Your online reputation can make or break your business. Technology has made it easy for shoppers everywhere to read customer reviews before purchasing a product or service. If you’ve got a couple of bad reviews amid lots of good ones, no one will really care, but when those negative reviews start to stack up, watch out.
But how can you get good reviews for your products—and respond to negative ones—without taking valuable time away from running your business? An automation service like WebiMax can help by managing your reputation for you.
What Are the Best Tools for Reputation Automation?
If you’re looking for software to help you automate your reputation management for you, take a look at our list of the best online reputation management and the Golden Eggs below.
WebiMax is our favorite online reputation management service because it assigns each client a dedicated reputation manager and quickly responds to negative reviews on their behalf. Reach out to WebiMax for a free quote.
NetReputation excels at burying negative results, giving you a chance to impress your audience with positive ones. Schedule a free consultation with the NetReputation team to get started.
InternetReputation.com helps prevent the mistakes you made 10 years ago from haunting your current career prospects. Book a free consultation today to take control of your personal brand.
More Top Reputation Automation Services
Every business makes mistakes, but the internet never forgets them—unless you employ a reputation management service to help bury the bad and highlight the good. We’ve spent hours researching and testing the best reputation automation services. Our favorites come with different strengths, from expertly managing your Yelp reputation to helping you snag Google reviews from happy customers. Dive into each one in our list of the top nine reputation management companies.
How Do I Get Started With WebiMax?
Getting started with WebiMax is easy. Just give its office a call at 856-288-7095 or request a free proposal by filling out the company’s online communication form. Be prepared to provide the team with your reputation goals and budget.
You’ll be assigned your own WebiMax project manager and dedicated marketing team. During your onboarding call, you’ll meet your team, introduce them to your business, and outline your goals and budget.
The team at WebiMax will conduct a reputation analysis of your business and put together a custom reputation management plan for the first month of your reputation automation services. At the end of your first campaign month, you’ll receive a report detailing the results gained during the month.
Your team will then put together a new campaign based on these results. Campaigns run on a month-to-month basis, meaning you don’t have to sign up for a year-long contract. If you wish to stop receiving reputation automation services from WebiMax, just give the team a written notice one month in advance.
There are a few things we love about WebiMax:
- You can reach out to your project manager anytime via email or phone
- At the end of each month, you’ll receive a detailed progress report
- You won’t be locked into a long-term commitment
Timewise, the company says you can expect results after about three months. This can obviously vary depending on your situation, but you’ll receive a custom timeline during your initial reputation analysis.
How Does Reputation Automation Work?
There are two ways to automate the management of your business’s reputation. One option is to hire a reputation management company like WebiMax to do the lion’s share of the work for you.
The other option is to choose a software service that gives you the tools you need to manage your business’s reputation yourself—without spending precious hours scouring the internet for bad reviews.
Let’s look at how reputation automation works depending on whether you hire a team or use software to do it yourself.
Working With a Reputation Management Team
When you partner with a reputation management company like WebiMax or NetReputation, the reputation automation process more or less follows one trajectory. First, you’ll have your initial consultation with the reputation management team, this may be a phone or video call. In some cases, this initial consultation is free of charge.
Once they understand your business’s reputation goals, your reputation service team will typically conduct its own analysis of your online reputation. They’ll draft a plan to tackle any existing negative content and keep tabs on new reviews.
Some reputation management services also make a plan to improve your business’s website, social media profiles, and other relevant listings. Think of a Yelp profile for restaurants or an Avvo profile for law firms. In addition to creating content for these pages, a reputation management team can keep these slices of online real estate updated with your most current business information.
Helping you respond to negative feedback, burying bad reviews, and keeping constant tabs on your business’s online reputation are all important parts of reputation automation. But they’re not the only things you should think about.
Creating, posting, and promoting SEO-oriented content can help increase your online visibility. If this content is both positive and engaging, it can improve your reputation by simply overwhelming the negative content already there. Reputation automation services like WebiMax and NetReputation take care of this content creation for you so that you can focus on running your business.
Using Reputation Automation Software
Software that helps you automate reputation management tasks can be appealing because it tends to cost less than a full-service reputation management team. Of course, you won’t get the more high-level automations—like people who write social media posts for you—but you’ll get plenty.
Reputation automation software can:
- Track customer reviews across multiple sites
- Automatically send review requests to customers
- Notify you each time you get a bad review
- Provide a centralized dashboard for responding to customer feedback from around the web
- Automatically post pre-written responses under negative reviews
- Post positive reviews on social media
Software services like Birdeye provide you with a dashboard to help automate a variety of reputation management tasks. Say you’re a dental office, for example. Instead of spending time you don’t have following up with each customer personally, you can set the software up to automatically send a review request after a customer attends an appointment.
If the customer provides a positive review, you can set your reputation automation software up to send a referral request after two days. If you get a negative review, an automated response can post to the review site, and create a support ticket for you to address.
Because you don’t have to deal with this process manually, you can devote your time to addressing the customer’s bad experience—and doing what you can to fix it.
How Reputation Automation Gets Rid of Negative Content
One of the benefits of using a reputation automation service like NetReputation or WebiMax is that these companies are skilled at removing online content that’s damaging your business.
But you may be wondering, “How do they do this? Is it legal?”
First, the honest truth: negative reviews can actually be helpful. Have you ever looked at a product that had only four- and five-star reviews and felt…a little suspicious? People never agree 100% on everything, including the wonderfulness of a particular product. So having a few less-than-perfect reviews makes your brand feel authentic.
That said, some negative reviews cross the line. You know the ones we mean. These reviews are inflammatory, entitled, potentially profane, and may make false accusations—and they get a lot of attention, which can seriously drown out all the good things about your business.
Those are the reviews you want to get rid of or suppress. And under the Consumer Review Fairness Act (CRFA) it’s legal to ask a person to remove bad reviews under four circumstances:
- The review features private or sensitive information, such as a company’s trade secrets, financial information, or personnel file details.
- The review contains libel, slander, harassment, vulgarity, explicit material, or material that is offensive to a group of people based on race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality.
- The content in the review has nothing to do with the company, product, or service it’s posted under.
- Claims in the review are false or misleading—and you can prove it.
A good reputation automation team can take care of removing this type of negative content for you. NetReputation, for example, examines bad content for website terms of service violations, copyright infringement, and law violations.
Using its years of experience, legal resources, and plain-old passion for removing damaging content from the web, NetReputation can help wipe problematic reviews, blogs, articles, and more.
If complete removal isn’t possible, NetReputation will build a campaign to promote your most positive content on search result pages, pushing the negative stuff back until hardly anyone ever sees it.
Tips for Managing Your Reputation
When you use reputation automation software or work with a team of experts, you can breathe easily. No matter what happens with your online reputation, you’ll have software or a reputation management team to help you navigate the prickly jungle that is the internet.
But this doesn’t mean that there’s nothing for you to do. After all, the point of reputation automation is that it gives you more time to run your business, whether that means sourcing and selling amazing products or providing top-notch services to your customer base.
The neat thing is that giving your business 100% of your effort will help build your reputation. Happy customers mean positive reviews. And if you’re using reputation automation software or a dedicated reputation management service, you won’t even need to ask for those reviews yourself.
If you regularly receive negative reviews—ones that don’t contain libel, slander, or false claims—it may be time to look for ways to improve. Getting bad reviews is the worst, don’t get us wrong. But try to take a deep breath and look for any common themes running through the negative feedback. These are often signs that something’s up—and it’s probably something you can fix.
Make improvements gradually, and the reviews will begin to reflect those changes.
Why Reputation Management is Important
The vast majority of customers rely on reviews when making purchasing decisions. An online survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in late 2015 found that around half of U.S. adults under the age of 50 read reviews before purchasing a product.
Dependence on reviews has only grown in the years since 2015. A June 2022 study backs up what we said in the intro to this guide: customers won’t purchase a product if it has few or no reviews.
Using eye-tracking analysis and behavioral self-reporting, the study analyzed how important online reviews are to shoppers. Not surprisingly, they found that reviews are crucial to a customer’s decision-making process, and because of this, to the success of a business.
The researchers even suggested that every business with an online presence should set up a system to automatically screen reviews, weeding out any damaging, false content and responding swiftly to customer complaints.
And that’s exactly what reputation automation can help you do.
So get started today with one of our Golden Eggs or another recommendation from our list of the top reputation management tools. You’ll save time, resources—and, most importantly—your business’s online reputation.
