Online reviews influence 84% of the customer’s decision to buy a product or choose a specific service provider. Doing keyword research or searching for reviews on Google or other platforms about a company is an instinctive response. When it comes to legal litigation, clients become more susceptive to choosing the right legal firm. They want an experienced, helpful, and knowledgeable attorney who has already served similar cases with client satisfaction. Therefore, it is highly important to manage your online reputation actively and get overwhelming positive reviews.
The domain of legal matters may not fetch satisfying results for all clients. However, you need to overreach the negative comments with positive ones by being proactive, positive, and prolific.
Some of the best platforms to showcase your reviews are testimonials of your website, Yelp, LinkedIn, LawyerRating, Google My Business, Avvo, Martindale.com, Lawyers.com, Yahoo, Yellow Pages, business listings, and online review sites. Responding to online reviews ethically and effectively is a key to success. Here we will share some easy and relevant methods to manage your online reputation on a positive note.
Proactively Influence Online Reviews
The best marketing practice is to make your clients happy and get feedback to improve the service. Happy clients are more likely to give you good comments, although, unhappy clients can use this review giving process in a negative aspect.
Be it good or bad, it is always a good practice to proactively take feedback from your clients and request them to give reviews. You may integrate this into your file closing procedure so that you or your colleague ask for feedback or review from client.
To seamlessly and precisely manage this work you may design a feedback form and integrate it in Google docs, which you can share via email, message, or other means to your client.
The feedback form may start with a question asking if they like your service and give them two options; Yes or No with radio button. If they click Yes then divert them to the link of any review giving site where they can give a positive review. If No, then take their feedback through question format or giving space to define the reason.
Keep Track of Every Review
Keep a regular check or activate the alert system to get the notification, whenever you receive a new review. Check the source, filter it well, and analyze your process of operations or service based on each negative review you receive.
It is a good practice to revert with a note of thankfulness to the customers giving a positive review and try to be apathetic to those with a negative review. You may create an automated response to reply as Thank You against every review you receive. Publish positive reviews on different platforms where your legal firms have an online presence. This is one of the best practices to market your brand.
Positively Handle Negative Reviews
Handling legal matters are often stressful and may fetch some negative reviews as many times the client doesn’t get the expected judgment. A bunch of positive reviews may paint a flowery picture over time; however, a negative review is sufficient to fade away the picture. Here comes the efficacy or skill of handling online business reputation.
Unfortunately, negative reviews have no remedies! The only way or cure is to deal it with kindness or apathy, which can influence the readers on a positive note. The other way is to earn more and more positive reviews to outweigh the unhappy or negative reviews.
Maintaining professional ethics is highly required when you are managing the online reputation of a legal firm. To respond to a negative review, you cannot disclose the case details, cannot air up the client’s dirty diary online, or cannot be rude or aggressive. On an apologizing and requesting tone you have to close the matter or answer the questions.
Stay Away from Spam or Fake Reviews
All search engines or online review giving websites maintains algorithm to keep a check on fake or spam reviews. Their filtering process checks:
For any extreme case, where the client or any third party is trying to negatively expose you to a different domain, there you may take the help of cybersquatting to solve the dispute with the help of the World Intellectual Property Organization.
Prolifically Create Positive Contents
Actively boost your review by creating a blog page, do social media marketing, manage online press releases, use reputation management software, or interact with more and more online reviewers.
Social media is the backbone of all online modes of marketing and business. It is a preferable way to mitigate all negative reviews and highlight positive feedbacks or reviews.
Online Press Release can highly help you manage your online reputation. It let you disclose your success, progress, benefits, mission and vision, and forecast to mass in a professional and authentic base.
Publishing long elaborative and informative blogs optimized with SEO techniques reaches mass and creates your brand awareness among people. When online researchers can find authentic and informative blogs they will automatically start trusting the attorney or the law firm. This is a good way to rank on the search engine, reach out to many productive customers, and potentially manage online reputation.
Bottom Line – The Power of Narrative
Positive information, reviews, blogger’s comments, and PR can help you to overcome any negative review. Your narratives or responses must be very polite, positive, and logical.
Backlink your pages or website to business listing pages, get good inbound and outbound links to stay on the first page of the search engine. Managing online reputation needs consistency and resource. It can enhance healthy relations with customers both in-person and on online platforms.
We will shortly come up with many other informative contents on online marketing or business management of law firms. Stay tuned with us to know more…
