How to Use SEO in Reputation Management

An online reputation is an essential marketing tool for any modern brand, including personal brands. This includes websites, reviews, social media, and more. But in a digital world where anyone can post anything to the internet, controlling what your customers and peers see about your brand can be a complicated task.

Deimira Paa Baidoo, an online reputation manager and marketing consultant, explains how you can implement SEO to boost the content you control and minimize the content you cannot.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of using different techniques to naturally appeal to search engines like Google and Bing. These search engine algorithms will recognize your site and content as the most helpful to viewers and make it easier to find in a web search.

For reputation management, you can incorporate SEO into your strategy by:

• Making Sure Your Website Is First — When someone searches your company name, the website you manage should be the first result, if not the first few. Research and implement content SEO, technical SEO, and other strategies to increase your homepage and corresponding pages’ SEO ranking.
• Getting Your Content On Other Sites — Since you are an expert in your field, you can try to work with websites and blogs in your industry to provide guest posts, interviews, and other content. Not only will their backlinks to your website help boost your own website’s SEO, but you now also have control over content on sites you don’t manage.
• Monitoring Reviews and Social Media — Review sites like Yelp will often show up in the top results for keywords associated with your business. Check these sites regularly for any critical reviews and respond to them politely and positively. By keeping a professional demeanor on reviews, you may be able to use the bad review (and the review aggregator’s SEO) to your advantage.
• Using Google My Business — If you don’t have one already, set up a Google My Business account to provide details about your company to customers. This enables your business to appear in top search results on Google Maps and in local searches. It does also give users the ability to post reviews and questions, both of which you will need to monitor.

SEO takes time to master and time to implement, but when done correctly, it puts you in control of your company name, keywords, and, ultimately, your reputation.