Business owners have always appreciated the value of a good reputation. But with modern online business, reputation management is attached to one other key consideration: search engine optimization (SEO).
At least 68% of customers will pay 15% more for a product from a more reputable company. Not only that, Google’s new EEATs reward businesses that have all the signs of being reputable and trustworthy in their content.
In this article, we will explore the essential elements of SEO and reputation management. We’ll provide actionable best practices to help you effectively manage both. This is how you get more online attention highlighting your most positive content.
What Is SEO Reputation Management?
SEO reputation management is the act of ensuring that positive results are at the top of SERPs for your business. Conversely, you want to ensure that any negative results are pushed down and overpowered by positive results.
Your company’s reputation in the search engines differs from its “ranking” or “SEO performance.” They often say that no publicity is bad publicity, but this isn’t true regarding online search results. If your company is highly visible in the SERPs, but the content is all negative, you will only benefit in strange and unusual circumstances.
This gap between SEO and online reputation management is why you need to address SEO reputation management in your strategies.
Why Reputation Management is Important for SEO
SEO is important, but you need to make sure that your online publicity is positive. Over time, negative SEO can actually reduce your company’s visibility. Platforms like Google reward customer-centric content. That means negative coverage can reduce sales by simultaneously reducing overall traffic and scaring away potential customers who find you.
Your brand reputation impacts conversions and where search engines place your content on the SERPs. Normally, most searches, including your company/brand name, should place your homepage at or near the top. Then, a few results may be on other pages. But what are the other search results, and what do they say about your company?
What if the search results your website shares the first SERP with include negative reviews or critical content? You need to respond to negative reviews and produce content that overshadows hit pieces against your brand. Almost all customers read reviews before making purchases, and 88% are more likely to buy from companies that respond to all types of reviews.
How SEO Affects Online Reputation Management
Your SEO decisions directly affect your online reputation and vice versa.
Developments to your SEO have a few direct effects on the future of your online reputation management:
First, higher search engine rankings lead to increased visibility and, therefore, more website visitors.
Second, there is the search intent behind the keywords content made by (or about) your company is optimized for. The keywords that bring up your brand, the user’s search intent, and the content that they discover all contribute to your reputation.
You need your keywords to attract and appeal to customers genuinely interested in what you’re showing them. By ensuring visitors find what they’re looking for, and not negative content, you improve the metrics used to measure your SEO performance.
Lastly, optimizing your Google Business Profile can greatly improve your local search visibility. Encourage local customers to leave reviews on Google Business or other review sites and build links to positive search results to strengthen your local SEO.
Six SEO + Reputation Management Best Practices
A good SEO reputation comes through a clear strategy that includes these best practices.
1. Create and Optimize Positive Content
If you see negative content about your brand online, it’s natural to instinctually ask “How can I get rid of this?”
The higher up the negative content is, the more you’ll probably want it removed. Over one-fourth of users just click on the top result. But unless the content violates the law or the search engine’s terms of use, you can’t directly remove it. What you can do is create higher-ranking content for the keywords that keep the negative content higher.
The most important step to bolster your online reputation is to produce high-quality, positive content. The content you publish should highlight your business’s achievements and authority.
Specifically, publish:
- Blog posts.
- Articles.
- Press releases.
- Customer testimonials.
- Explainer videos.
Use SEO tools and best practices to ensure that the content you publish is SEO-friendly.
SEO content showcases your business in its best light, attracting potential customers and building trust. It serves the dual purpose of appealing to readers and search engines.
2. Monitor and Respond to Reviews
Use review management tools to monitor reviews across various platforms like Google, Yelp, and Facebook. Review management tools have analytics features to aggregate these reviews into a single dashboard for easy management. Then, implement automated notifications so you can monitor and respond to reviews, giving you more control over customer experiences.
Respond promptly to both positive and negative reviews. Use automated alerts and reminders to make first contact as soon as possible.
Read our guides on responding to negative or positive reviews to maximize the impact of online reviews!
3. Leverage Social Media
In terms of SEO, social media primarily serves to expand the reach of your content. It’s free and easy to share your content to followers and other users on social media platforms. For reputation management, social media is a place to maintain your brand image while interacting with potential customers.
You can share your own content on social media and work with influencers to expand your reach. One-third of shoppers found a new product or brand on social media in one 2023 survey. One-fourth of social media users have bought something based on an influencer recommendation.
If you haven’t already, make sure you claim your social media accounts to take advantage of major social media platforms’ SEO. The more platforms you’re active on, the more interactions you can have and the more social media analytics you can leverage.
4. Optimize Your Website
Good, optimized content ensures your website is readable for visitors and search engine crawlers. But search engines read your website in a different way than human users. You need to take extra steps to take to make sure search engines easily navigate and understand your site.
Focus on on-page SEO elements such as title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and URL structure. Next, look at all your image alt tags, schema markups, and the other information that explains what is going on with each element on your site.
Regularly audit your website for technical SEO issues. Fix any issues that are discovered, such as:
- Broken links
- Duplicate content
- Performance issues
- Javascript or CSS bad practices
- Missing information
- Security vulnerabilities
- Other issues that could negatively impact your rankings.
Overall, user experience (UX) is what determines many of the metrics that Google values. Enhancing UX through intuitive navigation, clear calls-to-action (CTAs), and engaging visuals can also improve your SEO metrics. So, make sure your site is mobile-friendly and has fast loading times. The core web vitals of your site should always meet the acceptable thresholds.
5. Build High-Quality Backlinks
PageRank may not be as popular a topic as it once was, but it still plays a key role in SEO. Now, it still places a high value on backlinks. The main difference is that it values quantity far less than it used to but values quality and user behavior a lot more.
Acquire high-quality backlinks from reputable and relevant website pages to enhance your search engine rankings. Focus on building relationships with trusted voices, including trusted industry influencers, bloggers, and authoritative sites.
Conduct regular backlink audits to identify the overall quality of your backlinks. If necessary, take the time to disavow particularly low-quality or spammy backlinks. Create shareable, link-worthy content to drive the benefits of a strong backlink profile home. The best examples of share-worthy content include:
- In-depth guides.
- Research reports.
- Interactive tools.
- High-quality infographics.
- Actionable insights or instructions.
These kinds of content can naturally attract backlinks from reputable sources.
6. Address Negative Content
Negative content isn’t something that will go away and stop affecting you if you ignore it. You need to proactively create and optimize more positive content to outrank negative content in search engine results. Use SEO techniques to push negative content down the search results.
To maintain a positive reputation online, you need to address negative content quickly. Develop a crisis management plan to enable your team to handle reputation threats quickly and effectively. Regularly monitor your brand mentions and sentiment across the web to identify and address any negative content before it gains traction.
In rare cases, you can consider legal and ethical actions if the negative content is defamatory or false.
How To Recover From Negative Reviews
No matter how good your SEO and reputation management strategies are, you’ll still get negative reviews. It’s part of running a business!
The key is to know how to respond to negative feedback swiftly and professionally. Standard practices for responding to negative reviews should be included in your review management plan. Fast, professional responses minimize damage and demonstrate your commitment to customer satisfaction.
Applying the best practices for responding to negative feedback will pay off over time. You may even turn some unhappy customers into loyal, long-term customers. But more importantly, your public responses demonstrate your commitment to customer service to others looking at reviews.
The other part of recovering from negative reviews is getting more positive reviews. Sometimes, all it takes is knowing how to ask for a Google review. This way, you can publicly help solve unhappy customers’ dissatisfaction while also causing more public satisfaction!
Combine SEO + Reputation Management For Ongoing Growth
Combining SEO and reputation management is not only wise, it is necessary if you want your online business to expand. Online visibility only goes so far if your online reputation leans toward the negative. But your excellent online reputation only matters if shoppers can easily find your business.
Managing your SEO + online reputation is a lot easier with the right tools. Reviewshake is a web-based solution that makes high-value reputation management tasks easy and centralized. That way you can manage mentions of your brand across all platforms while you expand your content to get more organic traffic.
SEO Reputation Management with Reviewshake
Combining SEO and reputation management strategies is essential for maintaining a strong online presence and ensuring your business is viewed positively in search engine results. By creating and optimizing positive content, monitoring and responding to reviews, leveraging social media, optimizing your website, implementing structured data, building high-quality backlinks, and addressing negative content, you can build a robust online reputation and attract more customers.
Reviewshake makes it easy to implement these strategies effectively. With Reviewshake, you can:
- Manage Reviews: Aggregate reviews from over 85 platforms into a single dashboard for easy management, response, and notifications.
- Generate New Reviews: Automate the collection of authentic reviews by sending requests via email and SMS with customizable templates.
- Market Reviews: Showcase reviews on your website, social media, and in Google search results using Rich Snippets to boost visibility and credibility.
- Analyze Reviews: Utilize advanced analytics to track performance, conduct sentiment analysis, and compare your reviews with competitors.
- Respond to Customers: Centralize all customer communications, including review requests, private feedback, and SMS replies, into a single, organized timeline.
Ready to take control of your online reputation through powerful SEO & reputation management techniques? Try Reviewshake for free and discover how our platform can help you generate more reviews, boost your brand’s credibility, and foster lasting customer relationships.
