If you run a home care business, you know just how vulnerable you are to people’s opinions.
Likely, you have mostly positive reviews of your company, but there are a few here and there that could cost you business.
That’s why you need someone behind you who can create and handle your online review strategy. Without a plan, you could leave yourself open to negative publicity — and as a home care business, you can’t afford that image. After all, you’re providing care for people’s loved ones. They won’t want to take a chance with someone who is less than reputable.
Choose a professional that offers complete online reviews management so you can stay in the loop about what people are saying about you.
However, it’s not just customer reviews you have to worry about. It’s employee reviews as well. When it comes to employee reviews, there are sites like Glassdoor, Indeed, Medium, Twitter and LinkedIn for employee reviews. For both customer and employee reviews, there are Google and Yelp to contend with. Online reviews management consists of managing both types.
What are Online Reviews?
Essentially this encompasses what people are saying about you online — on social media platforms and on review sites. These days, you can’t leave this up to chance like you could a decade ago. Now, the nature of the Internet is so pervasive that you can’t escape the potential for damaging reviews. That means you have to take a proactive approach to online review management and marketing in order to encourage and promote placement of favorable reviews. This also means you have to respond to and remove unfavorable reviews in order to rank high in SERPs.
According to Moz, online reviews are one of the top seven factors that influence where and how a business appears in local search results. There are many factors that go into those rankings across local pack and organic results, such as:
- Number of reviews
- How quickly those reviews are generated
- Numerical ratings
- Diversity of sites where your reviews are found
- Authority of the people who write those reviews
Google, Yelp and Facebook are the most important review sites for home care and elder care businesses. Google now ranks companies with higher numbers of favorable reviews more highly than those that don’t boast those high numbers or those who have a lot of unfavorable reviews. So, it’s in your best interest to pay attention to reviews and monitor them closely. They could be harming you online and you don’t even know it. Google and Yelp both appear in organic search results; while Facebook doesn’t appear in SERPs, this platform is extremely popular for your primary target audience when it comes to elder care SEO: the adult children of elderly prospective clients. There are, of course, pay-to-play sites like Caring.com; however, the general public understands these reviews can be biased or fixed and aren’t always reliable in regards to reviews.
Why You Should Care About Reputation Management
What people say about you matters — a lot. Especially in this industry. According to Search Engine Journal, 84% of people read online reviews, browsing an average of four to six reviews before they can trust a business. Trust, of course, is what your home care business is built on. As a company that works with the elderly and their families, you need to grow, foster and strengthen a reputation in your community or several communities as a reliable, skilled yet compassion resource. If you don’t maintain your image in the minds of your core audience, your bottom line could be impacted in a negative way. But more than that, you can’t keep up competitively with others in your field.
Think about it: anyone looking to entrust their loved one to a home care business will naturally choose the one with the highest number of positive reviews. Be that company that appears at the top. To get there, you need to weed out the bad reviews, highlight the good ones and keep the positive momentum going. All it takes is one rant on social media or one devastating review of a service and you could suffer a blow to your reputation. How you handle it is everything, whether it truly resulted from something you didn’t do right or just a big misunderstanding — or worse, a disgruntled ex-employee who feels the need to vent.
That’s where an online marketing and reviews management firm comes in. For example, here at A Servants Heart Web Design and Marketing, we offer these services:
- Social media updates
- Content development
- SERP management
- Active PR strategy
- Monitoring of industry-specific review sites
- Development of blogs and support forums
- Management of Google reviews and Yelp reviews
It Doesn’t Take Much…
…to ruin the reputation you took so long to build. Did you know it takes 12 positive experiences to repair the damage caused by a single unresolved negative one? It’s true, says Forbes. Worse yet, 22% of people who have had a bad experience will say something about it online, while just 9% who have had a good experience will do the same, says Social Media Today. And don’t forget about those ex-employees who have a problem with the way they were treated while they were employed, or how they perceived they were treated. They are the most dangerous of all.
Seventy-six percent of people research a company’s reputation online before considering a job opportunity. About half will weigh a company’s reputation before taking a job offer.
How can you keep bad reviews from happening? Well, you can’t always prevent it, but you can minimize it or catch it in time. It takes time and determination — two things you probably don’t have a lot of because you’re so busy trying to grow your business. Many web designers offer online reviews management services bundled with their online marketing offerings. A Servant’s Heart is one of them.
Contact A Servant’s Heart Web Design and Marketing
Call us now to learn more about our online reviews management services at (760) 227-2720.
