How to Successfully Use SEO to Manage Your Online Reputation

There are two distinct terms which are often grouped together, and are different in their application, but generally have the same end-goal — to create a positive image of a brand. I’m, of course, talking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Online Reputation Management (ORM).

The first one is used to increase the search engine ranking of your content, whilst Online Reputation Management (ORM) is a bit broader of a term, and is used to specifically manage the online reputation of an individual or a business/brand. More often than not, SEO is an integral part of any ORM strategy plan ORM includes not just SEO as part of its strategy, but also managing and monitoring social media profiles, blogs, review sites, etc.

However, today we will go a bit more in detail about what SEO entails, and how it can impact your online reputation management plan.

Why start with SEO? It’s pretty simple — a customer’s online experience starts with a search. Before a customer gets to your website, they first land on search results. If it so happens that they only see negative reviews or inaccurate information about you on search results, they won’t engage with your company if they don’t trust you or believe in your message.

Successful online reputation management (ORM) and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies can help you achieve results through proactively coordinating content, websites, and search engine results pages (SERPs). This way the right SEO-driven content strategy will boost your online reputation.

How to improve your Online Reputation by building on SEO

People are influenced by what they read about you, and generally, most are inclined to believe the negative reviews more than the positive ones. As such, employing SEO as a tool for your, will give it the best chance of being seen when people search for your business. SEO is necessary to help improve the tagging and search engine optimization of company-published materials; it will also make sure your content has the right keywords and headlines, so that it ends up ranking high on SERPs.

An effective SEO-driven strategy will accomplish the following goals:

• Optimize pages of your website to appear atop of SERPs and rank for target keyword phrases.
• Feature your actual relevant social media profiles representing your company or brand name.
• Optimize company-hosted and third-party review website pages to populate when an interested person Googles “your brand name + reviews.”
• Influence search engines to highlight positive content, whilst pushing down negative or irrelevant content.

One of the key strategies in managing content in SEO is optimizing for the right keywords and anchor texts. If you are ranking for a specific keyword, tie it with your brand name. This will provide you with anchor phrases that you can link to relevant pages and allow you to establish contextual relevance with your brand and your target keywords. They will also be useful for targeting content on different platforms, such as website content and social media profiles.

Other strategies used to improve your search engine content include directing link to URLs off your site- being affiliated with other reputable images can be a great boost to your reputation and you will gain credibility and trust from customers; pitching journalists or bloggers or editors or content creators on the web to write about you; creating your own content; leveraging high-ranking platforms and influence SERPs features, amongst others.

Perhaps the most important part of managing your brand online, is monitoring results. Employing such tools and strategies to improve your reputation is not a one-time thing, but a continuous process that requires constant upkeep and frequent monitoring to see your results, which in turn will only help your brand in the long-term.Bottom of Form