We're going to go over the five sort of steps that are critical ingredients to you managing your online reputation. So if you have a local business and you do get reviews, you're not going to want to miss this.

First though, I pulled some stats off the internet that I think are worth understanding before you even get into managing your reviews. I think we all intrinsically know that reviews are super important for our business. Our sort of business Goodwill is now transparent and out in the public more than it's ever been before. So listen to this, I'm reading right here. 97% of consumers read online reviews to find local businesses. So that implies that 97% of them are using reviews and so forth as part of their search queries. And that goes back to some other stuff. We said about reviews and SEO, 85% of consumers trust online reviews about businesses as much as much as personal recommendations. 

So even though they don't know these people, they consider them as valid as a friend, talking to them about a business, 74% of consumers trust a company more if they read positive reviews. So this goes back to what we were talking about, about having that positive review thread, right? So these are huge numbers, 97, 85, 74, and lastly, 89% of consumers look at reviews before making a buying decision. So I think the numbers are pretty compelling. So let's get down into the dirt here, the dirt. And let me give you sort of the five, uh, bits, you know, action items that you really need to take. First off, you've got to find the platforms where your customers are leaving reviews. Now we track for our clients about 70 different platforms. So there's a lot of 'em out there. Things that maybe you don't think about, but there's Yext and city search and Zoc doc, if you're in medical, of course, very popular, got the big ones, Google and Facebook, but people leave reviews all over depending on their browser, what they're into, what's being put in front of them, their email accounts. 

There's a lot of reasons why they get navigated and influenced to leave reviews and different places on the internet. As a business owner, though, you're responsible for finding and figuring out where all that stuff is because that is all messaging about your business. Then number two, you gotta make sure that your account, your business account is actually active and claimed on all of those platforms. So if you haven't gone and done that for your business, it's time to log in and go to all of those platforms, all the review platforms and figure out if your business is listed. And if it is claim it submit a complaint, uh, a claim. And if it's there, you can do that. If it isn't there, then you can of course create an account for your business. All right? And then you've got to go through all the existing reviews, make sure that you flag inappropriate or spam reviews and respond to any need, never get negative feedback. 

Now in the next video I'm going to do, we're going to do a little bit on negative feedback and how powerful it really is, but you do want to respond to negative feedback and you can even sprinkle in some responses to positive feedback, but more, more than anything you want to engage and handle negative feedback on any one of the platforms that you do find. And then you need to check these about once a week. So if you don't have, you know, an automated system or something like that, that's helping you, then you really need to do this once a week. And we're going to post some stuff in the links on this video, some tools for you to make this task super easy. Number five, you've got to come up with a comprehensive strategy to increase your positive reviews, you know, and, and respond to negative reviews every week. 

So those are my five things. Now that last one, which is the whole strategy is, uh, kind of a can of worms, but we've talked about it on other videos. And really it means that you need to be engaging your customers, your customers that are fans and your customers that are having, you know, a service issue or some sort of complaint. You just can't let those things go. So stick with those, you know, five steps, get organized, get after it and figure out where people are posting about your business. Make sure you take control of the situation. So start and check us on the next video of this helped you like get your head around, you know, some of the stats, especially how powerful this is. Go ahead and smash that like button we'll see on the next video. And we're going to cover what to do about negative reviews. We'll see you then.