Reputation Management SEO for Your Company

When you type your company’s name into Google, what are the first results you see? Try it!   The same question goes for a hidden search, since your regular results may be affected by your browsing history.   If your company’s had some negative PR lately, that climbed to the top of the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages), there are ways to adjust your digital marketing strategy to repair it.

Whether you’re looking for reputation management or some good reputation building, you can do both via SEO. Let’s have a look at what SEO knowledge you need to carry out these reputation management SEO tactics:

What Affects the Order of Ranking Pages?

When it comes to ranking, SEO recognizes a few categories you should keep an eye on. Managing your online reputation via SEO can’t be accomplished unless you first understand the basics. If the pages you want to appear high in the SERPs aren’t there, you should check a few things to ensure they will rank:

• Make sure your site isn’t blocked from indexing;
• Optimize your content;
• Add enough backlinks.

Among other factors that influence your page ranking, keywords are indeed the most important. You need to make sure that you’re ranking for the right keywords, and that they’re frequently searched on Google. This is where SEO and content optimization help the most.

Reputation Management Digital Marketing Strategy

Now that the basics are out of the way, we can look at some strategies to improve or build your company’s reputation from scratch via SEO. Like most other businesses, your products and services will likely be reviewed at some point. Reviews can help immensely in creating positive public opinion about your brand, but managing your online company reviews is a tricky thing.

If you see a bad review on an independent website, there’s often the option to reach out to the publisher and ask for it to be removed, in the case of it being unfair or biased. However, if the review isn’t unjust but merely unfavorable, there’s a way to bury it in the SERP, so it’s not the first thing potential buyers see. You’ll do this by pointing a link to positive reviews, either from your site or guest posts on other websites. It will elevate a particularly positive review in the search results, allowing you to push the negative ones down.

Additionally, there are a few other SERP features you can add to your Google result pages which count as separate search results:

• Image packs and videos;
• Rich snippets;
• Shopping results;
• Google Ads (formerly AdWords);
• Knowledge cards.

Adding and optimizing these is great for reputation building, and it also provides potential customers with a wealth of information about your brand.

SEO can get you out of the clutches of online obscurity and also help you improve your company’s reputation. However, its downside is that it can take months before you see any results, especially if you’re trying to do everything on your own. With a professional on your side, the process will be much faster, and you’ll get reliable results.

Don’t hesitate to contact me if you wish to see your efforts come to fruition more quickly. I’ll be happy to discuss your marketing strategy with you and help in any way I can.

Rob Dunford is a Marketing Consultant in the Great Toronto Area with over 20 years of experience in implementing marketing plans for small businesses.