Does your business carry the Scarlet Letter? You probably thought those practices were over but today Google is marking thousands of businesses with a modern day equivalent of The Scarlett Letter and it will follow you around. It is called your online reputation and it will either attract customers or drive them away.
In the Nathaniel Hawthorne story “The Scarlett Letter” Hester Prynne committed adultery and her community forced her to wear a Scarlett letter A on her clothes so that instantly everyone meeting her was reminded of her short comings. Today, Google is doing the same thing for your business.
As customers go online, if they don’t like something about your business or if they like you a lot, they are likely to leave a review. This review will follow you around and will provide either a glowing report or announce to the world all of your short comings.
Google Maps
Doing a search on Google for the type of business you want to find will return a maps listing of business supplying that type of service. If you look closely you will also see that it gives review results for those businesses. Go to Google and do a search for a service like dentist, roofer, or electrician. Google will display what is commonly known as a maps listing near the top of the results. As each business is listed you will see under it whether it has reviews or not. Clicking on the notation for review will take you to the page that Google made. Now Google has made a review page like this for every business in the country and it is typically the first thing that shows up in the search. And there it is for every one to see, your reviews.
This works out well for you if your reviews are good, customers will be attracted to you. But what happens if the reviews are bad? In that case you have a Scarlet letter, a badge of shame, pinned to your breast just like Hester Prynne in that great novel.
Does your business carry Google’s Scarlet Letter?
Customers will shun you and call a higher rated business and why shouldn’t they? Your reputation has been ruined. Hester Prynne had no way to fix her problem but you do, there are strategies to improve your reputation.
A bad review can happen for a variety of reasons.
- It may be deserved.
- One of your employees may be having a bad day and not performing well.
- Your customer may be having a bad day.
You must address the bad reviews.
- You must address any underlying problems that the reviews point to.
- If possible, contact the review posters and make things right and see if they will rewrite the reviews.
- Put a process in place to encourage your customers to leave good reviews for you.
Google and other online review sites will not remove bad reviews so the idea is to get enough good reviews to push the bad ones down, and hopefully you’ll get enough good reviews to push them way down and out of sight.
What is your online reputation and what can you do about it? For the answers to these questions visit http://www.myreputationnow.com and sign up for our free webinar and use our free resource that will collect your reputation from all over the web.
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