Whether you are a business owner looking for ways to manage your reputation online or you are looking for information on how reliable a company is before partnering or just buying from them, there are many ways to check out a company’s internet reputation.
We are in the digital era; everything you need to know about anyone or anything is one quick Google search away. Do you want to know how to check out a company’s online reputation? Stay tuned to find out.
What is Internet Reputation?
It’s the initial impression a company gives a user who sees them online. Before making a judgment on your company, a user might take a long time to learn more about it. So it’s essential to keep up with all facets of a brand’s online presence.
The following are the different elements of an online reputation:
- Inbound links
- Online reviews and feedback
- Social media presence (mentions, interactions with users, hashtags, etc.)
A company’s reputation can be harmed by negative news (such as litigation or customer complaints) or it can be enhanced (by receiving positive feedback from customers or achieving popularity across different social media platforms).
What Do Internet Reputation Stakes Entail?
If you are a business owner, knowing what customers are saying about a company may help you enhance your customer experience over time, increasing your profitability. It can also help you develop a plan for managing your online reputation.
A sales pitch used to be done to forge a trusting relationship with a customer back then. However, with the advent of digital marketing strategies, it is crucial to take into account online reputation as a measure of consumer satisfaction. You must therefore manage your brand image to persuade your potential customers more effectively.
Best Ways to Check Out a Company’s Online Reputation
Here are some quick techniques to research the reputation of a company:
General Research
You must first precisely ascertain what is being said about your company online at the moment. To get a thorough view, you can use Google (or the search engine of your preference), enter the name of the company, and list every site where it is mentioned or receiving positive (and negative) reviews.
This is one of the most common ways to research a business’s reputation and part of the process for verifying a company’s legitimacy. While it is not as detailed as other methods, it works to get an overview and start from that.
Social Media
Particularly on social media sites, the landscape of digital marketing has rapidly expanded. Almost any business has at least a Facebook page or an Instagram account. And that is also the place where you can discover a lot from a business.
Have you ever seen a Facebook post from a particular store, and spotted negative comments on it? Well, that is because usually when customers can’t reach out to the business or they haven’t replied to their issues, the first thing they do is go to social media and rant about it, and most of the time directly in their comments section.
Make sure to check a company’s social media accounts before you invest or work with them. If they are full of complaints or even worse, they have blocked their comment section, that’s a red flag.
If you are a business owner, the best way to avoid negative comments in comment sections is by running a daily check on every social media account and trying to kindly reply to every complaint, and deleting them after the issue is solved. If you can, you could also assign someone from your team to do it for you.
Better Business Bureau
Better known as BBB, it is a non-profit organization that aims to foster trust between businesses and customers. Consumers can leave positive or negative feedback on businesses or file complaints on over a hundred BBB-accredited businesses across North America. The BBB focuses on the practices listed below:
- Detecting and responding to unethical marketplace activity
- Developing a trustworthy marketplace of businesses and nonprofits
- Providing free ratings on millions of companies to customers
- Informing businesses and customers on the best practices in the marketplace
- Providing excellent examples of corporate role models
Any business owner can apply to be part of the Better Business Bureau, and as a customer, you can easily check your local BBB to be more confident before buying. Customers frequently use the BBB’s ratings and certification system to determine how ethical a firm is and how it handles complaints.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a tool that allows users to construct custom searches based on specific keywords or phrases, and if the search term appears in the latest results, Google will notify them.
You can set a Google Alert to receive updates on a certain topic, niche, product, or service. It is free, anyone with a Google account can access this tool.
If you own a company, there is another fantastic Google tool that can help you with reputation management for free: Google My Business, also known as Google Business Profile (GBP), is a helpful search engine feature that works geographically and aids businesses in managing their online presence.
Review Sites for Specific Niches
A website devoted to reviewing goods and services within a very narrow topic or area is known as a niche review site. There are countless numbers of these websites, perhaps even tens of thousands. It can be challenging to identify the ones that are most pertinent to what you are researching, but fortunately, Google can assist with that. The sites that host reviews of the good or service you are looking for can be found by searching for your brand name and “reviews”; the sites with the most recent reviews will appear first. Here are some of the best niche review sites on the web:
- TripAdvisor: It is an internet platform where millions of thoughts regarding various tourism-related enterprises (bars, nightclubs, hotels, restaurants, cruises, etc.) are posted.
- HomeAdvisor: It’s one of the more often used web resources for free information about home renovation businesses. There are millions of reviews on contractors. So, if you are thinking about remodeling, it is safe to seek information there.
- RateMDs: It’s a healthcare review website where you can conduct searches by doctor’s gender, city, and specialty. More than 2 million ratings and reviews of doctors are available on RateMDs.
- SeniorAdvisor: It allows users to report on prices concerning facilities and offers reviews of senior living communities and home health care providers in North America.
- Zillow: A real estate marketplace that strives to deliver reliable information on the real estate market to buyers, sellers, and other intermediaries.
- OpenTable: It’s a website where you can look up restaurants, read reviews of them, and look for open tables at the time of your choosing.
- G2: Based on your requirements, G2 assists you in finding new software tools and reviewing the products you already own. Users must sign up to post reviews. The evaluations frequently go into great detail and include many queries.
Yelp
Yelp is one of the most popular business reputation websites. Its one to five-star ratings is a straightforward, quick, and convenient way for customers to assess their experiences. Text reviews, which are subjective statements that go along with the star rating, can provide helpful information about the effectiveness of a company’s customer service, the usability of its website and physical store, and the general satisfaction of its customers.
Unfortunately, it is not 100% accurate, as there are businesses that illegally buy reviews and others that deliberately send negative reviews and criticism to their competitors. We recommend running a Google search to confirm that the customer feedback you see on Yelp is legit.
Dun & Bradstreet
It is not as popular as the others, but it provides information that every customer or potential partner should know. They offer a “credit score,” but they do it for businesses rather than for individuals. It’s backed by a ton of data, and it is objective and representative of a lot of information that a corporation might choose to keep secret in some circumstances.
FAQs
Why Should You Check Out a Company’s Online Reputation?
More consumers are using search engines to study products before making purchases day by day, which has a growing impact on consumers’ shopping behaviors. Therefore, companies must be favorably presented as a brand in search engines or review websites.
While word of mouth can be important, online positive reviews are a big green flag because we know the Internet doesn’t hide anything (for better and for worse). If there is anything relevant related to a company, it will show up.
Are Those Methods Always Accurate?
Not always. Companies can buy reviews. Although it can be hard to tell, there are clear signals that the review you are reading could not be legitimate. False reviews frequently employ ambiguous phrasing, illogical timestamps and places, and fake-sounding nicknames.
What Should You Consider When Checking Out a Company’s Reputation?
- Dishonest reviews are not always favorable. Sometimes businesses may post fictitious bad reviews to discredit a rival.
- Verify the reviewer’s portfolios. If they have written multiple reviews, read them to determine how much you can trust those reviewers. If the reviewer made an account solely to write a single review for a single product, there is a possibility that it may be fake.
- Keep an eye out for a sudden strike of reviews. That may occasionally imply that these are paid for or from an angry rival.
Wrapping It Up
Your decision over what to buy or which business to hire may be influenced by online reviews. You should be able to rely on the reviews to represent the genuine thoughts of those who have utilized the products or services in question. Unfortunately, some evaluations are fraudulent, misleading, or distorted, which is bad for customers and trustworthy businesses. We hope the information delivered today helps you spot what is real and what is not while checking out a company’s reputation.
