In the SERPs, SEO is important for developing and managing the narrative surrounding your brand. In an effective brand management, all kinds of marketing have a role to play. Using the same tone of voice in your advertising and emails, as well as using the same visual assets for your website as you do for your billboards, all help to construct a picture in the mind of a buyer when they contemplate your product or service.
However, your brand may be subjected to poor publicity or reviews, which can have an impact on how it is seen.
If a potential consumer wants to know if your company is reputable, they will most likely look you up online. They’ll want more objective feedback than just visiting your website.
As a result, maintaining one’s internet reputation is crucial. It’s the process of shaping and controlling your brand’s online image. In that procedure, SEO is a crucial factor to consider.
What Is the Importance of Online Reputation Management?
A search for a brand, product, or service is frequently the first step in the research process. When someone searches for your brand, your website is likely to be one or two of the results. All of those other search results might be expressing something about your company that isn’t as good as you’d expect.
For Corporate Brands
Negative feedback is unavoidable. An objective third party might make unfavourable comparisons between your product and a rival. Bad press may have a big impact. You may be losing out on the opportunity to discover possible reputation concerns if you aren’t actively watching what shows at the top of the search results for your branded keywords.
It can be difficult to reverse the harm to your brand if a news report about your firm circulates, or even erroneous information is posted on a third-party website.
It’s critical that your brand’s message appears on the first page of Google search results. Working on your online reputation management ahead of time might put you in a great position to rectify misconceptions and outrank negative material.
Our Personal Brand
This is true for both your personal and professional brands. You must ensure that the material available on the internet portrays a favourable image. We’re all getting very skilled at projecting a nice image of ourselves on social media. Photoshopping photos, picking highlights from our lives, and selectively publishing information that portrays us in a favourable manner are all things we do. When examining prospects for a job, employers and recruiters are increasingly looking at their social media profiles.
But what happens if someone looks up your name on the internet? What appears on the first page of the search engine results pages (SERPs)?
How to Use SEO to Manage Your Online Reputation
For controlling your online reputation, here are six vital SEO tips:
1. Control the Front Page
You should try to manage the first five or so top-ranking results for your brand as much as you can. Your website, as well as any other digital properties you own or manage, and your social media accounts.
If a potential consumer is searching for information about your company, you want to be sure the information they get is accurate. This includes utilising the most popular social media platforms in your area. Create branded profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Most branded search queries will rank highly for social media sites because they are quite authoritative.
However, a social media presence isn’t enough. Create a profile for your business on review sites and industry comparison sites. Basically, any property that is not directly owned by you but over which you have some control over the content.
2. Use the power of social media and review sites to promote your business
Putting oneself out there on social media and review sites is risky. People will leave comments and reviews. They won’t all be positive. Even if you don’t have an official Twitter handle or a company-created Glassdoor page, that doesn’t mean your competitors or angry employees aren’t talking about you. It’s possible that you’re just less aware of it.
You should reply to both positive as well as negative reviews. A Google search for your brand can result up a bad Twitter comment. Maintain a presence on social media and review sites for your company, both to respond to negative feedback and to keep it off Google’s main page.
3. Create a Google My Business account
You can also own this section of the branded search results. When a person searches for your brand on Google, your Google My Business listing may be the first result they see.
It’s possible that your office’s opening hours or availability will alter around the holidays or during the COVID-19 limitations. Google My Business is an excellent resource for keeping that information updated.
Google Posts
Google Posts is another benefit of a Google My Business page for reputation management. Posts are content snippets that display directly on your Google My Business listing. They let your business to directly inject timely deals, articles, or changes into Google search results without having to fight the ranking system or wait for indexing. This is an efficient technique to market anything immediately if you require reactive PR or want to promote something quickly.
Reviews
With a Google My Business profile, you can expect your brand’s reviews to show at the top of the SERPs. There’s not much you can do if a customer posts a review on your Google My Business profile.
It would have to violate Google’s review rules in some way, and even then, there’s no assurance it would be declared as such by Google. It’s just as important to deal with negative attention as it is to deal with good attention when it comes to reputation management. On Google My Business, you may reply to a bad review, providing your company the opportunity to change a poor experience into a favourable one.
Questions & Answers
Google My Business also has a Q&A section where members of the public may ask you questions. The fundamental problem here is that anyone can answer such questions. This is a terrific approach to figure out what your target audience wants to know, but it’s also a very public way to do so.
It’s important that you remain on top of any queries posed so that you can provide an appropriate response. Nothing prevents a well-intentioned (or ill-intentioned) member of the public from answering a question incorrectly. Keep an eye on this part of the SERPs to make sure you’re taking care of your online reputation.
4. Make content with potentially negative keywords in mind
People Also Asked (PAA) search prompts are frequently returned in brand searches. For your reputation management keyword research, the PAA findings are a treasure of information. These prompts may inspire users to examine questions about the brand that they otherwise would not have considered.
Your potential consumer may not have evidence to believe your company is a fraud, but seeing queries that encourage unfavourable material about your company that have been searched by others may build that suspicion. Examine the PAAs that show up for your brand. If they’re even remotely unfavourable, you’ll want to make sure you’re the highlighted segment to dispel that perception.
5. Be Memorable for the Good Reasons
Many people will have little compassion for you if you are attempting to suppress a high-ranking unfavourable news piece that is based on facts. Work on becoming memorable for the right reasons instead. Get the word out about your philanthropic donations, your support for local sports teams, or your environmental efforts.
Concentrate on digital PR for the sake of PR, even if you only obtain a brand mention. It could be enough to outrank review sites, comparison sites, and other more harmful properties for your brand phrases if it’s on a high authority website. The idea is to fill the top page with favourable brand mentions that extend beyond the properties you directly control.
Set up a Brand Alert
Keep an eye out for when you’re referenced online with Google Alerts or other brand mention tracking tools. A journalist or reviewer could be interested in hearing your side of an unpleasant story. It’s possible that your company’s opening hours were misreported, or that other mistakes were mentioned. That warning can offer you the chance to rectify misinformation or a harmful claim before it reaches a large audience.
6. It’s Not All About Google
Don’t forget that Google isn’t the only search engine available. Make sure you’re doing everything right for those search engines as well. Create a Bing Places listing and keep an eye on the first page of DuckDuckGo for brand terms. If your brand is likely to be searched in a different search engine, it’s vital that you keep track of your reputation there.
Credits – https://www.searchenginejournal.com/reputation-management-seo-beginners-guide/386052/#close