Key Points:

  • Google search results, Social media, and review websites are the three factors that can help in improving your reputation
  • Web scraping is a technique used for extracting data from sites
  • Reviews can make or break your brand's reputation

In the present day, online marketing drastically triumphs over traditional advertising. The reason for the rise in popularity of online marketing over traditional advertising can be attributed to the fact that online marketing offers a higher level of engagement and interaction with customers.  For this reason, the online reputation of a brand becomes crucial. Nowadays, there is an ever-increasing number of customers going online shopping. Due to this, your reputation highly depends on their online reviews on purchasing choice. One poor review can radically affect your organization's status, and you might wind up losing your clients.

In the current scenario, it turns out to be considerably necessary for organizations to resolve these concerns. So how can you solve this problem?

You need to conduct an online reputation audit. Monitoring what your clients think about your items and services is the first step to performing a reputation audit.

Consultancy.uk, an online platform for the UK's consulting industry, recently conducted a study. The study claimed that 71% of customers refer to online product reviews before they decide on buying a particular product. After product peculiarities and cost, customer reviews are the third most significant criteria for consumers.

A brand with high online reviews will be a preferred choice among your customers. Hence, to accomplish a decent online picture, a brand needs to take specific steps. Offering a guarantee to your customers is essential. But to do this, you have to invest time in examining client surveys.

You need to solve any complaint registered by a customer, at the earliest. Any delayed response can become a blot on your brand's reputation. Consequently, a satisfied client will bring about great online reviews. Once, they start telling their friends about your product, your chances of getting new customers also increase.

Online product reviews accompany most online shopping websites. To go through all of these online reviews manually is a tough job. With this in mind, you have several dedicated sites that study brands. Reviews can make or break your brand's reputation. Due to this, periodic product, online reviews sites are crucial for maintaining a positive online view of your brand.

Table of Contents

How to Direct Reputation Audits by Investigating Reviews?

Brand reputation points to how others see a specific brand. It is of most extreme significance to perform brand online reviews sites. One approach to do so is by investigating audits.

Online Review Management
  • Gather reviews: Nowadays, most e-commerce websites have a feature of online reviews. You can gather reviews from review panels. Additionally, social media is a giant source of reviews. Tools like Brandwatch, Hootsuite, Klout, TweetReach, or Social Mention can help you gather these online reviews from social media platforms.

Now you need to filter these responses. You can take all the negative reviews from the previous years as your starting point.

  • Filter the negative reviews: All reviews mostly pertain to different issues. To understand the gravity of a problem, you need to categorize these reviews. You can search for negative reviews that appeared a few times featuring a similar issue.

Specific issues have a higher number of negative online reviews. These numbers mean that it is indeed a grave issue. This realization is a pointer you need to keep in mind for subsequent times. Now you have things to work on for brand reputation management. On the other hand, there are things to work on product quality as well.

  • Investigate and act: You can perform a thorough investigation of these issues. Try to differentiate genuine feedback from a hoax. You can do this by talking to the customer directly. Once you have identified the problems, give the clients a legitimate answer. Don't forget to be polite.
  • Reflect: You can take up essential activities to understand those issues. An issue that is the subject of more online reviews is mostly genuine. To protect your reputation, you have to focus work on that issue from then onwards. Also, think about how you can improve the overall customer experience.

The procedure looks very manageable when written in words. But in reality, analyzing these audits seems to be a tiresome task.

  • Imagine that we are mapping to examine the reviews of a brand like LG. There would be an enormous number of reviews, perhaps billions in number. It won't be easy to separate the positive and negative online reviews manually from this list.
  • Likewise, it is critical to isolate audits depending on geographical location to comprehend if there is an issue looked at by clients in a specific area. Physically attempting to do this is likewise a chaotic task.

With all the progression in technology, there should be an answer to this issue.

How Can Data Extraction or Web Scraping Help Reputation Audits by Analyzing Reviews?

Web scraping is a technique used for extracting data from sites. Many web scraping software is available online. Data masters can quickly leverage them through HTTP or other programs. You can perform web scraping manually; however, you can utilize a bot or a web crawler.

The Importance of Online Reviews for Businesses

Through scraping, we can change a whole site to organized data, thus making it convenient. You can acquire online reviews for businesses from various websites. With the assistance of web scraping, it gets simpler to gather all those surveys.

There are various approaches to doing web scraping. Through web scraping, you will gather a massive amount of reviews. Now, we have to isolate positive, nonpartisan, and negative audits to examine them separately. You can do so through machine learning. You have to analyze positive, negative, and unbiased surveys. Subsequently, you can undertake certain analyzed fundamental moves to improve the reputation of your brand.

Examining audits is undoubtedly not a one-time process. You have to continue analyzing the importance of online reviews as long as your item or service is accessible over the internet. Web scraping has a remarkable duty to carry out in guaranteeing that your reputation won't get broken.

How Can Brand Reputation Be Improved?

Google search results, Social media, and review websites are the three factors that can help in improving your reputation.

  • Ensure that when people browse Google for your products and services, negative online reviews about your brands don't pop up. Even the best brands use these methods. It has been beneficial for them. Search Engine Optimization specialists can assist you with this.
  • Attempt to make a positive verbal exchange about your brand on social media websites. People are associated with one another through online review management networking. Online networking can help you boost your image or reputation

Aside from all these activities, your brand's online product reviews and services should be of top quality. There should be no compromise on the quality of products. At last, your reputation relies upon the quality and service you offer.

Things to Remember to Build or Improve Your Brand's Reputation

Your brand isn't just face value. It becomes an emotion once people start incorporating your products into their lives. To build a robust and influential brand reputation, it is vital that you focus on these points.

1. Engage with influencers and community: Today, the market values influencers a lot. They might be from youtube or Instagram. Their followers tend to believe anything they say. You can gather more customers by leveraging the power of influencers through advertisements. Hence, you can include a few in your marketing campaign. Also, you need to ensure that they are speaking positive things about your product.

Another class of individuals that can come to your rescue are industry experts. These experts have a thorough knowledge of their industry. This knowledge allows customers to trust them. When experts review your products, people believe that they are recommending them.

Then comes the community. Sometimes the best way to directly step into it. You can discuss your products and ask what else they expect. All these online reviews for businesses can help in fostering a relationship rather than as a marketing project.

2. Take care of how you respond to feedback: You can begin by being Respectful. Always admire the feedback from your customers. Act on them as soon as possible. Make sure that you politely answer your clients. This precaution will send out the message that you are willing to make amends.

Always be prepared to solve their anxieties. You can prepare for this by having a different department in your business that handles customer feedback.

3. Create content that speaks about customer reviews: Many times, a blog or two regarding the online reviews you get from people can do an impressive job. One crucial aspect to keep in mind is never to boast. It should rather be like a story.

You can talk to your customers and gain insight into how they got to know about your online product reviews. Furthermore, what they liked and how it made a difference for them. You can weave a compelling story out of this information.

You can focus more on the customers who review your product badly. You can publish their stories and have them talk about how you responded to their feedback.

4. Keep an eye open for troublemakers: Always monitor the online reviews for businesses circulating online review management platforms about your products. A few of the standard tools are Brandwatch, Hootsuite, Klout, TweetReach, or Social Mention. These will help you filter all the comments referring to you. The next step is to look out for people spreading rumors about your online product reviews. These sorts of people need to be dealt with immediately.

In many cases, companies have issued legal notices for people like these. Also, when you address the issues with your customers at the earliest, it keeps them from writing negatively about you. Any such online review management on a social media platform has a vast readership. Hence, it is best that you stay safe.


Sandra Moraes is the Content Management Specialist at Datahut. Expertly she is a Data Scientist and investigated Data Analytics. She created Data Science and Customer relationship. Follow her on LinkedIn