3 SEO Reputation Management Tips To Boost Your Rankings

Messaging is important, not only for current customers but to potential ones. With so many moving parts, your brand is a very shapable concept and should be carefully managed to optimize the conversation. One of the most important ways to keep your brand healthy is by working on your online brand reputation. And one of the easiest ways to do that is with SEO reputation management.

With the level of access people have to the internet these days, it’s crucial to maintain a robust online presence. When people search your brand name online, what’s the first thing that comes up? Is it a newspaper article highlighting your achievements in an optimal way? Or a social media post detailing education initiatives? Glowing product reviews? All of these results can be at the top of SERPs when people search your brand name, but they might also be getting lost in the pile. SEO reputation management is how you can target the mentions you’d like people to see when they search for you. In this article, we’ll explore the following:

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What Is SEO Reputation Management?

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. The entire concept of SEO revolves around creating content around a particular keyword and trying to rank high on search engines for that keyword. In this case, the relevant keyword is your brand name and every other keyword related to it. What comes up when people search your brand name on search engines? Is it content that you control or content that other people control? Do you have digital property on the first page of SERPs for your own brand name? How many of the first-page properties do you control? These are all questions that SEO reputation management helps you to answer.

So how does SEO reputation management work? SEO reputation management is how you control the digital property relating to your brand. It involves monitoring all the comments, reviews, reports, etc about your brand and making sure you encourage the positive and address the negative. Like I said earlier, the bigger your brand gets, the higher the chances of getting negative press or bad reviews. You can’t avoid it. But you can manage it.

The way search engines work, all mentions of your brand online will be collated and then ranked according to the quality of the content. Social media, forums, blogs, newspaper websites, review platforms, comparison websites, everything. Each and every mention of your brand name on the web is crawled by search engines, including your own narrations of your brand. So it becomes a race between you and every other person commenting on your brand. Who wins the first-page positions?

Using SEO for Online Brand Reputation Management

The very first step in using SEO for brand reputation management is to acquire a digital property. You need a very good website. Your website is the first point of stop for any search engine crawling your brand keyword. First impressions last, and search engines agree. If your website is not well-built and well-optimized, then you won’t rank high on the results page. Your website must be easy to crawl and index. All aspects of technical SEO must be optimized. Technical SEO has to do with making it as easy as possible for search engines to crawl your website and also for consumers to use your website. 

Increase brand awareness in different directions

Once, you have your first digital property, which is your website, you can acquire other digital properties. These will include social media profiles, profiles on review websites, and industry comparison platforms. These platforms offer you secondary methods of controlling the narrative about your brand. Also, unlike your website, these platforms also allow you to keep an eye on what people are saying about your brand. Social media platforms especially allow you to keep up with reviews in real-time and carry on conversations with your customers regarding their experiences with your brand. Using the reach and bandwidth, these pieces of digital real-estate afford you, you can then go ahead to implement a strategy for online brand reputation management. Here are some ways you can do this with data-driven results.

SEO Reputation Management Tips

Create quality content

One of the first and most important rules of SEO either for identity management or for marketing purposes is to create quality content. Search engines love content that helps people. While it is not easy to create customer-centric content around a branded keyword, there are still ways to do it. You can create how-to guides that explain what you do and why you are the best at doing it, you can create video content walking consumers through the process of doing what you do, or you can do an interview-style article with your employees to show consumers how each part of your brand works.

All these are methods you can use to create content that will be useful to consumers (which search engines love) and highlight your brand in the best possible light at the same time. While you might not be able to get the first position on the first page, you’ll certainly gain a first-page position. This is a very good step to controlling a good number of the first-page digital properties for your brand keyword.

Utilize social media

Once you start creating profiles, it is only a matter of time before people engage with you. Engagement comes with so many positives and negatives. It includes comments and reviews which are beyond your control. The good, the bad, and the ugly; all are going to be rolling in.

You may now be wondering why you created a profile in the first place. In truth, social media is not the only place where your brand will be discussed. Social media gives you more visibility to the various perceptions that people may have about your brand.

You can manage your brand reputation online by making sure you respond to comments as much as possible. Be active on social media. Reply to all comments to the best of your ability. You have no idea of how far a negative comment about your brand on social media can reach.

Social media platforms are highly authoritative and they always rank high for branded posts. So, you need to make sure you are controlling or at least have a hand in everything relating to your brand on there.

The best you can do is to maintain a strong presence on all sites where you have profiles and address your comments and reviews as much as you can. With this, your image is being properly managed. You are also keeping negative comments off the first page of searches concerning your brand.

Also, try to listen and monitor discussions online as much as you can. Monitor keywords relating to your market. Since you can’t be everywhere at once, social listening and monitoring help you sift through discussions online and appear anywhere you are needed. This method is very effective while trying to manage your brand’s reputation online.

Gain good press

One of the best ways to rank high with SEO is to appear in the news for the right reasons. News spreads, but bad news spreads faster. Always make sure that your brand appears in the news for good reasons. With so many news and blog sites covering headlines relating to your brand’s positive acts, search engine crawlers scan sites will positively influence your search rankings.

In a case where there is a high-ranking negative article that is well established with facts, it will be tough to bury such a report. Instead, your brand can gain press about community service, environmental protection, or encouragement of local groups around you.

Once positive headlines about your brand start making rounds on several news sites, it will improve the quality of search results presented to people searching about your brand. If you are lucky, headlines about you may appear on a high authority website. It can help outrank any negative PR your brand may have bagged.

Web Scraping for Online Reputation Management SEO

Like we said in our introduction, to successfully manage your online reputation, you have to know what your online reputation is. You have to know what people are saying about your brand and you have to be able to keep up with changes in what they say. You have to monitor social media, monitor industry news circuits, monitor forums, and still, keep an eye on search engine results for changes in your rankings. Doing all this while trying to do good business and satisfy your customers can be quite challenging. But there is a way to do it. That way is web scraping.

Web scraping allows you to use automated bots to crawl through the source code of given webpages and extract data according to preset parameters. The bots break the webpage down into basic HTML code and then extract data from within the code. The extracted data is downloaded into a CSV file or something similar for easy use.

Web scraping allows you to do three things:

• collect data in large volumes
• collect random and disorganized data into a structured form and,
• collect data in real-time and from any website on the internet

Basically, web scraping offers you a way to collect all the data relating to your brand keyword at the click of a button. You can scrape social media for comments and posts, scrape review platforms for reviews, industry news circuits for press covers (good or bad), and even scrape search engine results pages for your rankings.

To get started with web scraping for online management of your brand, you can use a scraping service like Scraping Robot. At Scraping Robot, we have one goal only: to get you the data you need, when you need it, as easily as possible. Our scraping service is designed to provide a seamless data-gathering experience that requires only the littlest of input from you. To get started, all you have to do is send a message to our developers to tell them what you need. They’ll instantly start building your own custom scraping solution.

Web scraping API

Our scraping service uses API technology and speed-optimized proxies to allow you to collect data in real-time from multiple websites simultaneously. You get 5000 free scrapes when you sign up.

Conclusion

SEO is a data driven venture. Management of online reputation is key to your brand’s survival, making it critical that you protect it to the end. Using the right SEO reputation management tools like Scraping Robot, you can easily keep an eye on your brand reputation and control the narrative that is displayed by search engines about your business.

The information contained within this article, including information posted by official staff, guest-submitted material, message board postings, or other third-party material is presented solely for the purposes of education and furtherance of the knowledge of the reader. All trademarks used in this publication are hereby acknowledged as the property of their respective owners.

Saheed Opeyemi