Steps on how to overcome negative online reputation

Here are steps on how to overcome negative online reputation

• Begin with Introspective Analysis
• Assemble All the Facts
• Sort the Facts into Three Groups
• Build an Action Plan
• Execute an Action Plan

Begin with introspective analysis- if your reputation has tanked, then you need to take some time to reflect on why you are in the predicament.

Why did your reputation plummet? Are your products and services lacking, or do you have below average customer service? Maybe you have seen customers complain about their experience on your website.

Assemble All the Facts

Gather all mentions and information necessary regarding your brand on the web. Tools like Mention and Radian6 and Google alerts are great for gathering what’s being said about businesses.

Sort the Facts into Three Groups

Now that we have the data in hand, we are going to sort it into three main groups..

Categorize results into three groups:

1. Positive – These are easy to spot and also the easiest to take action on, because there is very minimal action for these findings. You will, however, want to make note of some positive feedback because this will help you identify some of your strengths and will leverage your sharing power on social networks.

2. Neutral – These are the middle of the road comments, reviews, opinions where users were neither ecstatic nor displeased with your products or services. Just like negative feedback, this will serve as insightful information.

3. Negative – These are the most detrimental and the highest priority for getting your business reputation back on track. Make a list of the different areas of concern. This will help you sort out where to begin. For both negative business reviews and negative content on the search engine results pages (SERPs), put strong websites as a higher priority because they have more visibility and will be harder to fight. Assess the strength of a website by checking its domain authority.

Build an Action Plan

How you plan to improve your reputation- kindly refer 15 ways to improve your online Reputation

 Execute an Action Plan–

First Phase

It never hurts to ask. Many times, website owners will be happy to remove the content.. If there is failure to remove results, the next step you may want to consider is to actually move forward with legal action (depending on the situation). For client review that doesn’t meet the review site guidelines, you can write an email to the legal or customer service department. If it’s content showing up in the SERP,

Second Phase

Find strong websites with high domain authority (DA) to share positive content like the BBB, Chamber of Commerce, and social sites like Google+ and Facebook. This gives you an opportunity for increased credibility and more importantly an opportunity to push down negative results in the SERP. The trick is to fight back with higher DA websites than those that are showing the negative content in the SERP.

For example, if you have negative content coming from hubpages.com (DA 88), you can fight it by placing content on blogspot.com (DA 93). This is not a guaranteed method, but it works a good majority of the time if you create better content, promote it, and have patience waiting for it to kick in. It works even better if you build some links to your new content.

Third Phase

Address negative feedback with real time responses on all review sites, blogs, and social accounts. Whatever you do, do not get into a commenting war, become defensive, or offer ill-informed responses. This only digs a deeper hole and will worsen the situation.

Even if the person making the claim is inaccurate with their information, it’s your job to amend the situation, regardless of who is right. Maintain composure and review the following pointers prior to responding.