you rather have the shopper leave your shop to get a second opinion from a friend or have the friend come to the shop? If the customer leaves your shop, they might accidentally discover one of your competitors or forget about their purchase altogether.

Make sure they’re well informed of your online reputation as soon as they step foot in your digital shop, so you should strongly consider collecting customer reviews to display directly on your site.

Source: Meaco

However, consumers do still go to Google on many occasions for a second opinion, so choosing a reviews provider that is a Google partner is important as well. Not only will it impact your reputation in Google searches, but if you run Google Ads, you’ll also be able to show your star ratings there, a proven conversions booster.

Encourage customers to give you more feedback

Collecting customer reviews is one thing, but to really impact your online reputation, you’ll need to do it proactively.

Why?

Because consumers tend to be motivated review writers when they are unhappy. In such cases, they don’t need to be asked to leave a review. They're proactive here on their own.

It’s the happy customers who generally don’t leave reviews unless they’re asked, but they’re the key to improving your online reputation.

Therefore, you should be proactive by using a review provider that automatically sends review invites to your customers.

Depending on the niche you work in and the nature of your products, there is even an ideal time to send your review invites to boost the probability of getting a response.

For example, if you sell a lawnmower, you may need to give users an invitation a few days after they’ve received the product. An item like that will probably not be used on the first day after receiving the product. Therefore, if you ask for a review too early, the owner might forget about your request by the time they’ve actually used the product one week later.

Therefore, it’s important to be able to customise the timing of your review requests.

Likewise, some customers might need a friendly reminder to leave a review with you. A reviews platform that can track this automatically and then send reminders to the customers who haven’t left a review with you yet is also a great feature. It can lead to a substantial boost to your total number of reviews.

With customisation features, you can test out what timing works best for your shoppers.

What about the other review platforms? In order to build even more trust with first-time shoppers, it’s important to have a harmonised online reputation, especially when it comes to Google. If the user sees a 4.3⭐ rating on Trusted Shops reviews but only a 3.4 ⭐ on Google or Trustpilot, that may also be a red flag to some shoppers.

With products like the Reputation Manager, Trusted Shops Business Members can send out review invites that direct customers to different platforms like Google Customer Reviews and Trustpilot (even if your shop is not a member). This will help them boost their customer ratings across multiple platforms and influence how shoppers see their brand.

Monitor your feedback

Once you’ve got a good influx of customer reviews coming in consistently, it’s important to monitor them. Reviews are a great marketing tool, but don’t forget that they’re a source of valuable feedback as well.

Have a lot of people complained about slow delivery? Time to investigate. Maybe there are a number of comments that have had issues with a specific product. It might be time to replace the product or speak to the manufacturer.

If you’re a new shop with a relatively small number of customers, you can probably do this manually. However, if you collect a high number of reviews, artificial intelligence tools can help you analyse your reviews to get a better overview of your customers’ experiences.

The Sentiment Analysis is a tool that does exactly that. It can comb through all your reviews instantaneously and give insightful data to help you get an overview of what your customers are saying about you. 

Having a complete overview of your customer reviews will give you amazing insights into what your customers actually think about your shop. This makes it easier for your to actually improve your business and boost your reputation even more.

Improve your customer service and product quality

Once you’ve begun monitoring your customer feedback, the next step would be to start taking action. After all, there are some small things you can do to improve how shoppers see your business, but there are certain things that require real planning and development.

Customer reviews can reveal so much about your business. As we mentioned, online reviews can be broken down into two types: service reviews and product reviews. This is where you can begin thinking about optimisation.

The feedback in your service reviews should normally reveal insights into things like your customer service, delivery, payments, packaging and things of that nature.

Recommended reading:
A Guide to Different Customer Types for Sales & Customer Service

Product reviews will therefore give you insights into specific products. Once again, take this feedback and look into improving your product line. Not only that, but you’ll even be able to improve your product descriptions if you notice certain patterns in your product reviews.

Another added bonus of acting on your product reviews is that you can also reduce the number of returns. The mere presence of product reviews informs users about your products and the experiences and use cases that others have had. This leads to a reduction in purchases from customers who end up returning the product.

Become more transparent

There are a number of small things you can do on your website to improve your trustworthiness and therefore your online reputation.

For example, you can make sure you have visible contact information throughout your website. Many online shops will provide a phone number (or two) along with an email address and/or a chatbot. Making the potential customer feel like they can reach you easily throughout the customer journey is a sure fire way to build more trustworthiness for your online shop.

By converting more customers, you will also boost your ranking alongside your rating, which will boost traffic to your site and provide even more happy customers.

You could also create an About Us page, which tells a bit of your brand’s story. By including this common page to your website, it provides an opportunity for your potential customers to know “who you are”. There are a lot of directions you could go here:

• tell the origin story of your brand
• tell the story of your employees
• explain the production process or the sourcing of materials

There are a lot of ways to go here, but telling your story in a clear way can help customers see your online shop in a better and more transparent light.

Additionally, make sure all your legal info is easily found in the footer. In fact, everything mentioned here should be easy to find throughout the website.

Recommended reading:
Storytelling in E‑commerce: Why Is It so Important?

Reply to reviews

Let’s jump back to customer reviews again briefly since it is the core of your online reputation.

While you’re becoming more transparent and improving your services based on customer feedback, you should make sure to let your customers know what’s happening by replying to them, particularly to their customer reviews.

Not only will replying to reviews strengthen your relationship with that customer, but it also sends a signal to future customers who stumble on this review that you take customer satisfaction seriously.

By staying engaged with your customers, you can improve customer loyalty and win over the ones still researching your brand.

Although you might assume we’re only referring to negative reviews, it also makes sense to reply to positive reviews. Even happy customers like to feel heard, so be sure to show your appreciation for them too!

Tools like the Smart Review Assistant make it easy to reply to reviews automatically. Thanks to artificial intelligence, you can provide unique and relevant responses to your customers while saving yourself both time and effort. Perfect for shops that collect a lot of customer reviews.

Leverage social media and content marketing

It’s no secret that social media can be very impactful to your brand image. With that in mind, your online reputation mirrors your brand image. Therefore, you should be leveraging social media to improve your online reputation.

There are many ways to build more trust with your users on social media. Much like your website and the other advice above, it’s important to stay engaged with your followers. You can begin by replying to their comments just like you would with customer reviews. Come up with posts that encourage them to like, share, or comment.

Did you get a great customer review? Share it on social media by adding a bit of pizzazz to the texts and publishing it.

You could also give users a behind-the-scenes look at your e-commerce business in some of your posts. That’s a great way to be more transparent.

Are there holidays coming up that connect to your niche? Make sure to incorporate some holiday elements into your posts. If you do work in a particular niche, you might also want to consider influencer marketing activities like sponsorships, review requests for unique products, or even affiliate marketing.

At the end of the day, it’s all about storytelling and you can mix a number of strategies together. That’s the beauty of social media.

Conclusion

Your online reputation exists across the web. It begins on your website by becoming more transparent with your contact info. Customer reviews being displayed is another big online reputation booster. Those customer reviews overlap with your reputation in search engines and other review providers. Being proactive about your reputation online can help boost conversions and this can domino into more traffic and even more sales.