One of the most important things for any business is its reputation. An online reputation is how other people see a business or person when they look for them online. Everyone has an online reputation, whether you know it or not. If you don’t know what yours is, it is time you took control of it.
Once a person formulates an opinion on your brand, you will struggle to change their mind. So if this opinion is negative, it can result in one less sale. Multiply that by hundreds or even thousands of people, and your sales will suffer. Even just one bad review can be hard to bounce back from, and can also be the reason why some companies fail. However, this is why solutions have been developed in an effort to change and influence people’s opinions on your brand. Let’s explore how you can manage your online reputation with the help of SEO.
Produce high-quality content
When we say content is king, we mean it. The impact that high-quality content can have will not only improve your reputation, but it will also improve your ranking in the search engines, which brings about the opportunity to find new customers. You can achieve this through content marketing.
Content marketing is a fantastic SEO method that can present you as an expert in your field. However, it is not as simple as producing content and publishing it. You have to create a strong content marketing strategy, and to do this, you will need to implement the following steps:
- Define who you are targeting: You first need to define who your audience is so that you can tailor your content to them. This also affects when and where you are posting.
- Keyword research: You will then want to conduct keyword research to see what topics are currently trending for your particular industry or niche so that you can base your content around them.
- Determine what type of content you will focus on: Will you produce blogs, videos, podcasts, or case studies?
- Know what your competitors are doing: Always keep up to date with what your competitors are doing. They might have discovered a trending topic that you missed.
- Create the content: With the knowledge of who you are targeting and around what topic, you can start creating your content. This content needs to be adding value to the topic, and if done well, it will show you as a trustworthy source.
- Promote your content: Publishing quality content means nothing if you don’t promote it. Actively promote the content you have created on social media platforms.
- Monitor your results: Track how well the content is doing a few months down the line. Remember that it can always be updated and changed.
Improve what is seen online
SEO is about building your online presence, but if you want to improve your reputation, then you need to take this one step further. You need to improve all of your existing online components, not just content. In order to do this, you can recruit the help of reputation management services. A service such as this will analyze and inform you of the areas that need to be improved, such as reviews, ratings, business listings, and SEO.
While you might have implemented a content marketing plan and seen a considerable improvement in your content, this is not the only area of SEO that matters. By building up your reputation, you can also accomplish better ratings and reviews, local SEO, and see development within Google My Business. You need the right information supplied to your customers, and Google My Business can help do this. The more accurate information you provide about your business online, the more your reputation will improve. This leads us nicely onto the next point: expanding your online presence.
Expand your online presence
The internet offers plenty of opportunities to expand your online presence, and when you are trying to manage your online reputation, it is important that you take advantage of the different platforms available. You can’t just rely on people leaving ratings and reviews in one place, such as your website or Facebook. Not everyone uses Facebook, and not everyone will go on there to find reviews for a business. Some people will use Google, while others will use TripAdvisor or Yelp.
You don’t even have to have a profile for people to leave reviews about you, and so you could find that people have been leaving different reviews for months, but the information they have supplied is not correct. They might have your website URL wrong, have the wrong opening hours to your store, or have provided the wrong phone number; this all impacts the reputation of your company.
This all links back to local SEO. If your local SEO isn’t up to par and you aren’t supplying your customers with the right information, as discovered by reputation management services, then this needs to change. You need to take back the control and expand your online presence to these particular platforms that people trust and then update the information about your business’s location, phone number, website URL, etc. You must make this a priority. You need to ensure that you are reaching as many people as possible and that you are getting positive reviews across all of these platforms.
It’s not just reviews that make the difference
You need to show that you are an expert in your field, that you are a trusted source within the eyes of Google, and, therefore, you need to focus on white hat SEO strategies that will help you do both, such as link building. With a solid link building strategy in place, you are effectively promoting your brand and increasing the chances of somebody coming across your site.
With high-quality content posted on high DA sites that link back to your website, you will improve your ranking on the SERPs, which shows you as a credible source to many people. However, by actively building up your links and keeping your audience in mind, you will be expanding the reach of your presence much further than you could have imagined. As a result, you will assure your readers and potential customers that you are a trustworthy source and a credible brand. You’ll be able to enjoy increased traffic and a reputation boost that will get you noticed for all the right reasons.
