Are you running a spa or a salon business? Then you need to make sure your online reputation management is in order.

In today’s competitive beauty industry, you probably already know the importance of making your business stand out. To make that happen, proper online reputation management can help.Online Reputation Management 101 for a Salon Business

In a nutshell, reputation management entails the following processes:

• Encouraging positive feedback from clients
• Properly responding to negative online reviews
• Minimizing any negative publicity

As a salon business owner, you never want to see your calendar with zero booked appointments. With effective reputation management for your business, you can have your business packed with consistent bookings.

Here are some effective strategies to boost and protect your business’s online reputation.

Claim Your Salon Business’ Online Listings

More likely, your business is already listed on several local business directories or online yellow pages, review sites, and social media platforms. However, don’t just leave it at that.

It’s essential to claim these listings, so you have complete control over them. Several websites allow you to create and supervise your business listing. Google is the biggest online platform you need to utilize to help boost your business.

Take the time to claim and verify these listings to impact your business’s online reputation management positively.

Here are the essential benefits of verifying your business listing:

Establish trust with your customers.

When potential customers go online to search for your salon business, they’re more inclined to reach someone with a professional website, a verified listing, and accurate business information.

Your salon’s business information is most likely available online. However, not all the details are updated. Claiming and verifying your business listing let you manage the information that prospective customers will find online.

These details include your business name, address, phone number, business hours, and other pertinent information. It’s essential to keep these details accurate to provide correct information to your target audience.

Ensuring that the information about your business is correct also gives an excellent impression to your clients – potential, current, and future ones.

If a potential client finds your business phone number online, calls it, and it’s not the correct number, you immediately lose that customer. They will move and get in touch with your competitor, who most likely has their updated information listed.

After claiming your listing, you can further manage and optimize it to help improve your search engine rankings. You can add photos, your official business logo, your products and services, and more.

These efforts round out your business listing and enhance your brand’s credibility and trustworthiness. Your online reputation will significantly benefit from these strategies.

Enhance your business’ search engine rankings.

Claiming and verifying your Google business listing propels your search engine optimization marketing efforts.

When you claim and verify your online business listings on Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yelp, and other online platforms, you can display correct information about your salon business, such as an updated address, contact number, business hours, and website link.

This also allows you to have your website link readily available in different places on the web.

Furthermore, you can incorporate unique tracking tools when you verify your Google listing. This feature allows you to monitor and analyze where your website traffic comes from. In turn, this will help direct your online marketing efforts.

Google My Business, in particular, provides free analytics tools to monitor the performance of your business listing. The information includes:

• Direct searches
• Discovery searches
• Website actions
• Map views
• Directions actions
• Phone call actions

When you claim your business listing on Google My Business, you can manage the information that Google shows for your business. If you don’t have the correct information, you would most likely turn potential customers away.

A Salon Business’ Online Reputation and Customer Reviews

When consumers search for businesses online, they look at customer reviews. Almost 90% of consumers trust online reviews just as much as recommendations from people they know.  

If consumers see a few negative reviews, it doesn’t automatically mean they’ll turn away from your business. You don’t have control over the feedback and reviews you get from customers. However, you can certainly handle how to respond to them.

What’s more important to consumers is to see how responsive you are, whether it’s a negative or positive review. This effort on your part helps in your online reputation management strategy.

Establishing trust is imperative if you are running a salon business – no matter what industry you are in. Your reputation management strategies should directly complement your search engine optimization efforts.

One of the important ways to conduct this is verifying your salon business’ Google My Business listings. Fortunately, this process doesn’t take long, and the Google My Business primary platform is free.

When you complete this, your overall internet presence will benefit significantly.

Dealing with Negative Client Reviews

First and foremost, ignoring negative client reviews is terrible for your salon business. Consumers value responsiveness, and if they see a negative customer review without a proper response from a business owner, they tend to move past that company.

In today’s digital world, one negative online review can significantly impact your business. More and more consumers trust reviews they see online just as much as word-of-mouth recommendations from people they personally know.

Responding to negative feedback is an essential facet of online reputation management for your salon business.

Even if you don’t have a dedicated marketing team for your salon business, it’s essential to monitor your online reputation.

Fortunately, you can set up the monitoring yourself reasonably quickly. You just need to make sure you dedicate some time to it on top of running your business. As always, you can hire a professional digital marketing company to do this for you, so you can concentrate on running your salon.

To monitor the online reputation of your salon, make sure you know all the places that your business appears on the web. These places include:

• Google and Google Maps
• Social media platforms including Facebook and Instagram
• Review sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor
• Your business website

What should I do if my salon business gets terrible online customer reviews?

In an ideal world, you don’t get a bad review for your business. However, that’s not always the case. As such, it’s vital to know how to handle this situation properly.

When you run a business, you should know how to accept and engage with customer reviews – both positive and negative.

Here are the most effective ways of handling bad online reviews.

1. Answer promptly.
2. Be transparent and earnest with your answer.
3. Keep it professional; don’t get personal.
4. Avoid giving out a canned response.
5. Ask for the customer’s contact information and respond to their specific situation via direct message.
6. Be thankful for the feedback.
7. Go the extra mile by offering compensation or discounts if necessary.
8. Take the appropriate step to fix the issue.
9. Follow up with the customer.
10. Always encourage customers to leave feedback.

Key Takeaway

It’s essential to pay attention to your salon business’ online reputation management. Your reputation management efforts impact your online growth strategy. You can always depend on a professional to handle this aspect of marketing for your business.

In the meantime, we hope that the information and resources you find in today’s article will help you navigate the online business landscape and encourage positive sentiment for your salon.