There may be even greater reason to fear those less than stellar reviews of your business by disgruntled customers. Not only may a harsh word or lower rating discourage prospective customers, now it may become harder for them to find you at all.
According to Google’s Matt Cutts, there is a potential launch coming at some point this year that will look at the quality of merchants and how quality rankings may be factored into their search engine results. The goal here is to benefit those businesses that ostensibly offer a greater quality or service based on customer feedback.
While Google already seems to factor some of this information into its current formula, they know full well that a lot of reviews out there – good and bad- may not always be legitimate. The goal is to look at more information to help to determine quality. What that information may be is still up in the air, but this is certainly something to watch. Is it time to put more focus on reputation management?
By Don MacMelville