Impact of Reputation on SEO

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Reputation management is a significant factor when it comes to success. It is crucial for businesses in the modern age.
Reputation is not a simple metric by any means. It is a combination of several features that go all the way towards creating a brand.
Are you considering a turnkey online reputation management at a great price? Then, Haitna is the people you should be hiring.
They have decades of professional experience behind them. Your brand image has never been in safer hands.
Are you looking to improve your brand’s reputation? Then, these are a few aspects that require your attention.

How to Improve Brand Reputation

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1. Share Your Positive Results

As a brand, you want your customers to focus on the positive aspects of your business.
Regardless of the client’s size, if you have a positive engagement, the best idea would be to share it on all mediums at your disposal.
A lot of brands think this doesn’t work and refrain from doing so. But the truth of the matter is that if you don’t get it out there, the chances are that people are not going to see it.
ORM also creates a positive loop when you involve your clients in this process.

2. Work On Negative Results

Regardless of how good they are at their job, every company is bound to have a few unhappy customers. It is the price of the business.
If you don’t see negative reviews on a service, it might indicate review manipulation.
Do not associate your brand with something like manipulating reviews.
The takeaway here is to reduce bad reviews, that is a given. But your focus should be on converting these negatives into a win. It sets up social proof that your company cares about its customers.

3. Have a Dynamic Website

Today’s customers are intelligent and hard to please. They take everything into account when choosing a service. So, website design is one of the more important aspects of the decision.
Website design is a prime candidate for ranking signals according to recent search algorithms.
Brands need to have a page that looks and feels exclusive. It needs to be dynamic and responsive. Also, it needs to appear consistently across as many devices as possible. It should also tick the boxes when it comes to user experience.
The design should reflect the brand’s attitude towards the customer.

4. Reduce Load Times

If there was one thing that was as critical to ranking, and as for customers, it would be website load times.
According to SEO experts, as competition heats up, load times have gotten shorter. Most of the websites on the first-page load up the quickest in their niche.
A customer clicks away in about 4 seconds of viewing a website. So, time is of the essence.
Optimizing load times involves many things, including technical.
A website code revamp is required, cutting down on resources used.
You need to reduce the number of images and optimize them as well.

5. Optimize Your Site for Mobile Phones

More than 50% of the website traffic is already coming from Mobiles. There is a huge shift of users to mobiles from desktops. It is because of more powerful smartphones and high-speed mobile internet.
There are also apps on these smart devices that can do anything a computer can.
Brands need to make sure that their websites are mobile optimized. Mobile traffic numbers are increasing day by day.
Adopting better technologies suited to mobile devices like AMP is crucial. It will be critical to a brand’s success.

6. Employ Technology

The search for better technology is never-ending, but that should not be an excuse to adopt late.
Today’s market is highly volatile. Brands switch to new technologies to gain an advantage.
As a brand, it is important to be at the forefront of technology.
Businesses must associate with the latest tech in the niche. By doing it, your brand’s search engine reputation will get enhanced. And the best part is that it makes for great advertising as well.
Several brands announce that they’ve switched technology. It generates a lot of interest with their audience.

7. Build a Good Backlink Profile

Getting a good backlink profile for your brand is pretty much mandatory for top brands.
Backlinks are important to get link juice flowing for websites. The problem is linking back from poor quality websites tarnishes your brand image. And it can have adverse effects on your ranking as well.
Run periodic checks on your SEO profile for links to unwanted websites. You need to do this as a priority. It can seriously hamper your reputation with your clients as well as search engines.
On the flip side, having an excellent backlink profile can be a great asset to your business.

8. Optimize Content For Your Brand

Content is the core of the brand experience, and it needs to be spectacular if you want to do well.
Depending on your brand, you can work on several types of content platforms.
You can choose from blogs, graphics, videos, podcasts, or even all of them.
The key is not to create content for the sake of creating content. Meaning, anything you publish needs to follow to your brand’s standards.
Blindly sharing content without curation first can have bad results for your reputation. When it comes to content creation, a checklist can help keep track of validation.

9. Adapt Latest SEO Practices

Ideally, SEO as a process needs to evolve constantly to keep up with business needs. But usually, there is a general disconnect between SEO execution quality and brand requirements.
When this happens, brand reputation can waver even to the point of negative sentiment.
It calls for a repair of the entire process, especially if you have an outdated SEO pipeline.
Newer principles of SEO and digital marketing make use of a lot more metrics. It can help brands manage their reputation much more effectively.

10. Use Video Content

As a medium, video is one of the fastest-growing and far-reaching platforms which a brand can get.
When SEO started, it was all about text and good reason because it was much more accessible for everyone.
Videos are becoming more popular nowadays. One of the prime reasons is the availability of high-speed internet. The video offers a much higher quality of content transmission (images and audio). It makes it the preferred content platform for a majority of the users.

11. Leverage Social Media

Social media is one of the most engaging platforms that are available at the moment. It makes sense for brands to invest time and effort because the results are rewarding. And for online reputation management, social media marketing plays a pivotal role.
There are more than 3.8 billion people subscribed to social media. It is a huge collection of potential customers.
As brands learn to use social media platforms effectively, their reputation also increases. It is no coincidence that most brands that do well have a strong social media presence.

12. Revamp Google My Business Listing

As an SEO tool and a better brand reputation, Google My Business is precious for a business.
Get a verified My Business listing. It could be the difference between you and your competitors.
GMB pages also have a high impact on SEO ranking numbers. It makes it all the more important to have it optimized as part of your business strategy.
Remember to follow best practices when creating your GMB profile. Ideally, it should have a good number of reviews from your clients.
Faking Google reviews can have adverse effects on your reputation. If you find malicious and unfair reviews, tag them for removal.
You can spot fake reviews by looking at their review history.

13. Use Special Tools

Reputation management can be a scary task for brands. It is especially true if you are just starting. In today’s market, trust is an extremely important metric. And reputation management is a trust-building process.
Rather than making changes to your marketing process with little understanding, opt for tools. Several reputation management tools can help you improve your scores.
Many of them are free to try, but paid tools are powerful. These tools can help you gather all reputation metrics in one place. It can help you make effective changes.

14. Do Fact-check

An important part of managing reputation is processing your information flow to and from your brand. With modern marketing, there is a lot of information that is available.
You need to make compelling decisions on how you represent the information.
Any information that is shared by your brand needs to be accountable.
Meaning, you need to be mindful of checking for facts. It holds for current topics that generate a lot of interest.
Sharing information with very little research can have adverse effects on your reputation.

15. Avoid Shady Tactics

With the need to rank quickly, taking the shortcut is a tempting proposition. But it can impact your brand reputation negatively.
Algorithms are becoming more advanced every day. It is in your best interest to stick to tried and tested methods.
Black hat SEO can give you instant results. But, it will hurt the rankings in the long term.
Always opt for processes that are on the white side of things.
Even Google started catching grey hat methods nowadays. Are you outsourcing your reputation management? Make sure that you know what is happening.
Request them to run everything by you so you can check.

16. Hire Influencers

As digital markets’ power grows, people who have built up huge reputations rise to the top. These people are called influencers. Since they have a huge set of followers, the reach will be massive.
As a brand, approaching influencers can have a big positive effect. They can push your brand reputation higher and get you a much better audience.
Partnering with them can get you millions of brand impressions in a short time. This kind of reach with no negatives is invaluable for your business.

17. Curate And Organize Value Propositions

A business that wants to stay at the top of their niche should be able to establish a strong value proposition.
A unique value proposition is critical if you want your brand to grow. It helps people recognize the difference between you and the rest of your competitors.
Value propositions must be curated and justified by your brand. People are always going to compare companies.
A strong value proposition is going to make purchase decisions easier for customers.
Brands need to spend a significant part of their time and effort to come up with their UVP.

18. Work With Bigger Brands

It might not be possible instantly. But sometimes smaller brands can work with leaders to establish a firm hold. There are several examples of this too.
GoPro and RedBull have partnered together to leverage off each other’s strengths.
When you analyze this partnership, you will find a lot of common elements. Both brands are associated with sports, action, and stunts, to name a few.
GoPro brings the technology, and Red Bull has more experience with running events.
Co-branding is something that happens a lot these days. If you position your company correctly, it could work for you as well.

19. Optimize Buyer Persona

A mistake that most new brands commit is that they don’t have an accurate customer avatar. It could be due to time constraints or lack of proper research.
When it comes to reputation, brands need to figure out the right customer for their brand.
Pitching to the wrong customer does not only mean bad sales. It also results in bad reputation scores that are difficult to reverse.
Regardless, this is an area where brands should pay more attention.
Understanding a customer base can give brands an advantage in every process.
Engagement, which is a critical metric, skyrockets when you have the right customers.
Getting the right buyer persona could be the difference between success and failure.

20. Work on Brand's Social Profile

Social media is now becoming more relevant to businesses than ever.
Every brand in existence right now has a social media profile. But only creating one is not enough.
Optimize your social media profiles to appeal to customers. People tend to grade businesses based on their social media presence.
Numerous customers interact with brands on their social media handles. It means that businesses should make the process as easy as possible for them.
A solution would be to have a team focused on social media branding. It can later be upgraded to a multi-functional team as well.

21. Post Consistently

Posting high-quality content has a positive effect on the entire brand.
Whether it is SEO metrics or brand outlook, content is a powerful catalyst for brands. But posting content randomly won’t be optimal for performance.
With the amount of competition in the market, you need to optimize posting.
Too many brands post content inconsistently, which has minimal chances of working today.
Create effective posting schedules and stick to that for a period to get results.
Interested customers will know when to look for new content from your brand. It creates a positive cycle and improves reputation signals.

22. Promote Created Content

Creating content is the hard part as far as businesses are concerned. The fact is that several brands fail to promote them effectively. It is surprising because promoting is a lot easier than creating.
Many people lost the value of high-quality content as they didn’t promote it properly. It has happened too many times.
Promoting content is something that normally takes a backseat with new brands. It is poor practice. It also handicaps brand reputation with their demographic.
The solution would be to have a dedicated promotion process. You need to ensure that you don’t skip it at any cost.

23. Engage With Your Customers

Sometimes brands have an optimized social media profile, content, effective promotions. Yet they will miss things out. The reason is that they fail to engage their clients.
Simply updating a social media account with content is not enough. People are looking for effective interactions from their brands.
Again, the solution here would be to have a team at least partly dedicated to this. The function of this team would be to attend to user queries and comments on social media.
Reduction in response times can have a marked positive effect on brand reputation. Engaging with customers can also improve word-of-mouth marketing.

24. Address Feedback

Client feedback is a critical part of the positive brand reputation cycle. Customers are becoming smarter, and this means that brands need to be more active.
Earlier, people were giving feedback only on specific platforms like email and telephones.
Today, a bulk of queries come through on social media and messaging platforms.
It means that businesses need to have appropriate measures in place to address this.
Again, having teams who can respond to customer queries would be invaluable here.
Addressing feedback is critical for brands. These scenarios, when handled right, can be transformed into positive reviews.

25. Set Goals to Push Boundaries

Business owners should always be looking to push the envelope when it comes to services and technology. The world is progressing at a rapid pace, and it is easy to get left behind.
Companies should be more forward-thinking when it comes to setting goals.
While resting on trees seems an easier way to deal with success, it will never last.
Search engine reputation management is not about how companies are doing at the moment. It is also about how businesses equip themselves to deal with the future.
To earn a reputation, companies need to look ahead.

26. Reorganize Marketing Activities

As a rule of thumb, marketing takes a large amount of time and money today. It means that sometimes companies can lose sight of what is important and what isn’t.
Today’s marketing is always changing to suit demands
. Something well-established today is outdated tomorrow. It is a prime reason why marketing activities always have room for optimization.
Having periodic assessments about your marketing funnel is vital. It is now a necessity rather than an option.
You can save a lot of effort through optimization and multiply the yield.

27. Give Promotional Merchandise

In several industries, there is still space left to market with the merchandise. It is one of those methods that carried over from traditional marketing.
Merchandising was and still is, a novel method to enhance reputation. It is not uncommon to give out freebies and branded collectibles. It could be clothing to mugs to souvenirs and anything in between.
Giving away branded stuff for your customers is a good way to gain brand awareness. Even if it is expensive, it can deliver when it comes to reputation.
That is why several companies have branded gift boxes that complement their business. But whatever your domain, a customized t-shirt is a definite winner when it comes to branding.

28. Improve Local Search Presence

Local search is one of the most overlooked parts of reputation management.
Most companies are always looking at big goals. They do not focus on smaller, important ones.
Improving local search awareness is a huge boost for the reputation of businesses. But there is good news here.
Optimize your Google My Business listing and your website. It should give you a good head start. If you do it well enough, your company could appear on local search results.
The local pack is the top three local listings on Google searches for a particular query.

29. Use Google’s Knowledge Panel

The Google Knowledge Panel is the block of text you’ll find on the top of search results.
Google presents it as a rich snippet that has the most common information about a query. If you can optimize your search results thoroughly, this is the ultimate reward.
The Knowledge Panel is important because it offers dominant positioning on searches.
Your brand pretty much occupies all the right side of searches.
Even on mobiles, it appears right on top, leading all other results. While getting on the GKP might be a task, it is definitely worth the effort.

30. Be Geo-location Ready

As a business, it is critical to be relevant in geotagged searches. It is especially true if it’s at a local location for your business. If you’re not getting the desired results, you need to get your business geolocation-ready.
Again, the key here is to have an optimized GMB page. Also, you could encourage your users to tag your business on social media. It can have a positive result on your reputation numbers.
Effective geotagging can also help with your SEO.

31. Control Business Information

As a brand, what your customer can read about you online becomes vital. It is relevant when you are trying to improve your reputation with your customer base.
You need to design the content properly at all levels. It can prevent sensitive data from leaking out to the public. It includes both the positive and negative aspects of your business.
Businesses need to control the narrative of their brands when it comes to all aspects.
Choosing to respond directly to negatives can improve brand perception. Alternatively, promote the positives of your business. Make sure that you do it directly on your website.

What Gets Hurt Due to Negative Reputation?

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32. Organic Traffic

For a brand, traffic is one of the basic SEO metrics that they will be looking for from the web.
With a bad reputation, search engines will start to demote your website. Pretty soon, this will result in a noticeable organic traffic drop.
Reputation is so closely related to the traffic. It is the first thing checked when traffic drops. And once organic traffic drops, it is going to be difficult to gain it back.
Rather than let bad reputation ruin your marketing, make sure it never happens.

Related : Reasons Why You Should Avoid Cheap SEO Services

33. PPC Marketing

Many people don’t think that Pay Per Click marketing campaigns can be affected by Online Ratings.
A PPC ad redirects users to the landing page where they proceed to interact with the website. It surely has nothing to do with reviews. But what these people fail to understand is that today’s consumer is a lot more empowered.
Regardless of the brand, the first thing they do is check online for reviews. That is where sometimes, even big brands get caught out.

34. User Experience

Bad reputation and user experience are directly interrelated with each other. When people have bad user experience, they leave behind bad reviews.
A bad reputation can already define the user experience for potential clients.
A brand has to distance itself from negative reviews online.
User experience is an important part of the branding process. It is especially true for sensitive markets like healthcare or legal.

35. ROI On Marketing

One of the most important parts of the business is your return on investments.
One of the prime directives of a business is to maximize ROI. However, when a bad reputation leads the brand’s name, it can put you at risk.
Falling ROI is a natural result of a bad reputation.
Modern businesses operate with varying profit margins. But a hit to ROI is usually difficult to come to terms with for a majority of them.
Running regular checks on your reputation profile can help overcome this problem.

36. Brand Awareness

For a business to succeed, it has to reach the maximum number of people. That is how brands increase their chances of stealing clients. But when handicapped by a bad reputation, brand reach is severely limited.
Bad reviews can set low expectations with potential clients. It is another problem with bad reviews. And this is even before you’ve had a chance to interact with them.
A solution here would be to help clients with bad reviews. It could improve brand image and awareness.

37. Company Values

Since the whole world now is more connected than ever, the role of SEO reputation is even more noticeable. Sometimes this can affect a company’s performance in the stock market.
Even big companies can’t save themselves when it comes to reputation and share prices.
Apple had a major fall in reputation during 2012 - 18. It resulted in a sharp drop in value by 7% in about six years of about millions of dollars. They could have saved it through reputation management.

38. Hiring Process

Another effect of reputation is that you do not get the top talent to work for your company.
SEO is a dynamic ecosystem where nothing remains the same. It means that you need the best people working for you. But with a bad reputation, people wouldn’t want to work for your brand. It results in losses through the process and hiring effectiveness.
A bad reputation can cost companies 10% more per hire. It adds up quickly and ends up being substantial in the long run.

39. Client Base

Landing clients is a difficult task regardless of the size of your company. But with a compromised reputation, it gets a whole lot tougher. And this scenario is predictable - no one wants to partner with brands carrying a bad reputation.
Clients are the life of any business, and limited numbers is a critical issue.
Check this recently published study from HRO today. It says companies can lose about 80% of their clients due to negative reviews.

40. Online Reviews

Over 93% of all consumers read through online reviews first before choosing a brand or a product. It is a staggering number of people. So, brands cannot afford to take reputation management lightly.
Brands need to be active and keep their eyes on the ball when dealing with reputation lapses.
Businesses need to work quickly to fix those bad reviews. The sooner it gets done, the better it is for their revenue.

41. Market Share

As a side effect of a bad reputation, a brand’s market share decreases overtime. And if this isn’t corrected, it can slide to dangerous levels. And once it is lost, regaining it becomes very difficult.
A good example of this is the case of American versus Japanese car manufacturers. The big three - Chrysler, Ford, and GM had a bad reputation for poor manufacturing techniques.
Compared to their Japanese counterparts, they are in huge demand. It is because of their quality.
Even after bringing their cars to the same standard as the Japanese, buyers were still suspicious.

42. Social Following

In the case of bad service, people usually post their first responses on social media.
Social media is where a lot of people release their frustration about brands. Then, people will leave the brand’s group or unfollow their accounts.
Take the case of Dolce and Gabbana in one of their ad campaigns. Their cofounder was aggressive and insensitive on their official handle. He went ahead and insulted their followers, calling them fat and stupid.
To this day, D&G hasn’t recovered the followers they’ve lost. With proper reputation management in place, you can avoid these things.

43. Lead Generation

Any business needs a good stack of leads to succeed. The problem with a bad reputation now is that it travels quickly. And this means fewer leads for brands with a compromised image.
Once Benetton posted an ad with “no girls allowed” on their feed. It resulted in people blasting the brand for insensitive marketing practices. We can assume that this lost them a good amount of leads from all of their customers.

Tips to Build Your Online Reputation

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01. Understand Your Business

Understand your business. It is the first step towards building an effective reputation for your business. There are several key areas here that you need to analyze.
You should first start with an ideal buyer persona. Find out what your unique selling propositions are.
Finally, learn what others do to close deals and maintain a good reputation.
Talking to other experts in your niche helps give you a view of your business.
Reputation is not just a collection of favorable numbers. It has much deeper roots for a brand.
Related : Effective Search Engine Optimization Techniques

02. Identify Goals And Objectives

First, you need to accomplish the basics. It will help to get ahead with reputation management for a business. Understand the goals that you’ve set what they mean for your business.
Goal setting is critical for brands of all sizes. This phase is what determines how you approach a problem.
For example, setting a goal that is too “comfortable” will mean that you underperform. You don’t need to use all your skills and expertise. It might result in poor feedback from the client, and the opposite is true, as well.
Goal setting way out of your reach means you won’t even finish what you started.

03. Get High-Quality Content

Quality content is a given when you want to get the most out of your campaigns. Content is practically the crux of the whole operation.
Search engines now focus on quality content, and it is a prime ranking signal. It is an area you shouldn’t compromise.
Make sure that you have or hire the best in the business when it comes to content creators. Also, opt for professional video content as it is the most trending medium today.

04. Review Service Protocols

As a business, how you serve your clients is an important part of gaining a reputation.

• Do you have adequate delivery systems for all your clients?
• What are your contingency plans in case of system failure?
• How do you handle the loss of critical personnel?

These are questions to which you need to have answers.
All these factors come into play during engagements. You need to prepare yourself for anything that might arise.
Failure to do so will result in a drop in reputation numbers, which might be irreversible.

05. Build Trust And Loyalty

When it comes to choosing brands, trust is an important mechanic to consider. The world is moving towards trust-based marketing. As a company, you need to build trust to gain customer loyalty. But this is easier said than done.
The reason is that modern consumers have lots of choices at every level. They have hundreds of brands to choose from in any niche. What this means for brands is that they need to earn the loyalty they need.

06. Push for Customer Testimonials

Customer testimonials are an important mechanic when it comes to reputation and trust.
You can suggest your customers leave a testimonial on your website or Google. If you have delivered high-quality service, they would be more than happy to do so.
Client testimonials are also an important ranking signal when it comes to SEO.
Google considers higher-ranked services more suitable for its users. But you should take care never to post fake reviews. The penalties for them might even extend to a ban on search results.

07. Respond Publicly To Complaints

For a business, negative comments or reviews are part of the process. The key to a better reputation lies with being able to deal with them.
Be brief and respectful when responding to unhappy customers. See this as an opportunity to convert these people to your brand. Something to remember is to keep the interaction public.
Responding to reviews helps other people gauge how effective you are at problem-solving. It is never a good idea to be rash or rude in this circumstance. It is always the brand that has more to lose than the customer.

08. Incentivize User-generated Content

Do you want to build a great relationship with your client? Then, user-generated content helps. When a brand posts custom content on their feed, it attracts a huge engagement from the users.
You get high-quality content that is relevant to your feed as well. It is important to curate this experience carefully.
Stick to a particular posting schedule for user content. Also, remember not to play favorites when choosing a particular piece to promote.
Several big brands publish a lot of user-generated content. They are pretty successful with it.

09. Make Use of Blog Posts

The written word will always have a presence on SEO for reputation management and people.
Regular blogs can help readers to know what your brand is serving. It also informs and apprises your customers of what’s new in the niche.
Blogs can help when people need more details about any particular topic that is trending.
For example, if you’ve just revamped your on-boarding and marketing process. It makes more sense to share the details in a blog.
You can quickly create a blog and addresses all the required details, as well.

10. Get Professional Help

Online reputation management is not an easy task by any stretch of the imagination. It has hundreds of moving parts, and there are many areas to mess up as well. There are several checkboxes to tick, and even then, some random flaw can creep in.
Leave it to experts like Haitna to deal with online reputation management and SEO. You save you many headaches. They have a full-fledged team to handle all the responsibilities of ORM.
Offloading reputation can leave your team free to pursue other core tasks. They are cost-effective as well, which means you’ll save money along with time.
We hope this post gave you some insights into managing a reputation for your business and clients.
As you can see, it is not easy to get done. But if you’re looking for an experienced agency to help you, Haitna has the right team.
Ask for a consultation, and they will get back to you with the right solution for your business.