Reviews FAQs

Reputation management is often a misinterpreted topic and often businesses associate it with the management of their social media platforms and promoting their brand image on search. However, reputation management is all about protecting your brand image. To explain what reputation management is, think about what the customer buying journey is all about, and reputation management is often a step of the journey. Customers are increasingly seeking peer reviews before deciding to buy a product or book a service. As they do so, it’s becoming increasingly important for businesses to secure good ratings and reviews. In fact, 97% of customers make a decision only after reading through a review, while Investpro acknowledged that 88% of customers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations prior to buying a product or availing a service in their study. It’s not only important for businesses to listen to customers and identify suggestions to improve, but it’s also important to engage with them and at times even carry out damage control of their reputation. The Harris Survey which carried out a study during the holiday season came to the conclusion that not responding to reviews could most likely increase a business’s customer churn by 15% and in addition, following a response by a business to a negative review by a customer, 33% returned a positive review, while 34% of customers deleted their negative review. Having reviews and timely responses not only builds trust with potential customers but helps instills confidence of the search engine in your brand and its services as a trusted source. Google has even commented by saying that responding to reviews on Google My Business will help a brand improve its local SEO and trust could very well be a factor that will bump your business up in rankings.

While pillar content is the foundation of your topic or everything about your business, the pillar content can just about give a high-level of the different topics that are included. Which is where topic clusters come into play. Topic clusters are basically an integral part of pillar content and link several or specific pieces of content to the main topic – basically, an in depth look into the content. For example, you could consider several blog posts of a certain topic as topic clusters and all the content is linked to the main foundational pillar content.

Pillar content is basically an SEO strategy to structure content on your website. Consider a long substantial piece of information of your business that is broken into different sections or topics (to mention the different aspects of your business) using different pieces and materials such as social posts, blog posts, photos and videos to grip your audience through the length of the content. Consider the pillar as the body of your content with different sections and pieces added to it to emphasize what’s on offer and add to the flavor of the content. The body of the content should be evergreen and the foundation of your business or the main topic, and the pieces of content or topic clusters with its elements should paint the perfect picture for readers and potential customers.

While online management tools such as Milestone Reviews will give you the option of cherry-picking the reviews that you wish to display on your website, having only good reviews and 5-star ratings will draw caution to the wind for potential customers who wish to book your services or buy your products. Being as honest as possible and displaying mixed reviews and ratings with your business’s apt responses to negative feedback in order to build trust is important.

Putting the words optimizing and best reviews in the same sentence string could be misleading for businesses as there’s no way you can predict the nature of customers and their perspective on services or products - “to each his own” could be a precise expression. Not even the biggest brands are spared from negative feedback but how they deal with them is the biggest difference. If you wish for your business to be on the receiving end of more positive feedback than negative, ensuring that your business responds to negative feedback in a timely and courteous manner is the first step. Build a relationship irrespective of the situation and ensure that your services or product meets their expectation. Ensure that your business is transparent about your reviews, products and services to build trust and in no way should you mislead potential customers just for a sale. From your part, you could use visual representations of your products and services to ensure potential customers know exactly what they’re in for. Most businesses face flak for not meeting up to their promises of their services or products and ensuring that promises meet expectations is the best remedy to optimize for the best reviews.

There are several online reputation management tools out there from companies such as Reputation.com, Brightlocal, and Chatmeter, and Milestone Reviews is right at the top when it comes to managing the reputation of a business online. With over 2 decades of working with the biggest brands in the hospitality vertical, managing the reputation of the brand is as important as building it. Using Milestone Reviews, businesses can track reviews and ratings in real-time, filter ratings based on the property, date, source of review and type of rating it received. In addition, businesses can respond to the ratings from the Milestone Presence Cloud screen to a number of directories and can configure standard responses to ensure all reviews are met with a response. Businesses can also use Milestone Reviews as a benchmarking tool and can fetch and assess competitor reviews from various properties and locations. This can help the business either up their game to reach the standard of their competitors or use the reviews to their advantage and increase the standard gap with their competitors.

Milestone offers its clients an online reputation management tool called Milestone Presence Cloud Reviews module for businesses to manage their reviews. Businesses have to deal with a growing number of local directories that contain reviews of their listings and having a tool to manage reviews for damage control of their reputation, engaging with customers, and improving their services based on feedback is imperative. Using Milestone Reviews, businesses can manage reviews and ratings in real-time, configure the best responses, and can also use it as competitive benchmarking as you can also fetch your closest competitor reviews – all on a single screen. In brief, here are some of the key features of Milestone’s Reviews module:

• Track ratings and reviews for multiple directories for all your business locations on one platform
• Filter ratings & reviews you receive by date range, property, review source, ratings, etc.
• Track trending keywords across multiple reviews (e.g. if ‘dirty’ is a trending keyword, that could indicate the need to improve cleanliness)
• Directly respond to customer reviews on Facebook, Google, Yelp, etc., from Milestone Presence Cloud
• Businesses can also configure a set of standard responses against various ratings (We are delighted.. for a 5-star rating; We are concerned…for a 1-star rating)
• Track competitor reviews for various locations and use them for benchmarking purposes