Reputation management encompasses multiple aspects of your plumbing company marketing, including reviews, content creation, and social media. In today’s podcast, Jason and Nolen dig into the subject and explore how plumbing contractors can make their reviews, service pages, and city pages work much harder for their businesses. If you’ve been struggling to improve your local rankings, even if your company has plenty of reviews, be sure to listen in!

Be on the Lookout for These Key Points

* Do reviews alone improve my local search engine rankings?

* Should new plumbers focus on reputation management or social media marketing?

* Is there a way to coordinate reviews across different platforms?

* Are city pages worthwhile?

Managing Your Company Reputation

In a way, reputation management revolves more around the perception of your plumbing company than anything else. Along with the obvious consumer perceptions created through reviews, your site’s graphic design, and navigation, there’s another crucial aspect that all too many plumbers forget about. How does Google perceive your business?

In the past, we’ve talked about the crucial E-A-T factors: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. When Google spiders (re-examines) an existing plumbing contractor website, it attempts to identify data elements that show your site, content creators, and business possesses these qualities.

Where Google Looks for E-A-T Factors

* For Expertise: Content creator bios, content organization and quality.

* For Authoritativeness: Content, creator bios, reference sites, keywords, & web design.

* For Trustworthiness: Reviews, geo-tags, check-ins, images, navigation, and link profiles.

These character traits impact both Google and customer perception of your business. Of course, that also means you can expect two-fold benefits when you nail all three elements! Below, we’ll dig into three of the most crucial aspects of reputation management.

Review Management

Reviews can make or break a plumbing business. While almost any plumber could tell you they need reviews, many don’t know how to collect them effectively or what to do with them once reviews start pouring in. While they certainly contribute to a company’s perceived trustworthiness, reviews don’t automatically cause your site to rank higher on google. 

So how can you get the greatest value from your customer testimonies and all those 5 star ratings? First, make sure your reviews come from a variety of sources. In other words, don’t put your eggs exclusively in Google Reviews, Facebook, or Angie’s List. While Google once prioritized recommendations through their own platform, the search engine now prefers a more diverse collection from multiple sources.

Second, be sure to take time to display customer reviews inside of your website! Not only does this please Google, but potential customers will also feel more confident about using your services. It may take a bit of research to find a widget that presents reviews in the way matches your tastes. At the Plumbing Webmasters, our team actually uses our own special platform called Righteous Reviews which convenient pulls recommendations from Facebook, Google,