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How to Deal with Negative Online Reviews

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Online reviews are a cornerstone of how consumers make decisions whether to buy a product or not.  If you see a product that you want, you will read through the reviews to make sure that you are going to be getting what you need from the product.  If the product website does not have reviews, the odds are good that you are searching online for one that does have them.  But what if you are the business that is getting reviewed?  There is a certain level of expectation that you are not going to have 100% positive reviews, right?  Here we discuss some ways that you can handle negative reviews online.

The Site Does Not Matter

It does not matter if the review was posted on a very well-known site or one that you might have never heard of, people will find it online.  That means you have to take all of them seriously and get a plan in order so that you can defend your business against them.  The first time that you see a negative online review about your business you are probably wishing that you had an online public relations degree.  Build a plan and stick to it and then reviews will eventually get taken care of on all the sites they are posted to.

Contact the Review Site First

Depending on the review site where you found the negative review, you might be able to contact them about it.  Take a minute and search through the site to see if you can find contact information relevant to your review and how to handle it properly.  If you think the review was added by a competitor, you may have a leg to stand on to get it removed, but the process will have to be fool proof. 

Join In and Engage The Reviewer

If the website that you find the negative reviews on allows you to respond to them, take a minute and do just that.  Being able to explain the situation to them and possibly clear up the reasons they left the review is the first step to repairing your reputation.  There is not really any need to hire a public relations expert for this, but an intern working towards an online masters in public relations might not be a bad place to start looking for help.

Always Encourage Positive Reviews from Customers

In many cases, and to keep things fair, you might find that negative reviews are not going to disappear from the internet.  If that is the case, you can combat them by asking your future customers to leave positive reviews if they are satisfied with your business.  There is nothing wrong with asking for some help if they are truly happy with your services.  Over time, this will push the negative reviews and bring your overall average rating up, helping your business.

Take a minute to take a look at your business and if there is anything that might cause a negative review.  There could be a few easy fixes that you can do to keep the negative reviews to a minimum.  Good luck!

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SEO Tools

7 Tools to Improve Your SEO

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Improving the SEO for your business is very important. When potential customers search for your products and services you obviously want to appear as high in the search engine rankings as possible. In order to do so, your SEO has to be better than your competitors. Google and other search engines will rank what they think is relevant to what is searched for. Therefore, you have to make sure Google thinks your business is relevant to rank. The higher ranking you get on Google, the more likely you will be to drive more traffic to your website. So, what do you do and where do you start?

BrightLocal’s 7 SEO tools

BrightLocal is a company that specializes in SEO tools that help businesses grow through the effective use of search marketing. Today, BrightLocal have more than 20,000 customers worldwide using their 7 SEO tools.

1. Local Search Rank Checker

The first tool is the Local Search Rank Checker. It tracks your ranking on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo and it covers both organic and local search rankings. You have the opportunity to set up this tool to run a report automatically every month or week and you can compare your result to previous reports. Decide what settings will work best for your business. Finally, the report is also available for you to download. Keep track on your ranking and make sure it goes up!

2. Local SEO Check-up

The Local SEO Check-up tool provides a fast and comprehensive audit of a business’ local SEO set-up. It’s a complete local SEO audit tool that runs more than 300 automatic SEO checks. It enables you to speed up your SEO audits and it only takes 5 minutes to set up! You get a clear and accurate report within 15 minutes which you can share directly with clients and prospects. The things this tool checks includes: inbound links, domain authority, your presence on the most important local directories, social media, and Google Places.

3. Google+ Local Wizard

You use Google+ Local Wizard to quickly analyze you Google+ optimization and benchmark your business against your top 10 local competitors. You can also see your ranking on Google+ for your key terms.

4. CitationTracker

CitationTracker is a tool that helps you find, track and manage your local citations. A citation is a listing for your business on a third party site, for example; on a review site like Yelp. By using this tool you will get help with your citations in four different ways. It will help you find existing citations, locate old and incorrect citations, spy on your competitors citations and track the change you make to your current citations. You can also find new citations by locating your top 5 competitors and list your business on the same site!

5. CitationBurst

The CitationBurst tool helps you if you don’t want to go through the labours of manual citation building yourself. CitationBurst will do it for you! It gives you the chance to submit to multiple directories at one time and help to generate listings on local, general and niche directory sites. Pick what sites you want to submit to and CitationBurst will complete the submissions for you within 14 days.

6. ReviewFlow

What ReviewFlow does is that it locates and monitors online reviews on important directories and reviews sites. Using this tool makes it possible to find existing reviews and track all new reviews you receive. ReviewFlow keeps track on all major review sites such as Google+, Yelp and Tripadvisor. By collecting reviews from all sites the report makes it easier for you to read and comment your reviews. You can schedule the report to update monthly, weekly or even daily.

7. ReviewBiz

The final tool is ReviewBiz. It gives you the opportunity of adding a ReviewBiz badge to your website. Create and customize your button and copy paste the code onto your website. By doing that, your clients can easily click-through to a review site of your choice to read and add reviews about your business. Positive reviews will boost your local ranking!

SEO Tools

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