The Importance of SEO in Online Reputation Management

In today’s digital world, search engine optimization (SEO) has become an integral tool for digital marketing for any business or brand. More often than not, SEO should be an important part of your online reputation management (ORM) strategy, as both of these concepts can go hand in hand when trying to manage and improve your brand’s image on the internet.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is strategy used to increase the visibility of a website on search engines SEO mostly focuses on SERPs (search engine results page) and improving tagging. It’s about finding opportunities to improve rankings of positive content and drown out negative search results. Employing SEO can result in a top search ranking for a single desired website or page, which can be achieved through varied tools and strategies.

For instance, to improve the SEO of a website, it is important to continually focus on on-page and off-page strategies, since Google changes algorithms between 500 and 600 times per year. On-page factors include quality content, optimized site architecture, and improved HTML; whereas off-page factors include the creation of high quality backlinks and social sharing.

One of the key strategies in managing content in SEO is optimizing for the right keywords. 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.

Other strategies used to improve your search engine content include directing link to URLs off your site- being affiliated with other reputable images can significantly boost 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.

What is Online Reputation Management?

Online Reputation Management (ORM) is a fast-growing discipline involves a mixture of tools and strategies used to create the best possible online image for your brand, which involves the use of various tools and techniques to ensure that positive news and reviews are the first things consumers see when they search for your brand online.

Some tactics used by companies to manage their online reputation include search engine optimization (SEO); content creation — such as blogs, websites; social media management — setting up business profiles on all relevant social media platforms; third-party website monitoring — monitoring the internet to see what people are saying about you; customer engagement etc.

How Are They Different?

As you have already noticed, ORM is generally much broader in scope it terms of digital marketing than SEO.

The main difference between the two notions is that SEO is there to ensure people find your company online, whilst ORM shapes people’s opinion of your brand based on the information available online.

At the same time, SEO is rather involved with driving traffic to a company’s website, whereas ORM manages content on many sites, including those not owned by the brand.

How Are They Connected?

More often than not, SEO is used as an integral part of an ORM strategy plan; of course, it can be employed separately, however, if you want to give your brand the best shot, it would be wise to use them both concomitantly. Here you can see how these two significantly contribute to your image branding, when paired together:

• Local listing creation are great for building links, and allow users to leave reviews on them
• Press releases are also great for building links, which help increase your brand awareness
• Toxic link removal helps you distance yourself from websites that are bad for your online reputation
• Brand monitoring is great for building links and monitoring what people are saying about you.

Since highlighting positive content alone does not guarantee that customers will see the most representative information, you need effective SEO to rank and feature the strengths of your brand. Consistently publishing content without implementing effective SEO tactics will not be very effective in the long run, as SEO cements the search results, giving them longevity as well as better performance.