In today’s day and age when online marketing hugely triumphs traditional marketing, the online perception of a brand becomes even more critical than ever. With more and more shoppers turning to online methods of purchasing, they mainly base their buying decision on online reviews. One bad review can significantly impact your company’s reputation and end up losing your customers. 

Therefore, it becomes even more essential for companies to conduct an online reputation audit and resolve issues timely. Listening to what your customers have to say about your products and services becomes a more significant necessity than ever. 

According to Consultancy.uk, an online platform for the UK’s consulting industry, 71% of customers find ratings important in their buying decision making. Consumers now see ratings as their third most important criterion when buying, after product features and price. A brand having good reviews is more likely to grow. To achieve a good online image, a brand should ensure that they are spending time in analyzing customer reviews and finding a solution for their grievances. Thereby making customers happy, which would, in turn, result in obtaining good reviews.

While online shopping platforms come with product reviews, there are dedicated websites that review brands. Reviews have the power to make or break your brand’s reputation, which makes periodic reputation audits a necessity for maintaining a positive online perception of the brand. 

How to conduct Reputation Audits by analysing reviews?

Brand reputation refers to how others view a particular brand. It is of utmost importance to conduct brand reputation audits. One way to do so is by analysing reviews.

• Take all the negative reviews from the past few years.
• Look for negative reviews that appeared several times highlighting the same issue.
• Analyse these issues and give the customers a proper reply in a respectful manner.
• Take necessary actions to solve those issues.

The process looks quite simple when written in words. However, in reality, to analyse these reviews is a tedious task.

• Suppose we are planning to analyse the reviews of a brand like Samsung. There would be a large number of reviews, maybe millions of reviews. It won’t be easy to segregate positive and negative reviews from this manually.
• Similarly, it is crucial to segregate reviews based on regions to understand if there is an issue faced by customers in a particular region. Manually trying to do this is also a hectic task.

With all the advancement in technology, there needs to be a solution to this issue.

How can data extraction or web scraping help Reputation Audits by analysing reviews?

Web scraping is a method used for extracting data from websites. Web scraping software is available, and they access the world wide web using HTTP or through browsers. Web scraping can be done manually, but usually, it is implemented using a bot or a web crawler. Through scraping, it is possible to convert an entire website to structured information, thus making it more comfortable. Reviews for a particular brand can be obtained from several sites and thus with the help of web scraping, it becomes easier to collect all those reviews. There are numerous ways to do web scraping. Once scraping is done, we would be having all the reviews. We need to separate positive, neutral and negative reviews so as to analyse them. It can be achieved by using machine learning. Positive, negative, and neutral reviews can be analysed, and necessary actions can be taken to improve the reputation of your brand. 

Analysing reviews is not a one time process. You need to keep on analysing them as long as your product or service is available in the market. Web scraping has a significant role to play in ensuring that your brand reputation won’t get affected.

Actions that can be taken to improve brand reputation
Google search results, Social media and review sites are the 3 factors that can help in improving your reputation.

• Make sure that when people search Google for your keywords, negative reviews about your brands won’t popup. This strategy is used by some of the best brands out there and has proven beneficial to them. SEO experts can help you with this.
• Try to create a positive word of mouth about your brand in social media sites. Today’s world people are connected to each other through social media. Social media can help your brand reputation to increase.

Apart from all these actions, product or service from your brand should be of high quality. There should not be any sacrifice on the quality of products. In the end, your reputation completely depends on the quality and type of product or service you offer.

Things to keep in mind to improve your brand reputation

• Be Respectful – always respect the feedback from customers
• Answer politely- Make sure to give replies to customers in a polite way
• Treat Google results page while searching your brand as your business card. 
• Always be ready to solve their concern.