If you’ve been involved with SEO for very long, you’ll know that there are many more approaches to your business online than there are in real life. There are main keywords and lesser keywords, pay per click advertising, forums and blog mentions, to name a few. Your business is open to users on all sides, which makes it very inviting. It also makes it very vulnerable.

For this reason businesses develop reputation management strategies as part of their general search engine optimisation. Reputation management can increase your grasp of top-ten spots for your brand and even main keywords in the SERPs. When your business receives a bad review, you want to be able to push it off the first page of results. If you can’t do that, replying to the review is the next best thing.

Review replies need to be handled carefully, and it can help to get the advice of your SEO firm when planning replies. You can talk to us at SEO Consult about this. There are several important things to remember:

• Be understanding. Even if the review is an unveiled angry rant, your reply needs to be polite and understanding. This doesn’t mean you should grovel, but be professional. The user reading the review will ultimately have sympathy with you when you’re level-headed
• Address the problems. If someone has reviewed you complaining that your search function isn’t working, ensure it is fixed before you reply. If the problem can’t be fixed, explain that you are working on it and offer an update
• Don’t offer a solid solution online. While you can address the user’s concerns and even report progress on their complaint in the review, it’s not a good idea to offer them something personally before contacting them. This is mainly because you don’t know who they are. If you offer them a discount on their next purchase, you risk being flooded with claimants. Taking the personal part of the conversation offline also prevents backlash if the issue can’t be resolved
• Follow through. If you ask the reviewer to contact you and they do, you need to continue the conversation. This may sound like common sense, but many businesses make the mistake of assuming that once the conversation is out of the public eye it doesn’t matter. This is not true. Someone who has been motivated to post one bad review is likely to post another if you only deal with their complaint in a superficial fashion
• Have a worst-case-scenario. Some complaints can’t be resolved. In this case, you need to be able to come out on top. Work out what you will do if the reviewer refuses to be pacified
• Don’t forget your SEO. While your main focus in replying to a negative review should be to resolve the complaint, review replies are an ideal opportunity to employ your off-page SEO. Inviting the reviewer to contact you is a perfect opportunity to plant your site link. Registering on the review site may present further opportunities

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