How to improve your company's online reputation with SERM

A company's online reputation is the settled image of a firm, the idea of it that current and potential customers have formed. Its sources are everything people say and write about your company on the internet. 

Remember that whether people buy from you depends in large part on what they think of the brand. 

Monitoring and managing reputation matter more and more to a modern business. 

How is a brand's reputation built and developed? 

Any company's success is the sum of many factors. Among them: 

• pricing policy and loyalty programmes;

• the quality of goods and services;

• well-built marketing;

• good customer service, and so on. 

But even when all of those components are perfectly tuned, a company still has to work on its reputation. This is not about manipulating the truth. On the contrary, you often have to defend your good name against information attacks. 

A 2018 study showed that negative information campaigns carry enormous risks. They can drive away up to 90–95% of customers. 

A new marketing discipline appeared to manage an existing reputation and shape the image of new firms — SERM (Search Engine Reputation Management). 

Trust in any brand rests on: 

• the authority of the business as a whole and of the people who represent it;

• publishing useful and interesting content;

• mentions of the brand in a positive context.  

A reputation often forms naturally, and it can also be the result of a successful PR campaign. The ideal lies somewhere in between. What matters is that the company offers a genuinely good product. Without that, neither PR nor SERM will work. 

We also recommend reading: What is content consolidation and how will it grow your site traffic? 

How do you track your reputation and mentions of the company online? 

Reputation work starts with monitoring what people write and say about the company online. 

How do you measure popularity? The main tools 

To check how popular your brand is, we recommend Google Trends. It gives accurate data, works fast and is completely free. You can analyse a single query or compare the popularity of several brands. 

Figures here are shown as percentages. You can also compare a brand's popularity across geographic regions: 

Checking mentions on social media 

The second part of monitoring is tracking mentions on social media. There are two ways to do it: 

• go through social feeds yourself;

• use dedicated services, for example Google Alerts.  

The Google Alerts monitoring service will be the main tool of any SERM strategy. It shows brand mentions on social media and in industry publications. Thanks to that you can react quickly to reviews, settle disputes with customers as they arise and gauge your reputation. 

To use the service, first create a new alert. After that, set up notifications about new publications. 

Ways to improve a company's reputation

Once tracking is in place, it is time to move on to reputation work itself. Which tools should you use? 

Publish content with positive information about the brand

An unpleasant pattern holds online: people are far more willing to leave negative reviews than positive ones. The study we cited above found that after a positive experience 20–28% of customers leave a review. After a negative one, 34% do. 

So building a positive reputation is objectively harder. 

To improve a reputation, companies place positive reviews on industry sites and blogs.

Such situations call for covert marketing. That means the material must not look openly promotional. At the same time the content has to be honest and contain accurate, verifiable information. 

The best way to create content like that is to work with bloggers. They are given a sample of the product, or invited to use the service free of charge or for a nominal fee. Having tried the product or service, the blogger writes about their impressions. Naturally, the company does everything it can to make those impressions positive. 

It is also important to post a detailed comment thanking the author for a positive review. 

Shaping the search results you need

A 2020 studyby Status Labs shows that more than 80% of people study search results carefully before buying. Keep that in mind and make sure there are no negative reviews of the company in the top 10 results. 

If such information does reach the top of the results, it has to be pushed out as fast as possible. To do that you can publish: 

• detailed positive reviews from the company's customers;

• neutral comments;

• information noise that scatters attention. 

The strategy has to be chosen case by case. A sudden burst of new positive reviews will not work. It is more likely to deepen the distrust. 

Responding promptly to critical reviews 

Remember that negativity will come. What characterises a system and a company is not the mistake but the response to it. Statistically, around 45% of people are willing to use a company that responds to negative reviews and fixes its mistakes. 

Watch negative reviews closely. If the criticism is fair, put the situation right and apologise publicly on behalf of the company. 

Think about offering a bonus on your services as an apology, too. Just do not offer bonuses on the next order — that will be read as manipulation and an attempt to earn more rather than to compensate. 

Your company should have official accounts on every popular review platform. 

Working on site authority and trust in the brand

Site authority (trust) is one of the most important ranking factors. It depends on which sites link to your resource. The higher the traffic and authority of the portals and blogs that have linked to you, the better. A plain mention of the brand in the text helps as well. 

To raise brand awareness and traffic to the site, you can commission a PR article in an influential industry publication. 

The brand should match the needs of its target audience as closely as possible. That means constantly following what your buyers are interested in. Find out which resources they read, which social networks they use, which content formats they like. Use that information to get more traffic, raise awareness and increase sales. 

Being active on Facebook and other social networks 

Reputation management also includes work on corporate social media pages. If there are none, they have to be created, set up properly and filled with good, interesting content. 

Posts should not be purely sales-driven. Share reports on the events you have held, your achievements, information useful to customers. Together all of this builds the image of a company that cares about its clients. 

Reviews can be published on the site, on YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest. 

A YouTube channel will become a powerful source of traffic and a tool for building expertise. 

Work with your employees 

Relationships inside the company affect its reputation too. Remember that unhappy employees tend to write negative reviews about the employer. 

How an employer should build relationships with staff to improve the reputation of the business: 

• The company should have its own pages on job sites. It is important to describe every vacancy in as much detail as possible. 

• Inside the team, maintain a high level of corporate culture based on shared working principles, goals and mutual respect. 

• Incompetent and unmotivated employees should be let go quickly, with the process handled correctly in legal terms.

• If employees leave of their own accord, give them positive references and ask them to write a positive review of the company. 

When all of these points are in place, the mood of your staff and their attitude to the company will work in favour of the brand's reputation. 

Expert opinions for the media and industry portals

Placing PR articles is one of the main sources of income for media outlets and large industry portals. You can find out the terms directly from the editorial team or through specialised article-placement services. 

Journalist-request services are useful as well, for example HelpSMI. 

There, users can register as an expert in three of several dozen suggested topics. The choice shapes a feed of journalist requests. Give a detailed and informative answer and you will earn a mention of the company in published articles. 

It also makes sense to start an industry blog on your site. Always reply to readers' comments on your articles. 

Conclusions 

Managing a company's reputation is a complex process involving marketers, managers and even rank-and-file employees. Launching and running SERM often requires bringing in a team of outside specialists. 

Reputation management begins with tracking mentions and reviews online. Such publications need the fastest possible response, reinforcing the positive and offsetting the negative. 

SERM is relevant to companies in every field of business: 

• online shops;

• service companies;

• b2b projects;

• consulting and law firms. 

The main steps for improving a brand's reputation: 

• publishing positive reviews of products and services — such reviews can be collected from customers who have not commented before;

• pushing accumulated negativity out of the top 10 results and offsetting it with neutral and positive publications;

• reacting quickly to negative reviews of the company, analysing and fixing problem situations, improving service and communication with customers;

• asking site administrators to remove information that is demonstrably false;

• working on the mood inside the firm and building respectful relationships with employees;

• cooperating with the media and with bloggers;

• launching a long-term PR campaign. 

If all of these actions are carried out properly and the company works effectively, the business will improve its reputation considerably. The number of loyal customers who use your products and services regularly will grow as well.

With SERM you can protect your company's reputation from attacks by competitors, and that means protecting the results of years of work. Reputation management campaigns give a business a powerful competitive advantage.