Good reviews can make or break a business, and there is no better feeling then when you receive positive feedback from a happy, satisfied customer.

In a world where the online market appears to reign supreme, reviews are increasingly important for traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, and receiving positive feedback can be a huge boost.

The main issue with this is that the opposite fact is also true – a bad review has the potential to cause a lot of trouble and can be a headache to deal with.

Fortunately, there are a number of tricks and techniques that you can use to handle a negative Google review and get your business’s online reputation back on track.

Read More

Your business is perfect. Your customers are satisfied, your employees are competent, your profits are robust, the bathroom never runs out of toilet paper, a drone delivers a gourmet lunch at exactly noon each day, your dedicated masseuse is always on hand to rub your shoulders – hey, is that Tom Hanks working in the next cubicle?

Nope, you’re dreaming. Because no matter how well your business is doing, it’s not perfect. You can always improve. Making those improvements isn’t easy, though. Hiring a consultant or doing extensive renovations is expensive. And what if changing one thing actually makes two other things worse?

No matter what type of improvements your business needs, online reviews can help you achieve them. Posts on sites like Yelp and Google have tremendous influence over your customers.

That may be hard to believe when you think about the reviews you’ve seen that say things like, “Food was okay, parking lot was weird.” But the research is clear: most of us use online reviews to help us make decisions about where we spend money.

Read More

If you could go back in time and talk to shopkeepers and handymen of yore about “online reputation management,” you would quickly earn a reputation of your own: as the town crazy person.

But even if you went back 10 years, people probably still wouldn’t know what you were talking about.

Until fairly recently, online reputation management was an umbrella term that could include any number of shady practices: Bribing bloggers to write about you, paying SEO companies to manipulate your website’s ranking or bury negative feedback, buying fake reviews for your Yelp page: businesses tried them all in the Wild West era of internet commerce (aka the ’00s).

But as consumers and search engine designers have gotten savvier, those questionable practices don’t work so well anymore. Today, it’s nearly impossible to hide or cover up a bad reputation.

Read More

It’s a vulnerable thing, running a business.

Your success – your ability to pay your employees, feed your family, keep the Netflix coming – all hinges on the whims of your customers. If they don’t show up every day, willing to exchange their hard-earned money for your services, you’ve got nothing but a bunch of office supplies you don’t need.

So even when those customers are pushy, demanding and insist on texting while you’re trying to talk to them, you need them.

And while you may not personally like every person who walks through the doors (we’re talking about you, Karen), you should appreciate each and every one. Every one of those customers has something valuable to give you: feedback.

Read More

Getting your Google reviews link is easier than you think. The real question is after you get it, how do you best use it to maximize getting more reviews? We’ve got you covered…

Read More

Who gives the feedback in business? A consultant, maybe, or your assistant managers… people who know exactly how the business is run?

Guess again.

Read More