Your business’s reputation is incredibly important both online and offline. The consistent good or bad attitude people have toward you can bring in more revenue or shut you down.

That’s why you need an online reputation management strategy. It can win you loyal customers for life — and customers who promote you for free.

How do you build an online reputation? It’s not primarily through clever advertisements anymore. People don’t trust them.

But people do trust their own online research, including what they see on social media and in customer reviews. That’s why the three techniques Trustpilot reviews below can improve your reputation and chances of success.

1. Respond to Negative Online Reviews

If someone leaves you a negative review, it’s easy to wish you could just delete it. Why should you interact with someone who doesn’t like you?

But think strategically. How could you use that review to improve your reputation? The answer is to respond professionally, courteously, and helpfully. It doesn’t matter if the customer is rude. He or she might have just needed to vent and didn’t realize anyone would care or help.

Here’s what you do:

• Leave a response to the review telling the customer what you’re doing immediately to fix the issue, or ask for a way to contact the customer to resolve his or her complaint.
• Ask for a second chance to satisfy the customer, and listen carefully to what he or she needs.
• Use what you learn to get ideas that will improve your products, services, or processes.

It’s amazing, but we’ve seen at Trustpilot that customers who have complained and then received a good resolution are actually more loyal than customers who never had a problem. Use that to your advantage.

2. Actively Engage on Social Media

Your social media pages can appear in search results just like your webpage can. The more you interact with customers on social media, the more those interactions will be visible online … and the more people might see them in search engine results.

If you are consistently treating your customers well on social media and being seen to do it, your reputation can improve. But you’ll need a coordinated and consistent strategy to use on your social media account. You could:

• Find out what social media platforms your key customers are already spending their time on, and create a presence there.
• Hire a social media manager who is responsible for assisting customers on social media and creating a content calendar to plan what you will post there.

3. Improve Your SEO with Reviews

Of course we at Trustpilot love reviews, but that’s because they genuinely are a powerful, proven way to improve your search engine rankings and visibility.

If you earn a certain number of online reviews the way Trustpilot teaches, you can start getting:

• Rich snippet stars from product reviews on Trustpilot

This is a credibility-boosting feature that can show up in search results about you. Prospects may see them when they’re first researching you. And that improves your reputation in their minds, along with improving how favorably search engines look at you.

Take Control of Your Online Reputation

At Trustpilot, we want our customers to get the great reputations they deserve. Your prospects should be able to find you. If you have useful products, your customers are not being well-served if they don’t know about you. Use the three ideas above to build your reputation and take care of your ideal customers.