7 Ways to Keep your Online Credibility Clean

Most newbie entrepreneurs make an often repeated mistake of focusing their time, money, and efforts on driving visitors to their website, while failing to keep their online credibility clean.

For a moment, step in the shoes of your customers and think about what you would look for in a business whose product and services you will most likely order?

The bad news is that many people are cautious when making their purchase decisions and will do extensive research online on the company, brand or product before making their final decision.

However, you can choose to see this as an invaluable opportunity by understanding the psyche of human behavior, using this to build up your reputation online.

In order to stay in business by converting visitors into long-term paying customers, you’ll need to prove them that you are reliable, trustworthy, and most importantly, you deliver what you promise.

Here are 7 USEFUL ways to keep your online credibility clean:

#1: Check Search Engines for Negative Reviews

The first step to keep your online credibility clean is to actually do a quick search for all major keyword phrases to see what pops up on search engines result pages (SERPs). If there are any hint of negative reviews about you, or your business and its products and services, then you’ll need to take appropriate action to remove it immediately before search engine robots pick them up!

This strategy is quite simple: If you can remove negative reviews from the 1^st and 2^nd page of search engines, you’ll likely keep your online credibility clean as people often do NOT click beyond those pages.

#3: Ensure No Negative Comments are on Social Media/Forums

In addition to SERPs, make sure there aren’t any negative reviews or comments on social media sites and forums. Most people spend a LOT of time on social media sites like Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, and recently, it’s been found that people trust companies that have social profile as it’s very easy to get in touch if they run into any problems down the line.

That means people are always checking out your social profiles!

So keeping it clean from negative reviews and comments is extremely important as rumors can spread in a matter of seconds through these social media sites. Do yourself a favor – check comments, status, and content on your social profiles and remove negative information about you and company, immediately.

#3: Post Positive Content/Reviews about You and Your Company

Once you’ve removed negative reviews and comments from SERPs, it’s time to replace it with fresh, useful, and informative content. Your target audiences are always looking for those positive reviews/success stories of you and your company’s products and services from others to ensure if you are “trustworthy.”

Why not give what they are asking for?

Post past success stories, helpful blog posts, and solution to their pressing question on your site’s blog. For best result, include client testimonials, or even, ask a professional reviewer to write an honest review for your business.

#4: Make Your Business MORE Transparent

Negative reviews and rumors about you company travels in a blazing speed when there’s lack of transparency/information about you and your business. Most site fail to include the following pages on their site and NOT only lose a potential client as a result, but also encourage bad rumors to spread throughout the net.

1. Lack of contact information such as email address, phone number, location

2. No money back guarantee/ return policy page

3. No privacy policy and terms of use page

If you do NOT have these pages, people will have reasons to be suspicious about you and your business. But it’s easy to set up these pages. Do it once and forget about it, and make your business authentic in the eyes of your potential clients!

#5: Become Active Online, Become a Blogger (If need be)

If you want to stay in the business, you’ll need to be active, both offline and online. That means, you’ll have to promote your business, products, and services by providing informative content on your blog that highlights the benefits, features, pros and cons of your products and services so that people can actually make a wise decision before making a purchase from you.

Becoming active online no way means spending hours online!

You could spend half an hour daily and do most of the things, daily. Post blogs regularly (3 to 5 times a week), respond to comments, email queries, and questions immediately to show that you’re alive and actually care about people’s concerns.

In addition, post useful, easy to grasp, and helpful contents that your visitors will love and you’ll have them keep coming back to your business, over and over again.

Start a blog, today!

#6: Make Your Site Simple Yet Responsive

You do NOT need to have a flashy and complex site with ads and banners all over the place to impress your clients. Just an easy to navigate place where your visitors can quickly and easily find the information they’re looking for will be sufficient!

Remember, if you offer a great user experience by making everything transparent and easy for your visitors, they’ll always have positive views about your business, and in return, help keep your online credibility clean.

Keep your home page fresh, make it easy to contact you, and if possible, link your site to social media sites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

And yes, do NOT forget to correct typos!

#7 Take a Legal Action against Rumors and False Negative Reviews

If you still find negative reviews displaying on SERPs after going through all these steps, make sure to contact the person directly and deal with the issue. If the claim is NOT genuine, ask them to remove all the content and links politely. But if they still do not listen to you, it’s time to get even and ask for a legal advice. You’ll need to be extremely cautious in this step as your online brand is already in dangerous territory.

Forcing people to remove the negative comments by threats (using legal action) would only back-fire you and your business. The best way is to respond positively to the reviewer by telling them how you’ll help solve their problem by taking appropriate action.

But you won’t be able to keep track of all negative reviews online. You’ll also need a healthy number of positive reviews for your business. Encourage your happy customers write more positive reviews about your business.