What to Do to Recover Trust Lost by Incorrect Online Business Listings
It’s always a best practice to clean up your local online business listings to avoid losing customer trust and search rankings.
Precise citations are still considered basic strategies for any business, as they add online visibility by placing companies and organizations in the directories and listings where prospective customers are searching for them.
But what happens when you have incorrect information published online?
The first course of action is to make sure your business directory listings and online citations are 100% correct all the time. However, what else can you do in the meantime to guarantee this kind of incident, if it occurs, does not damage trust for your brand?
Here are few tips to ensure that you don’t lose your prospects as you rectify incorrect online business listings:
Display accurate information
Confirm that your business physical address is correct on your website.
If your business has multiple locations, create a database of all present location addresses. Perform a site audit to make sure they are all consistent.
Always revise local content silos
If you are creating local content silos, collect all URLs and addresses of each place on the site where address and location details are shown.
Make sure to update your website and database once your business location changes address.
Incorporate social proof on your website
With everyone on social media, its public knowledge that consumers are more inclined to trust their peers more than companies and businesses.
Amplify trust for the prospect who comes to visit your site to verify your address and phone number by including testimonials from satisfied customers, customer ratings, and other user-generated content that displays your products and services in a genuine way.
When collecting testimonials for your site, remember to include names, business, location (city, town, state), and images (clear headshot of your customer).
Train staff at stores with physical locations
The moment you know that erroneous addresses, services or products are shown on your website, it’s critical to advise your store employees of the incorrect information.
Inform them that you are taking appropriate steps to update your local citations.
Keep the positive reputation
Plenty of citations appear on sites with reviews attached to listings like Tripadvisor, AirBnB, and Google My Business. Manage your online reputation by replying to negative reviews with respect and open-mindedness, and in time, and you will build up more trust in your company.
This approach is something every business should take seriously. However, the added benefit of protecting the business against possible frustrating online and offline experiences before they happen should serve as extra incentive for strong brand reputation management.
A good example is Google My Business Q & A. This new feature for businesses within Google Maps answers questions from prospects and customers from their Android devices. Actively monitoring and managing Google My Business Q &A is a good way of directly replying to people who are having concerns contacting or visiting your stores or business. It could also potentially be a way for you to be informed that your details online are out of date.