Every aspect of your business from ad copies, website design, navigation, product pricing, offers, product quality, order fulfillment, shipping to after-sales service impact the website conversion rate, sales, brand loyalty, and repeat business.

Follow the steps below to conduct a brand reputation audit with the objective of finding conversion issues:

#1 Search for your client’s brand name + reviews (for example: ‘debenhams reviews’) on Google:

#2: Scan all the top review websites one by one and then answer the following questions:

#2.1 Are the reviews mostly positive or negative or mixed?

#2.2 What customers are complaining about the most in the reviews? Create and maintain a database of most common objections and complaints.

Following are the most common objections and complaints I once encountered when scanning the reviews of a big ecommerce business:

• Written communication got unanswered
• Phone calls being disconnected,
• Clients put on indefinite hold,
• Clients raising disputes with PayPal
• Clients not getting a refund on time.
• Returns are not easy.
• Customers being sold out of stock items.
• Customers not getting their orders delivered for weeks.
• Hard time reaching a customer representative.
• Delivery almost always take longer than promised
• Some customers threatening to sue.
• Some customers threatening to complain to the better business bureau (BBB)

I scanned dozens of customers’ reviews (it took around 2 days) and the number one complaint was regarding shipping delays following by problems with following up with the customer support. The customer support seemed to be struggling with answering the customers’ inquiries on time.

Note down all the most common objections and complaints raised by angry customers. These are the conversion issues that we need to fix first in order to provide better user experience, quickly improve website sales, and get repeat business.

Focus on Negative reviews as they uncover hidden, unaddressed issues which when resolved can greatly improve your business bottom-line, provide the word of mouth publicity and repeat business.

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#3 Does the client reply to each and every negative review publicly?

Reply to each and every negative review publicly and as soon as they are posted. 

Reviews esp. the bad ones should never be ignored. If they remain unanswered, they just create the impression that the company does not care about its customers. It is a PR disaster that damages brand image and credibility.

#4 Do the reputation audit at least once every month to discover new conversion optimization opportunities.

Every website has got 10,000 problems that need fixing. But nobody has time and resources to fix them all.

In order to prioritize your tasks and manage your resources, you need to collect customers’ feedback data all the time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Your customers’ feedback will almost always highlight the most important issues that need fixing first. Without such feedback data, you may end up spending a significant amount of time and resources in finding and fixing a problem that doesn’t really matter to your customers.

If something doesn’t matter to your customers than it won’t help you in improving the business bottomline. It is as simple as that.

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