Tips to Boost Your Reputation Using SEO

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This year's business competition is at its peak. We are witnessing the growth of smart consumers who believe in validated buying decisions. With that said, your brand’s online reputation significantly influences your sales.
Each business strives for a stellar search engine presence and a positive reputation. Today, online reputation management is an essential factor in your business success.
Many SEO firms believe online reputation as crucial as your SEO efforts. And they represent online reputation and SEO as two sides of a single coin.
Here we will discuss the importance of online reputation and how to grow it.
Read on to learn:

• What is Reputation Management
• Importance of your Brand’s Online Reputation for SEO
• Tips to Boost Your Brand’s Online Reputation Using SEO
• Best Tools to Track Your Online Reputation

What is Reputation Management

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Online Reputation Management (ORM) is a strategy to establish a positive sentiment about your brand. One employs ORM to control the public conversations about a brand on different channels. These conversations include:

• The user-generated reviews on GMB;
• The reviews & ratings on other business listings;
• Continue the line - such as Capterra, which gets millions of traffic.
  
• The social media comments about your brand;
• Online conversations related to your brand- on blogs, websites, social media, etc.

All these factors impact the reputation of your brand. And they, as a result, influence your sales and conversions.
According to surveys:

• 92% of consumers report that online reviews impact their buying decisions.
• 88% of consumers trust user-generated reviews as much as personal recommendations.

So, let us understand the key benefits of online reputation management for businesses:

• It helps develop credibility and trust for your business through positive reviews
• It helps keep a check on the negative reviews and comments from users or competitors
• It enhances the transparency of a company and its offerings
• It boosts customer engagement and positive sentiment for a business
• It also impacts a brand’s search engine rankings and overall SEO
• It grows a business’s online visibility and presents it the right exposure

Importance of Online Reputation Management for SEO

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1. Reputation Management Creates Fresh Content

As we know, SEO is driven by content. And reputation management produces new content for your brand.
Online reputation management includes encouraging user-generated reviews. These reviews on listing platforms and your website act as fresh content for your brand.
This content might not hold the same value as blogs and curated web content. But frequent fresh content is always appreciated by search engines. And it will give a considerable push to your search engine rankings.
Most user-generated reviews include your brand name. And it can help increase your brand awareness online.
Moreover, user reviews from different platforms often link back to your website.
Also, you can have some tools that give you daily, weekly, and monthly data on who are all talking about your brand.
It becomes a strong social signal that further supports your SEO efforts.

2. Impacts Website Authority

Business reputation has a considerable impact on your website authority. Online reputation management includes various activities including:

• Increasing social mentions for your brand
• Increasing social media engagement
• Produce creative and user-worthy content regularly for a high social media engagement rate.
  
• Encouraging positive feedback and reviews on different listing platforms

Now each of these activities adds a positive impact on brand popularity. And search engines notice this increase in popularity. Thus, giving them a reason to rank your brand higher than the competition.
With this, with a good brand reputation, it is easier to draw inbound links from high DA sites. More bloggers would be willing to quote your brand (or CEO) in their blogs. And media sites can help your brand find the right exposure. It would be a catalyst for your SEO efforts. And it will increase your website authority.
Nevertheless, you would find the right visibility for your newly-launched business offerings. You can expect overall growth in your business visibility online.

3. Locating New Long-tail Keywords

When it comes to growing your brand reputation through user-generated reviews, you welcome a lot of brand and products related content for your business.
Now, one can do an in-depth analysis of this user-generated content. This content will highlight the relevant terms your customers use for your brand. And one can screen the long-tail keywords in this content.
You can use these keywords to familiarize your content with your customers’ lingo. And the located long-tail keywords would help you optimize for search engine rankings. It means wider visibility for long-tail search queries. And it also manifests into a high conversion rate.
You can access any of these free, freemium, or premium keyword research tools to find the most relevant long-tail keywords for your brand.
With some efforts, you could utilize your brand reputation to accelerate your SEO performance.

4. Get More Visibility and Featured in Local 3-Pack

If you are a local business, a good reputation can help you with your local SEO efforts. Google notices your good online reputation along with:

• Frequent positive reviews on GMB;
• Primly, good GMB reviews boost brand reputation without spending a penny on branding and send trust signals for ranking it high on SERPs.
  
• Popularity on business listing sites; and
• Good social media engagement.

And Google values these parameters while planning your rankings for local searches.
Moreover, a stellar online reputation helps you rank in the Local SEO 3-Pack listings. These listings are noticeable exclusively at the top of SERPs for local intent searches. It shows the map location, ratings, contact number, and website link for the top 3 organic search results.
The local 3-pack results have the highest click-through rate for local searches. Establishing a presence in the local 3-pack can draw significant conversions for a business.

Tips to Boost Your Brand’s Online Reputation Using SEO

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1. Update Profile on Paid and Popular Listing Sites

As a part of your SEO strategy, you need to grow your business visibility online. And for that, you need to list your business on various local or service-specific listing sites.
Now, these sites include GMB listings and many other popular listing sites. The more relevant listing you cover, the higher grows your brand awareness.

Relevant : Benefits of a Google My Business Listing

These listing sites help customers engage with your brand. And here, they can post their feedback about your businesses and offerings. Positive reviews on these listings will help grow your brand reputation.
Moreover, some paid listing sites offer exclusive features to boost your reputation. One such site is Trustpilot, which offers paid features like:

• Brands get the personal email addresses of reviewers
• Businesses can send Trustpilot’s customizable review invitation to their clients or customers.
• Display TrustBox with rich snippet star ratings

The above-listed features can help you highlight your business among other listings.
The reviews on Trustpilot are put after screening fake reviews by the team.
And it will help boost your brand’s online reputation.

2. Plan Guest Posts on High DA Websites

Guest posting and drawing inbound links from high DA websites is a crucial SEO strategy.
Nevertheless, these link-building efforts grow your DA. They boost your brand’s popularity and online reputation.
For instance:

• If you publish your guest post on Forbes, readers would think highly of your brand. An inbound link from Forbes on this article will help you draw significant link equity.
  One link from Forbes builds more reputation for your brand (in both users and search engine view) than 100 links from other average websites.
  
• If you get to quote a statement on behalf of your brand in a prominent article, the platform’s reputation will pass down to your brand as well. It can be an eminent social signal for your customers.
• If a popular blogger reviews your product/service, it will impact your brand reputation. If he provides positive feedback in his blog-post, it will grow your brand reputation.

So, try to produce high-quality, sharable blog posts and share them on high DA sites. Try to establish prominent brand mentions on reputable platforms. And earn quality backlinks from relevant websites. These efforts will give your brand’s online reputation a much-required boost.

3. Utilize PR and Media Sites

PR outreach is a significant part of your link building and brand building strategy. It offers you great exposure, grows brand authority, and impacts your brand reputation.
For instance:
If reputable publications like Entrepreneur Media cover your business news, it would be a great boost for your brand reputation. Plus, you can use this news’s reference on your in-house blog to cover the entire story.
You can also take consent to promote it through your social media and other channels.
This lets other PR magazines cover your story, making it reach a wider audience.
It will help you get the right reach for your brand-related news. And these efforts will enable you to develop a positive brand positioning.
So, you need to:

• Stay updated and maybe cover the latest industry news;
• Pitch your brand-specific news to popular media sites;
• Try to get featured in popular industry news articles;
• Get good reach for positive brand-specific news.

4. Encourage Positive Reviews and Feedback

Reviews and feedback are the most crucial brand reputation signals. Now, as you plan your SEO strategy, you need to invest some efforts toward encouraging positive reviews as well.
You can encourage users to review your business in many ways, these include:

• Plan a feedback generation strategy for every customer (through email, notification, etc.)
• Get your business listed on various local listing sites.
• Promote your business listings on social media and encourage engagement
• Find tools that allow you to send customizable review invitations to your customers.
• Some brands also plan incentive-based review encouragement strategies.

You can incorporate these efforts with your SEO strategy. Moreover, the review generation process can be accelerated using ORM tools.
Note: We will be discussing online reputation management tools later in this blog.

5. Improve Your Rankings in SERPs

While we are looking for ways to establish a good business reputation, let us not forget that the top rankings on SERPs themselves contribute significantly to a business reputation.
According to Moz, Google’s first page’s search results attract 72% of the total clicks. And this number reached up to 92% recently. These high click-through rates also represent that users trust first-page search results more.
This also increases your site’s trust flow and ranking of other web pages as users tend to pass through interlinks.
Therefore, if your business website ranks on the first page of Google, users trust it.
You need to get more of your important landing pages rank on Google’s first page. It will grow your overall website traffic and boost your reputation.

6. Create Engaging, Quality Content

Whether you are an expert or a beginner, you would know that content is the basis of SEO. The more quality content you produce, the more significant your SEO efforts will be.
Most, if not all, SEOs have heard of Brian Dean of Backlinko, who built a strong online reputation for his brand by creating user-friendly, trending, and engaging content.
Quality content has a crucial impact on your brand awareness and reputation. The content you produce must be:

• According to the SEO guidelines, to help your brand rank higher in SERPs;
• Sharable and informative, to help you earn inbound links from high DA websites;
• Insightful and authenticate, to help readers learn about and trust your brand;
• Engaging, to draw high engagement (shares and comments) from readers;
• Conversion-focused, to help you earn good traffic and conversions; and
• High-quality, to support your brand value and boost your brand reputation.

One must produce quality long-form content with high readability. Both search engines and readers appreciate it. It can help improve your rankings and conversions.
Bloggers and high DA sites readily promote high-quality content on their platforms. And this can help you grow your business’s online reputation significantly.

7. Respond to Negative Reviews Smartly, and Overshadow Them with Positive Reviews

Negative reviews and comments from users are bad for your business reputation. If reviewers bombard you with negative reviews, it can lead to a reputation crisis. Therefore, you need to keep a check on negative reviews.
While your SEO team encourages reviews, it is also crucial to curtailing negative reviews.
One way to manage negative reviews is by responding to negative reviews. In today’s competitive market, you should never ignore customer feedback, especially negative reviews. It’s high time that you acknowledge the concern and respond to it politely.
If it is about a bad customer experience, you can resolve the concern with a ‘we care’ attitude. 89% of users love to see a business respond to a user review. Most users tend to modify their feedback if a brand pays focus to their concern.
Another way is to boost the promotion of your positive social signals. It will help you overshadow the negative reviews.
In some cases, businesses connect with the listing platform owners to hide some defaming reviews. One might need to connect with reviewers themselves to meet their concerns.

8. Boost your Local SEO Efforts

Local intent search dominates the overall search queries on various search engines. 50% of all search queries on Google are local intent searches.
Moreover, the competition in the local business market is sweat-inspiring. Your business reputation becomes crucial when you are a local business.
Below are various local SEO tactics that can help you elevate your brand reputation:

• List your business in popular listing sites with consistent business information (NAP consistency)
• Try to utilize paid features on listing sites to encourage positive user reviews
• Stand-out as a reputable business on Google My Business (GMB)
• Find your presence in the Local 3-Pack, as consumers highly trust local 3-pack results
• Plan press release in reputed local media sites for brand awareness and reputation building

Growth in your local brand reputation can increase your conversions up to many folds.

9. Gear-up for Blogger Reviews

SEO involves blogger outreach campaigns where businesses connect with bloggers to cover their brand story or share their posts.
Akin to it, you can connect with influential bloggers to review your offerings. It would have the same impact as influencer marketing.
Influential blogger review campaigns offer stellar growth to your brand reputation. You need to:

• Screen and connect with influential bloggers in your industry
• Pitch them your product/service review proposal
• Highlight the USPs of your offerings
• Mention how his followers will connect with this review and offering
• For example, Daniel Bernstein and trainer Eric Johnson posted a video to get in shape. She promoted Fiji bottles (with her promo code), indicating to her followers the importance of staying hydrated.
  
• Meet the monetary aspects he demands

You can use popular blogger reviews as materials to boost your brand reputation online.

10. Use Brand-specific Keywords and Optimize Anchor Texts

You can club your SEO and reputation-building efforts through keyword optimization.
It would be best if you established brand-specific keywords for your business. One way is to analyze your top-ranking keywords and club them with your brand name.
The next step would be to start using these keywords in your content smartly. It will not only build your brand popularity but grow your brand reputation.
Brands must use their branded keywords as anchor texts for inbound links on guest posts. Placing these anchor texts on popular guest post websites boosts your brand reputation.
You must invest some effort to grow the popularity of your branded keywords. It can help you reap great benefits in brand reputation and qualified traffic.
One can also use branded keywords in PPC (Pay Per Click) Search Ads. It will help you boost your brand awareness and branded keywords’ popularity. However, including PPC means agreeing to a higher marketing budget.

11. Do Not Miss Out on Social Media Influencers

Social media engagement is growing with each passing day. And influencer marketing has become influential than ever. It can impact your brand reputation like nothing else.
With that said, here are some stats to show the effectiveness of influencer marketing:

• Content shared by influencers earns 8 times more engagement than that shared by brands.
• On average, businesses generate $6.50 profits for every $1 spent on influencer campaigns. These profits go up to $20 for a few top brands.
• 40% of consumers purchased a product by seeing an influencer use it on social media.

Recommendations from influencers have a significant value. If popular influencers recommend your brand or offerings, it is a crucial trust signal. And it will give a stellar boost to your brand reputation along with conversions.
There are various platforms to connect with social media influencers. Some of the popular ones are – Traackr and Upfluence.

12. Plan Website Improvements Along with On-page SEO

On-page optimization remains the initial aspect of any SEO strategy. It comprises of:

• Technical optimization for the search engines; and
• Conversion-focussed optimization for the viewers.

Ideal on-page optimization also includes some reputation-building considerations. These considerations are:

• Optimizing the website content quality to make it look more trustworthy and authentic
• Adding important trust signals to your website (“feature in” section, brand logos, etc.)
• Adding certification and reward badges from reputable sources on your home page
• Highlighting your client testimonials and case studies as strong social signals
• Including screenshots of user-generated reviews on popular listing sites
• Highlighting ratings and reviews for your product offerings
• Keeping your on-page social signals updated
• Regularly updating the on-page content and producing new content for search engines.

The above activities will help you grow your brand reputation and conversions.

13. Deploy SEO and Reputation Monitoring Tools

Most SEO experts are familiar with tools like Google Alerts, BuzzSumo, and Social Mention. These tools help search experts set alerts and track mentions for your focus SEO terms. With this, some tools also help you find overall engagement data around a focus term.
These tools also prove productive when it comes to online reputation management. Businesses use these monitoring tools to track brand mentions and product mentions. They can also do competitor reputation analysis and check engagement around their brand.
Some tools allow brands to scrutinize their brand reach, influence, and consumer sentiment.
Moreover, there are tools to boost brand reputation through review management. One can use these tools to simultaneously grow their SEO efforts and brand reputation.

14. Increase Social Media Engagement

Now there is a decade-old debate whether social media impacts SEO or not. But, social media positioning affects your business authority and reputation.
Social media profile building and engagement building is a part of overall SEO. And it is crucial for your brand visibility as well as customer engagement.
Eminent social media presence with good engagement and followers is a strong social signal. It acts as a catalyst for your brand reputation. And consumers trust a brand with a strong social media presence.
So there are steps that you can follow to boost your brand reputation:

• Build engaging and authenticate social media profiles on various popular platforms
• Update your social media profiles with brand-specific and trust-inspiring content
• Grow your social media engagement with sharable posts and exclusive industry news
• Encourage positive comments about your business and offerings on social media
• Display a strong connection with your customers through social media platforms
• Utilize social media influencers and turn your customers into mini-influencers on social media

Best Tools to Track Your Online Reputation

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1. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a simple, free tool popular among most marketers. The tool allows you to set an alert for a term. So whenever someone mentions the term online, you receive a notification for it.
How to Use:

• Just submit the term you wish to set an alert for. In the case of brand reputation building, the term is your brand name.
• Once you set the term, the tool will send you email notifications of the mentions.
• You can set your notification preferences- every time there is a mention, once every day, or once a week.

2. Reputology

As the name suggests, marketers use this tool for monitoring business reputation. Reputology helps you manage your business reviews seamlessly.
Other than social media, the tool tracks reviews for your business all over the internet. It includes industry-specific review sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Trustpilot, etc.
Key Features:

• Location-specific review tracking
• Perfect for multi-location businesses who can compare performance for different locations
• One can respond to reviews from the tool itself.
• The tool automatically converts negative reviews into customer service tickets. It helps you efficiently manage them.
• Best suited for hospitality, fitness, dining, and real-estate domains.

Pricing:

• Reputology offers a 14-day free trial.
• One can choose from the Professional, Agency, and Partner programs.
• It starts at $180/month for 3 seats.

3. Mention

One can think of Mention as an advanced form of Google Alerts. The tool allows you to set alerts for your brand terms similar to Google Alerts. But here, you get real-time updates from all over the web and television.
The tool also offers insights into overall brand sentiment and share of voice.
Key Features:

• Real-time alerts for all the mentions on social media, forums, media sites, and television
• Allows checking reputation trends for a brand. These trends include consumer sentiment, influence, reach, etc.
• Allows comparing reputation trends with a competitor through powerful analytics
• Good for analyzing the overall brand reputation

4. Get Five Stars

This tool helps you grow your brand reputation by encouraging user reviews. Get Five Stars tool boosts your feedback encouragement process.
It promotes various solutions to collect reviews from your customers. One solution is pop-up review forms:

• It collects ratings from your website visitors about their experience with your business.
• Collects their feedback/review about your brand or offerings
• Allows the reviewer to share positive reviews on major review sites, including Google

Get Five Stars include Net Promoter Score forms and many other solutions to grow your brand’s reputation.
Pricing:

• It has different packages for Multi-location and Digital Agency customers.
• The Pro package starts at $75 per month per location.

5. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a little different from other alerts tracking tools. You can use BuzzSumo to track the overall engagement associated with a term. One can use BuzzSumo to:

• Research the engagement around a term on social profiles and overall web content
• Filter the search results by – date, country, B2B publishers, content type, language, etc.
• Create alerts for brand, keyword, or competitor mentions
• Find the most appropriate influencers related to a term with their connection details.
• Set preferences and filters for receiving the alerts

Pricing:

• You can opt for a 30-day free trial.
• One can choose between – Pro, Plus, Large, and Enterprise packages.
• The pricing starts @ $99/month.

6. SentiOne

SentiOne helps you track all the public conversions about your brand. The tool runs a rigorous search on the web to give you real-time and historical data about the mentions.
Key Features:

• Allows you to track your brand mentions
• Tracks public conversation regarding your brand on social media
• One can use it for tracking mentions for competitors or any other term.
• One can filter out positive, neutral, and negative reviews or conversations.
• One can filter data according to date, author name, content type, gender, platform, etc.
• One can directly react to negative mentions to avert a crisis.

Pricing:

• One can book a free demo on SentiOne’s website.
• The tool offers custom pricing quote based on the feature-set you choose

7. Reputation.com

It is an enterprise-level reputation management tool. The online tool helps brands employ different reputation management solutions.
Reputation.com offers an extensive set of solutions that include:

• User/Customer Reviews – for soliciting reviews from customers
• Social Suite – to allow brands to grow community engagement on social media.
• Surveys – to create surveys and collect reviews from consumers.
• Business Listings – for brands to optimize their listings and grow their reputation
• Insights – To analyze the data, strengths, weaknesses and find ways to solicit positive reviews.
• Competitive Reporting – Analyse the engagement and reputation insights for competitors

Reputation.com is a comprehensive reputation management solution for large businesses.

Key Takeaways

As validated decision-making rises, brand reputation and social proof become more crucial. You might be losing out on a massive number of customers owing to a bad business reputation. So, optimizing your brand reputation is essential for your business success.
Your brand reputation also impacts your search rankings and brand authority. A smart way to grow your brand reputation is by clubbing your SEO and reputation-building efforts.
Above are several ways to help you employ SEO for boosting your brand reputation. Employ them smartly with a well-calculated marketing budget and expert assistance.
The online reputation management tools listed above will further accelerate your efforts. The next step would be to find the right SEO partner for your business.
Get in touch with our SEO experts to know more about boosting your reputation through organic SEO services. You can drop your details here.