You have two key goals when it comes to managing your company’s reputation: First and foremost, building the credibility that helps grow your business and bring in the right types of clients and customers. Second, addressing any client negativity that inevitably comes along in the lifetime of a business. We’ve written this guidebook to give you the tools, best practices and easy action items for success.  Don’t be intimidated – we can make you an expert! 

Your Houzz profile acts as a virtual marketing team, working for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days a year: showing prospective clients your work, providing references from satisfied clients and showcasing your expertise, so you can focus on your day job.  We’re going to show you 10 ways to arm this virtual marketing team to build and manage your reputation – both on Houzz and off.  

Now that you’ve invested time and effort building and managing your reviews, get the most out of them by placing them on all your touch points.

You can add a reviews page which pulls in all of your reviews from your Houzz profile and puts them on your website.   

And of course, you can link to all your social pages from your Houzz profile.

Offline, show prospective clients and customers you are Houzz-savvy with window stickers, car and truck magnets, and job site signs. Find them here.

That’s it! Building content, managing your reviews and promoting your brand through these 10 simple guidelines will help strengthen your reputation and give prospective customers greater confidence in your business.

10 Best Practices for Reputation Management

1. Create credibility with professional photos
2. Proactively request reviews 
3. Take control of the review process
4. Collaborate with clients from the start
5. Respond to reviews: both positive and negative 
6. Complete and differentiate your profile
7. Get ready for the Best of Houzz awards
8. Build your following and display your affiliations
9. Use discussions to fill in the gaps
10. Make sure your website works hard for you

1. Create credibility with professional photos

It goes without saying: Houzz is a visual platform. Your project photos represent your work and your business in a very powerful way; they are how clients judge your ability to deliver on their vision and the quality of your work. On Houzz, photos are often the first exposure a prospective client has to your business. From a reputation standpoint, professionally shot photos speak to the credibility and professionalism of your business, no matter what type of project or budget level you work with. So make sure your first impression is a positive one that draws in potential new business.

If you are taking your own photos, be sure to think about composition and staging. Houzz offers guides like this one: How to Compose Your Shot for Stunning Home Photography.

2. Proactively request reviews 

Once a prospective client has found you through your work, how can building and managing your reputation help close the deal? Our annual Houzz & Home survey of hundreds of thousands of homeowners found that when it comes to hiring a professional, ratings and reviews are some of the most important criteria. When it comes to reviews, having that seal of approval from past clients can help close a deal, while not having reviews can actually lose you business.

Gathering many reviews from satisfied clients is critical for reputation management. Not only do positive reviews help close business, but they also help minimize the impact that one negative review can have by making it look like an unusual case. So request reviews from every client, and set expectations early. 

Houzz has high standards in place for the review process to help ensure the best experience for everyone in our community. Houzz checks that each review submitted is legitimate and written objectively.  Anonymous reviews are not allowed. This ensures that reviewers stand publicly behind their reviews and that professionals can identify their reviewers. 

5. Respond to both positive and negative reviews

Now that you have reviews, managing them – both the positive and the negative – can take your reputation management to the next level and truly differentiate your business from the competition.  

After your review is posted to Houzz, be sure to thank your reviewer and add your own comment to the review. This is a great opportunity to demonstrate to prospective clients the great relationships you build with each client and the way you engage on a project. It’s an additional touch point to show your personality, expertise or attention to detail. Potential clients are reading these details, and pros in the Houzz community tell us these small gestures can help close new business.

Try to resolve negative reviews. Clients can edit their Houzz review at any time. If your client is less than satisfied, look at the review as fresh insight that gives you the opportunity to reach out and make things right. If you demonstrate concern, clients will often gladly update their review and talk about how you turned around a difficult situation. 

Address negative reviews head-on. Sometimes you just don’t see eye to eye with a client. When this happens, reply to the review with your side of the story, but do it with grace and professionalism. This can completely take the power from a bad review. How? Kristen Petro of Kristen Petro Interiors has actually closed new business because of the way she handled a difficult and detailed negative review. She advises:

"A bad review, when you can respond to it, is an opportunity to explain your company and its process in a way that you can't via your Houzz business description or website. It's a way to give insight into the way your company operates. People who are interested in you will seek that out. 

The adage that the customer is always right isn't always true - we do everything we can to accommodate, but sometimes they ask for things that aren't reasonable, or that conflict with our ethics or process. Standing behind the principles and ethics of good business sometimes means saying no to a client. If that yields a bad review, so be it, but you must maintain your professionalism and can't be emotional in your response.

In the end, you want the clients who want to work with a company like yours. If they don't appreciate your process and response to a bad review, it may not be the kind of client you want anyway. It is another level of pre-qualification. We want clients who want to work in a professional way, those who will read our response and appreciate it.

There is life after a bad review!" Read the review and Kristen’s response.

6. Strengthen and differentiate your profile

Having a strong profile builds your credibility on Houzz, among other significant benefits. Write a personalized business description that helps prospective clients understand how you differ from your competitors. Perhaps it’s by how you work with your clients, or that you are a family-owned business, or the type of work you do, the materials you work with, or your focus on green building practices. Details help make you credible.

7. Build your following and display your affiliations

Many pros have more followers on Houzz than on any other social platform. That’s because 40 million people use Houzz, 90% of whom are homeowners who are actively building, remodeling or decorating. 

Building a following on Houzz increases your business credibility, and also feeds the Houzz algorithm that determines your ranking in the “Find a Pro” directory on the site and app. 

So ask your clients and colleagues to follow you on Houzz – it’s easy for them to find and click the “Follow” button on your profile. 

8. Get ready for the Best of Houzz awards

Did you know that you enter the Best of Houzz awards for Customer Service simply by having your clients submit reviews?  Earning a Best of Houzz award is an enormous credibility builder, and has become a coveted and powerful marketing tool for professionals on Houzz.

Winning pros:

• Place the winner badge on their website, business cards and email signature
• Send out press releases and secure articles about their award

To be eligible, you need to have at least one review from a client whose project was completed in the past calendar year.  For example, for Best of Houzz 2020, you would have needed to have at least one review for a project completed in 2019.

Don’t worry if the person asking the question is out of your area, or working on a DIY project. The Houzz audience is diverse and global. The idea is to answer each question for the tens, hundreds or thousands of people who may be visiting your profile and who are using those discussions as a way to gauge your expertise, and what you would be like to work with.

10. Make sure you have a credible website

Clients look at a company’s website as evidence of a legitimate business, one that is both savvy and solvent.  While it’s great to have a presence on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, social sites aren’t compelling substitutes for a company website. These days, you need to have a responsive, mobile-friendly website - in fact, lack of a mobile-friendly design is the number one reason that 40% of mobile site visitors leave and go to a competitor’s site. If you have your own website, make sure it is helping, not hurting, your credibility. If your site isn’t current technically, or if it is dated or expensive to maintain, you need to take action. To help our pro community, every Houzz Pro subscription includes a professional, mobile-friendly website with a custom domain, built and managed by the Houzz team.