Good online reputation management for your brand starts with search results and online review sites. The majority of our digital reputation management projects here at Go Fish Digital revolve around suppressing negative search results and review site rating improvement. Optimizing these areas is a good start for taking control of how your brand is perceived.

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But there are other places where negative sentiment about your brand may be showing up. If online reputation management is going to be a focus for you or your business, it’s important to develop a strategy for these often-overlooked channels. 

1. Autocomplete & Related Search

Before a searcher even gets to your SERPs, they will be greeted by a search engine’s Autocomplete predictions. Rest assured that a negative phrase like “complaints”, “scam” or “lawsuit” appearing here is going to immediately influence the reputation of your brand.

Don’t overlook the “Related Search” section either. Although these predictions appear at the bottom of the SERP on Google and Bing, a curious user will stumble across these terms – which are often different from the Autocomplete phrases. 

The exact algorithm for how these predictions are pulled is difficult to unpack. But we do know that factors like search volume, recency of searches, and location of the searcher are part of the equation. We work with clients on developing a content and optimization plan to increase the frequency of positive phrases we see in Autocomplete, influencing the predictions as much as possible to replace negative keywords.  

2. People Also Ask Boxes

People Also Ask has been a hot topic in the SEO world for the past few years, but it’s often overlooked as a reputation indicator. Just like Autocomplete, the predictions here can help shape public perception. We’ve seen questions related to product recalls, workplace safety, bad press and everything in between pop up. This SERP feature is appearing more and more frequently, yet is often skimmed past when brand managers are monitoring online sentiment.

We’ve found a few useful strategies for converting or suppressing negative People Also Ask questions with schema and third-party content. As part of your ORM dashboard, it pays to keep tabs on what’s appearing in this section of relevant SERPs. 

Have a question about People Also Ask from an SEO or ORM perspective? Feel free to contact our team by following the link at the end of this post. 

3. Video Carousels

While we’re on the topic of SERP features, we need to talk about video carousels. Your brand’s YouTube channel may already be full of product/service overviews, workplace culture highlights, customer testimonials, and other reputation-building content. But not all of these videos are guaranteed to appear in a carousel. We’ve seen businesses with sterling reputations be victimized by an angry YouTuber or past customer who airs their frustrations in a video. With the right title or view count, these videos can leapfrog your owned content and appear on the first page of search results. 

Our strategy here is to promote existing videos or create new ones that can eventually suppress a negative target at least outside the first three videos in a carousel. That takes an attention-grabbing and keyword-optimized title, useful information for the viewer, and distribution that will garner maximum views. 

4. Social & Web Mentions

Ok, so you’ve nailed down your search rankings, autocomplete, review sites, and any other unique SERP features. What about monitoring the chatter of past, present, and future customers online? After all, any dialogue on your social channels is another opportunity for people to weigh in on your brand. Maybe you already have a go-to social media person on the team who can answer any questions on Facebook or Twitter, but what about conversations happening outside of your owned social channels?

It’s important to monitor untagged brand mentions or anything outside the purview of your own pages. Tools like Awario and BuzzSumo are great for picking up mentions of your brand on Facebook groups, subreddits, online message boards and everything in between. For anything else, old standbys like Google Alerts or a page monitoring tool like VisualPing are simple and free ways to catch and address a reputation threat before it gets worse. 

5. Glassdoor/Indeed

Employee review sites like Glassdoor and Indeed seem like obvious places to try and control your company’s reputation. However, we’ve seen plenty of organizations who believe that, unless a searcher is a job-seeker, star ratings and reviews on these sites don’t really matter. The truth is that everything a searcher sees online factors into their perception of the brand, and Glassdoor and Indeed almost always rank high for searches of business names. A company that values its employees is likely to value its customers. 

There are a few different ways to improve star ratings here. Both Glassdoor and Indeed encourage employers to request reviews, and Glassdoor even provides free email templates for obtaining new reviews from different employee groups. We also use our knowledge of these sites’ review guidelines in order to re-verify or remove certain negative reviews. 

With these overlooked areas on your radar, your ORM strategy will be much more comprehensive in the new year. For more tips and tricks, or to learn how Go Fish Digital can help your brand improve its reputation, you can contact us here.

The 5 Best Online Reputation Monitoring Tools is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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Where simplicity is key for something like Google Reviews, BBB’s old-school style can make it a bit challenging to understand. Here is a quick and dirty guide to understanding the basics of BBB and how your business can leverage it to benefit online reputation management.

What Is the Better Business Bureau (BBB)?

The Better Business Bureau (BBB) is an independent ratings and review site that seeks to measure the trustworthiness and integrity of businesses. It is divided into several regional chapters, each overseeing businesses located in that region. 

Each BBB business profile includes two primary metrics: a letter grade awarded by the BBB based on their assessment of overall reliability, and a star rating average of all customer reviews left on that particular BBB profile. 

The BBB also awards select businesses with BBB accreditation, should they meet certain criteria. More on that below. 

Due to the Better Business Bureau’s authoritativeness, extensive list of businesses, and strict ratings system, it is one of the most important online review platforms for businesses to manage properly.

Resolving Complaints

Complaints (i.e. negative reviews) on BBB are damaging to businesses in two ways. Not only will they drag down the average star rating of your businesses, but as complaints add up and/or go unresolved for long periods of time, BBB will demote the letter grade rating of a business as well. 

When a new customer complaint is submitted, BBB will direct the business to respond within 14 days. You may respond to the BBB regarding a complaint through an online complaint system, mail, fax, or email. 

Working with the BBB to “close” a complaint (lessening the complaint’s damage to your business letter grade rating) can result in one of the following closing statuses:

1. Resolved: The reviewer verified the issue was resolved to their satisfaction.
2. Answered: The business addressed the issues within the complaint, but the consumer either a) did not accept the response or b) did not notify the BBB of their satisfaction.
3. Unresolved: The business responded to the dispute but failed to make a good faith offer to resolve it. 
4. Unanswered: The business failed to respond to the dispute.
5. Unpursuable: BBB is unable to locate the business.

When it comes to resolving or answering a complaint on BBB, Go Fish Digital recommends a few best practices:

• Respond in a timely manner, within 48 hours if possible, and no more than 14 days after the review is published.
• Address the reviewer personally, by name if possible. 
• Acknowledge their specific complaint. Do not respond with a generic, scripted response. 
• Thank them for their feedback, and apologize for the negative experience.
• Restate that the issue conflicts with your business’s core principles. 

Utilizing Your Local BBB Chapter

One benefit to using the BBB is their business support. Unlike Yelp and Google, which can send you on a wild goose chase just to get a simple answer about removing a review or updating your profile, BBB’s regional setup can be an advantage when used properly.

Connecting our clients with their local BBB representatives has helped to resolve complaints, answer questions about accreditation, and remove business profile pages. The system isn’t perfect (a few BBB regional reps serving hundreds of businesses can result in some long delays in communication), but having a specific contact is a massive improvement compared to other platforms. 

Use the BBB Directory to identify the proper BBB contact for your region, and get in touch with them to take advantage of their knowledge.

BBB Ratings: Star Ratings vs. Letter Grades

Something that can confuse consumers on BBB is the difference between a business’s star rating and letter grade rating. Sometimes, a business can boast a strong letter grade and weak star rating, or vice versa.

Remember, the BBB star rating is the average rating of all customer reviews left on that particular business profile page. The letter grade is an overall judgment of trust assigned by the BBB based on factors like complaint history, time in business, and any known legal issues. Here you can review the full list of BBB rating factors.

The BBB assigns a numerical value to each of their 10+ rating factors, which are weighted by importance, to obtain an overall point score between 0 and 100. A business that scores 94 and above on that scale achieves the coveted A to A+ grade. Businesses that fall short of 60 total points are given an F grade. 

Pay special attention to the “Reasons for BBB Rating” linked below a business’s letter grade on the profile page. This provides specific information on rating penalties that can be useful for business owners and customers alike. 

BBB Accreditation 

There is no subject related to BBB that prompts more questions than accreditation. Is accreditation a magic pill that resolves all BBB issues? Is it an overrated badge of honor? Is BBB accreditation expensive? These are all good questions. 

First and foremost, BBB accreditation does not guarantee your business an A+ grade from the Better Business Bureau, nor does it protect you from negative customer reviews. 

To become eligible for accreditation, businesses must meet the criteria in BBB’s Accreditation Standards. These businesses naturally tend to also have positive reviews and are in good standing with the BBB. However, just working with your local BBB chapter on becoming accreditation-eligible will also raise your BBB letter grade since so many of the best practices for a positive grade and accreditation overlap. 

So how much does BBB accreditation cost? You will have to check with your local BBB chapter since pricing varies between regions, but pricing is based on the number of employees and usually ranges from about $500/year for the smallest companies and up to $1,500/year for companies with a few hundred employees. For larger corporations, yearly accreditation membership fees can be in the tens of thousands.

That begs the question, is BBB accreditation worth it? Primary benefits of accreditation include:

• Online and print assets confirming your badge of trust with the BBB
• Inclusion in BBB’s online directory when users search for “accredited only” businesses
• Access to exclusive business support services and tools

Conclusion

Ultimately, businesses must weigh the cost of an annual accreditation with the benefits the extra endorsement provides. In many cases, an “A” grade from the BBB and a positive average star rating from customers is enough to earn consumer trust. 

For businesses with an older clientele or in a particularly competitive industry, accreditation may still be worth the yearly cost. Speak with your local BBB chapter about resolving any outstanding complaints associated with your business or to learn more about exact pricing.

With these tips at your disposal, BBB can turn from an often-ignored review site to one that attracts new customers and helps fortify your brand’s reputation.

How to Optimize Your BBB Business Profile is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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That was the challenge Go Fish Digital summarized in a recent case study (you can view and download the case study PDF by clicking here). Online review management for franchises or multiple location businesses presents its own set of obstacles, but we found these strategies to be the most helpful. 

Flagging Reviews at “Striking Distance” Locations

Flagging negative reviews for removal is one of our favorite ways to quickly improve a business’s star rating. What you’ll need is knowledge of a review site’s content guidelines, and a detail-oriented team to sift through the reviews and find flagging opportunities. Some violations we often see for larger businesses include review-spamming multiple locations or reviews based on second-hand experiences. 

Using tools like our Yelp Calculator, we identify which locations are within striking distance of the next-highest star rating (usually within 1 or 2 reviews). We start with these pages to try and uncover any flaggable negative reviews. In our case study, we had a near 50% success rate of getting flagged reviews removed by Yelp. With this approach, you can quickly turn around the star ratings of some of your less-reviewed locations.

Use Your CRM System

Before you turn to your Customer Relationship Management software to request reviews, be sure to check your target review site’s policies. For example, sites like Yelp prohibit business owners from explicitly requesting reviews. 

But you can turn to your most loyal customers for reviews on most platforms. We have found the most success requesting reviews from highly-engaged customers, such as those belonging to a loyalty program. You could also consider segmenting your customers by frequency of visits, date of their most recent business interaction, or location to encourage them to leave a new review online. 

Don’t be afraid to A/B test different review request strategies. Maybe customers in California respond better to review requests via text message, or new customers respond best to requests at the point of sale. 

Identify Important Review Themes

When it comes to Online Reputation Management, it can be easy to treat the symptoms of customer unhappiness, but not take care of the root cause of the issue. Online reviews are a symptom, but you can analyze the context of these reviews to reveal underlying problems that must be addressed. 

We like to try and identify “swing” topics – certain topics that tend to pop up in negative and positive reviews most frequently. For a restaurant franchise, it may be a certain dish. For a home services business, it might be punctuality (positive reviews about a service person being on time, negative reviews about tardiness). Identifying these topics with some basic text analysis tools, or even pulling a sample of reviews manually, can help your business solve problems that apply across locations. 

Sometimes the solution to one or two key issues in your business can help stop the influx of new negative reviews. 

Standardize a Review Response Strategy

First and foremost: do not use a strict template for responding to reviews. This can be especially challenging to avoid if you are overseeing multiple locations and hundreds of reviews each year, but it’s worth the extra effort. What we recommend is that you use loose “scripts” for responding to common complaints or (hopefully) positive compliments. Working off a script ensures that all responses are consistent across locations.

There are a few important things to consider when responding to negative reviews, which you can read more about in our write-up on review responses. Identify a point-person or team who can serve as the brand “voice” and work off a strategy that includes responding quickly, empathizing with the customer, and pointing them toward a resolution. 

The goal is to offer more than a canned response that could come across as robotic and insincere. Leave room in your response for some personalization – it just might result in the reviewer updating or removing their review. 

Be sure to check out our latest ORM case study to see what impact these strategies have on star ratings of franchises or multiple location businesses. Should you have any questions about how Go Fish Digital can improve your online reputation management, you can contact us here.

How to Improve Reviews for Multiple-Location Businesses is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

The algorithm Yelp uses to filter reviews is a closely-held secret, but Yelp has offered some hints in this video on the subject. Yelp says their algorithm mainly looks at review quality, reliability, and user activity when determining filter status. Yelp also states they want “active members” to have their reviews featured, rather than “reviews written by users we don’t know much about.”

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Here at Go Fish Digital, we’ve monitored thousands of Yelp reviews on behalf of our clients and tracked the correlation between filter status and certain qualities of a Yelp review or reviewer profile. Correlation is not causation, but when combined with Yelp’s own statements on the filter, we can put together some hypotheses. 

Here is what may cause your Yelp review to disappear or fall into the “Not Recommended” filter:

1. Your Yelp profile is brand new
2. You submitted your review at the same time as others
3. Your Yelp profile is not verifiable 
4. You don’t have a realistic review distribution
5. You violated a Yelp guideline

1. Your Yelp Profile is Brand New

The characteristics we see correlate most strongly with filter status are the number of friends and number of reviews on a given Yelp user profile. In Yelp’s own video on filtering reviews, they compare an established profile to one that has no profile picture, zero friends, and just one review. In our research, adding just one friend on the platform increases the odds that your review pops back out of the filter.

It’s a frustrating double-standard by Yelp. Users are required to build up their Yelp presence before their reviews start to count. But if you are a business on Yelp, the first review you receive is marked “First to Review” and it very rarely gets filtered out. 

2. You Submitted Your Review at the Same Time as Others

It’s not just the characteristics of your profile that determine filter status, but also the timing of your reviews. Think about the algorithm that Yelp has devised. It’s designed to filter out untrustworthy reviews. Wouldn’t a sharp spike in the rate of new reviews cause some alarms to go off at Yelp?

The evidence seems to support this theory, even if the correlation is not as strong as it is with other profile characteristics. We’ve seen plenty of businesses who, in an effort to turnaround their Yelp scores, host an event or place more Yelp-approved calls to action (like signs, stickers, etc.) around the business. Even if these reviewers are legitimate, we see Yelp filter out a large percentage of them. Conversely, we’ve also seen businesses helped by the filter when they’re victimized by negative or spammy reviews that come in a wave. In those cases, the filter is a useful tool for business owners.

3. Your Yelp Profile is Not Verifiable 

Even if your account has a track record of reviews and friends, there are still some characteristics that could put a new review into the filter. Remember, Yelp is looking for “reliability” as one of its criteria. 

So how can Yelp confirm you’re a real user, and not a bot or an alias account? There are a few things you can do. 

• Have a profile picture – in Yelp’s own example, you’ll notice that the filtered review does not have a profile picture. 
• “Check-in” at the business you review – this verifies your location. Yelp likely prefers reviews and reviewers with a demonstrable track record of consistently reviewing businesses in their city.
• Use the Yelp app – this goes hand-in-hand with checking in. Geo-tracking increases the odds of your review sticking.
• Sync your Facebook account to your Yelp profile – Connect Yelp and Facebook to further verify your identity. 
• Include a photo with your review – Yelp likes to feature photos, and including one with your review can help it stay on the page. 

4. You Don’t Have a Realistic Review Distribution

This one is tough to define, but fits our hypothesis around reliability and trust signals that Yelp would take into consideration. Yelp wants to highlight the reviews of active users, which leads us to believe that a super-engaged reviewer would eventually develop a som

ewhat natural distribution of positive and negative reviews. Five-star reviews and one-star reviews are the most popular ratings published to Yelp by far, so perhaps something resembling an upside-down bell curve helps your chances.

If your profile is full of either all four and five-star reviews, or all one and two-star reviews, don’t be surprised to see your reviews fall into the filter at a higher-than-normal rate. 

5. You Violated a Yelp Guideline

Yelp’s policies are pretty strict about businesses requesting reviews from customers. While tactics like putting a Yelp sticker on the cash register are ok, explicitly asking for reviews is not permitted. So if Yelp sees a bunch of new page visitors originating from the same source, they’re likely to start filtering them out. 

Let’s also include other explicit Yelp rule breaking here. For example, if you have accessed your personal Yelp profile from the same IP address as one that has accessed a Yelp for Business account, best believe Yelp will filter out a review you leave for that business. 

What Does NOT Affect Yelp Filter Status

We’ve covered what characteristics likely impact whether or not a review gets filtered. But there are other review traits that Yelp business owners have long suspected are also part of the algorithm. There are many theories out there, and Yelp is unlikely to confirm or deny anything. However, these are the characteristics we see having little to no correlation with filter status.

Star Rating

As far as we can tell, a 5-star review has just as much of a chance of being filtered as a 1-star review. This leads to more business owner frustration. Seeing a bunch of 5-star reviews not contributing to the business star rating can be infuriating. But you have to remember that Yelp may be keeping out some negative reviews as well.

Length of the review

We don’t see a correlation here either. Long reviews and short reviews get filtered at the same rates. 

Language/Word Choice

“Colorful language and imagery is fine” according to Yelp’s review guidelines. Word choice will not impact filter status, but don’t push your luck. Personal insults, advertising another business, or revealing intellectual property are all grounds for a review to be removed. 

Conclusion

Keep these tips in mind and you’ll hopefully start to see your reviews featured on a business page more frequently. If you’re a business owner, take a look at your page’s own filtered reviews and see if you spot the same similarities. 

Should you have any other questions about Yelp, whether it be removing negative reviews, monitoring locations, or responding to reviews, get in touch with Go Fish Digital. We’d love to help you out!

Why Does Yelp Hide Reviews? Unpacking the Yelp Filter is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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Replying to a nasty review can often feel like a futile exercise. But your response to a review is not just for that one past customer. Your response also influences the opinion of all the prospective customers who are researching your company to help guide their purchasing decision. Readers want to see that a company cares enough to own up to their mistakes and take the good feedback with the bad. Studies also show that businesses replying to reviews generally see an uptick in their overall rating. 

But, not all reviews require a response. We’re here to help you determine when to post a reply and when not to based on our experience resolving customer complaints and encouraging a review rating change.

How To Respond To Online Customer Reviews

Reviews That Need a Response

Positive Reviews – That’s right, even positive reviews should warrant a response. This one is easy – thank the reviewer (by name if possible) for taking the time to leave a review. Personalize your reply even further by commenting on something specific that the reviewer really liked. 

Neutral Reviews – Most reviewers feel compelled to leave a review after an extremely noteworthy customer event, either good or bad. So, even though they’re rare, neutral reviews require a response. If the review mentions both something positive and a minor complaint, make sure you note your appreciation for their feedback and work to address the complaint.

Negative Reviews (Most of the time)