There is no denying the fact that creating a positive online image is vital for any business; this makes reputation management more significant than ever. A company’s reputation can go north and south quite quickly, both from a traditional PR perspective and digitally.
Reputation management is the process of influencing online and public perception about the offerings of brand’s products and services. It builds your image by using numerous channels — mainly social media and press releases.
Research shows that almost 86% of consumers read reviews especially in the case of a local business. The same research indicates the fact that 84% of customers trust online reviews weighing it as much as personal recommendation and around 68% of consumers forms an opinion after reading 10 online reviews.
Relationship Management & SEO
When people search for your brand online, the information they will see in the outcome are all mainly SEO-driven. It is absolutely a no-brainer that you would want people to know and see more positive things about your existence rather than the negative and discouraging ones. In the modern digital era, nothing is more important than a well-respected image.
How Reputation Management Influence SEO?
Formation of Personal Brand
People like to do business with other people, not necessarily with the companies. This holds true for B2B companies who can nicely anchor their branding around the nexus of individual keywords that best portray and market your brand.
This is the best platform you can use to broadcast the unique services you offer to your customers. The other important aspect is to look for search term associated with your industry. After going through this, see which specific terms you can smartly leverage in both your personal branding and SEO efforts.
Importance of Reviews
The most neglected part of reputation management is the handling part of the reviews. All successful business has professionally and effectively tapped this segment and done wonders.
According to a survey, positive reviews make 73% of consumers trust a local business more.
It is extremely important to understand that legitimate users review can really have a substantial impact on the ranking of your website. The more users see positive reviews, the higher the probability of them clicking through and sharing your content. All this activity is monitored pretty minutely by the search engines, who then reward your hard work with better rankings. The other side of the picture is – bad reviews can hamper the ranking quickly.
Here are few common sections of reviews:
Good Reviews: It is best to appreciate good reviews. When someone takes time from their busy schedule and give your business a good rating, then you should show gratitude.
Bad Reviews: When a customer gives some negative remarks about your brand rather than ignoring it, you should politely try to communicate your point of view and give your best in persuading the customer to accept your brand’s message.
Cultivate the Social Profiles in the Right Way
One of the key mistakes in reputation management is to register social profiles at dozens of websites and link to as many as possible, in anticipation that some will take over those top rankings. This works the other way — by creating a number of profiles, you basically dilute the effectiveness of the strategy, as those links could be consolidated across a few strong profiles instead, normally with greater impact.
The next big mistake is presuming that only registration of a profile in enough within itself to lead the rankings. It is strongly advisable that you participate in the websites that can be more valuable to help the profiles rank than just earning external links.
>h3>Keep an Alternative Blog
The effectiveness of blogs is of paramount importance. Blogs naturally attract a lot of links and references (external), which is precisely the reason why so many reputation management SEOs recommend registering firstlastname.com or brandnameblog.com, and then using it as a professional or personal blog.
Aggressive Brand Advertisement
The organic SEO can deliver a marvelous ROI over the passage of time — paid advertising enables you to immediately gain considerable amount of brand awareness. It is crucial to remember that your brand doesn’t actually have to be extremely big to feel big.
If your presence is everywhere around the web through brand advertising, then it is likely that your potential customers will be more aware of your brand’s offerings rather than relying wholly on organic awareness.
Control & Monitor Brand Activities
The big key to managing and controlling your reputation is replying swiftly to your brand mentions. The set of positive mentions are indeed an opportunity to tap new relationships while enhancing the existing ones.
Negative mentions should not be taken lightly and should be dealt with and resolved quickly before issues turn into mega problems.
The irony is that often you don’t even know if at all your brand is being discussed until and unless the dialogue is taking place at channels you own. This is where Google-Alerts can be or marvelous assistance.
Helps in Winning Customers from Competitors
Poaching customers is always a tricky task but can be mighty successful when done strategically. The key remains time accuracy – when to insert yourself into the conversation and how to keep customers’ best interests at heart and mind, simultaneously.
This can enormously increase your customer base. It is quite a delicate process also because you don’t want to exist clients to get a feeler that they are worth less than the new ones. It’s always beneficial to keep a good balance between both sets of clientele as both are your brand’s customers.
Reputation management is all about actively monitoring, controlling, and engaging with the overall public perception of your brand, with the ultimate goal of proactively crafting brand sentiment. A searcher’s first experience of your brand happens on Google’s SERPs – not particularly your website. The ability to influence organic first impression can go a long way towards improving both customer perception of your brand as well as conversion rates. This makes the relationship between SEO and reputation management a directly proportional one. As They you can’t make a second first impression.