With one of the highest internet penetration rates in the world, Singapore has emerged as a major online market. Business and personal brands leverage the robust digital market to grow their businesses. But with online exposure comes risks to your brand. While it takes years and lots of resources to build your online reputation, the slightest mistakes can wipe all these efforts.
Reputation management is an aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) that involves taking care of your brand’s representation in search engines. Now that your customers are mostly online, you want to always make the best first impression.
Read on and discover the critical role reputation management in SEO can play to promote your business.
How Online Reputation Management is Redefining SEO — And What to Do About It
The world of search engine results (SERPs) is fluid, with changes that are hard to keep up with. While everyone agrees on the importance of search engine optimisation in growing an online business, the ever-evolving Google algorithm makes it tougher than ever before to rank highly on SERPs.
At the incipient stages of search engines, SEO experts could play around with the Google algorithm. Brands invested heavily in black hat SEO to rank highly, but today, such tactics are detrimental to your ranking on search. From keywords, link building, to local SEO, Google’s search ranking factors keep growing. Over the last few years, user generated content (UGC) has emerged as a key factor in the Google algorithm.
Customer reviews and testimonials are at the heart of UGC and influence your company’s ranking on SERPs. If a customer leaves a poor review about your products or services, this can have a spiralling effect on your ranking. Worse still, the poor review might trend creating a potential disaster for your online reputation.
How is SEO changing?
Gone are the days when customer reviews didn’t feature much in your SEO strategy. Today, user-generated review forms a critical component of your content strategy. A customer review, for instance, forms part of your website’s content that Google crawlers consider for ranking on SERPs.
With fresh, positive reviews, you can now increase your brand’s search engine results page (SERP) ranking based on recency. Google considers the input of your customers as more valuable than the tons of content you generate on your blogs.
As negative reviews pile up, your star rating falls and this impacts your SEO. Forget about keywords, backlinks, and all the other hitherto tactics that were part of the SEO holy grail. Today, that single bad review by a customer is enough to kill your business. Removing negative stuff about your brand is at the heart of online reputation management.
After investing so much effort and resources, you can’t let your dream die. Rep management helps you adapt quickly to the changes in SEO. By investing in reputation management, you prepare your business for the worst and stay ahead of your competition. The goal is to get massive positive reviews that boost your star rating which translates to higher ranking on SERPs.
To appreciate how SEO has changed, consider a situation where a customer leaves a negative review about your pizza delivery service. Of course, bad news travels fast and other potential customers may pick up on the negative piece of news. During your site’s indexing, the bad review gets prominence and features highly on SERPs.
A customer looking for pizza near you will first find the negative result on search engine results. If the poor review finds itself on social media, consider your goose cooked. This is where online reputation management comes in handy. Your online reputation management service helps you get positive reviews and other content to suppress the negative perception.
Online Reputation is the New SEO
With user generated content now a major focus of Google’s algorithm, it’s more important than ever to consider your brand’s online reputation. Any word out there about your brand has the potential to make or break your digital marketing efforts. In this regard, online reputation management (ORM) has become more important than ever.
A positive brand reputation is at the heart of a successful marketing strategy. While your brand might have the best campaign in the market, you can’t have full control of information created about your brand. negative mentions on the internet can happen any time and you can’t anticipate such comments or reviews.
At one point, your brand has everything running smoothly and enjoying great ranking on SERPs for the target keywords. Suddenly a bad review drops on your website or some other platform with devastating consequences for your brands. Now that user generated content is an important part of your content, the negative reviews will quickly show up in online searches.
Reputation management is at the centre of SEO by helping reshape the narrative around your brand. Your reputation management services monitor any mentions of your brand across all platforms. From web pages, social media, to email feedback, your reputation manager is one the lookout for any negative feedback about your products or services.
Reputation management is about mitigation of the damage that negative reviews/content may cause. At the heart of successful reputation management is search engine optimization. Your online reputation management service leverages the best SEO practices and combines them with public relations to turn around the negative online narratives.
Through the best practices in SEO, online reputation management saves your brand by influencing the user generated content, which appears in top search engine results. Now that reviews have such a prominent place in search, your reputation management company gets to work to increase the volume of the reviews and other user generated content.
How Rep Management SEO Services Help
In the simplest terms, online reputation management strategically influences the public perception of a personal or business brand. Celebrity reputation management, for instance, involves correcting the perceptions of a public figure online.
A business/ celebrity reputation management service is now integral in your SEO efforts. The company has the resources to actively monitor brand mentions in real-time and follows rules allowed by webmaster guidelines. Your online reputation manager works overtime to generate positive reviews to counter the bad publicity your brand receives on search engine results.
By building positive review volumes, your SEO partner changes the narrative that has gained prominence in search. The idea is to use Google’s best recommended strategies in content creation to suppress or remove the negative reviews. Your SEO reputation partner distributes the positive reviews across all platforms, including on search, Facebook, and other important feeds.
Takeaway
Are you ready to get your brand’s groove back? While you’ve invested heavily in content creation and other SEO strategies, you’ve to appreciate the changing world of SEO. Reputation management is the new SEO and helps deliver incredible results by acting on factors that Google cares about. You can no longer ignore user generated content such as reviews. It’s time to leverage the good things your customers have to say about your brand to build your SEO campaigns.
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