Before calling or buying, people almost always check the company: they type its name into Yandex or Google, add the word reviews and look at the listing on maps. It takes a couple of minutes, but this is where they decide whether to get in touch at all.
On the first page they see the company website, map listings with ratings, review sites, mentions in the media and on forums, social media profiles. If the top lines show an old unanswered complaint or a lower rating than the competitor next door on the map, some customers go elsewhere. Analytics won’t show it: these people simply never call.
That’s why online reputation management affects the return on every other channel. Ads and SEO bring people in, but if the search results for your company name put them off, the money spent on those channels works less well.
The first 24 hours after a negative review appears largely shape how the situation develops. Here’s what to do:
If the review contains insults, false claims or signs that a competitor wrote it, prepare a request to the platform’s support team with evidence at the same time.
SEO brings new visitors through queries like apartment renovation in Kazan, and its success is measured in traffic and leads. SERM works in a different area — results for branded queries: the company name, the owner’s name, combinations with words like reviews and complaints. The goal isn’t traffic but control over what people see on the first page.
The tools only partly overlap:
Results are measured differently too. In SERM you track how many top-10 spots for branded queries are held by controlled or neutral content, how ratings change across platforms and how long a new review waits for a reply.