Lollipop Local

Reputation Management has become old hat. It implies reacting to a situation, whereas these days the reputation of a business is the first thing that people see when they search for that organisation on line. We need to be marketing those 5* reputations proactively.

Try it – type in a business in a city.

You see the name of the company, the website, a meta description and then you see their score and their Google reviews.

Google Plus Local Pages are now indexed where the old Places Pages were not and this latest merge melds the website and Google Plus together.

Another thing you need to notice is that when you start to type in the name of a business and a city, you will see suggestions from Google. This proves that other people are also searching for that business.

The Google Plus Local/Places page comes up first and the reputation is in full view of the world – get a bad review and everyone can see it.

Scroll down the page further and you will find the most authoritative citations of that business – the local listings which carry the most weight. And each one of these sites gives customers the ability to review.

What company can now risk being online without monitoring those reviews?

Why businesses should be thinking about marketing their reputations

But it gets worse. In the US, if you look at the PPC ads (Adwords) at the very top of the page and down the side, you will see that reviews are showing up there too, helping businesses to stand out.

So that’s the paid ads, the maps, the Google Plus Local and the organic listings all showing reviews which means that those businesses need to start building a 5* reputation if they want to be successful.

And where the US go, the UK very soon follows.

Why business reputations matter to consumers

According to Bright Local, an online business which monitors these statistics, 72% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

People skip the marketing and go straight to the reviews – that is what makes them decide whether they are going to pick up the phone and contact a business or not.

It’s no longer about lead generation, it’s all become referral marketing.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2012 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Google Places, Google+, Local Business Marketing, Local SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.