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Improve Your Brand's Online Reputation With SEO

Forbes Communications Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Jessica Wong

Managing your brand's online presence and reputation is critical for your business. Good or bad, things get spread much faster online. Many consumers rely on online research when considering a purchase, and a high-ranking score, good reviews, and relevant content impact your "visibility" on major search engines like Google.

That's why search engine optimization (SEO) should be a key component of your online reputation management. It touches on almost all areas that contribute to your reputation online. Having a good SEO strategy will help you rank higher on the search results page. With all the optimizations made, you will be able to pull the good up and the bad down. That's the optimal goal of online reputation management.

What Is SEO?

Search engine optimization involves strategically tailoring the content of your website so that it ranks higher and more frequently in online users' searches. Good SEO generates more clicks from the search engine results page and increases your ranking.

This process begins with identifying keywords related to your brand that you want to optimize for, then improving the content of your website accordingly. However, SEO is more than just that. Content optimization, link building, keyword ranking improvements, listing management, blog posting and social media presence are all different types of SEO tactics and strategies.

Most of your SEO planning should involve these four stages:

1. Get Ready

• Understand your business and identify goals.

• Implement and audit the setup of analytical tools.

• Build out the timeline.

2. Review And Analysis 

• Review technical setups and identify issues.

• Identify analysis opportunities and trends.

• Perform a competitive analysis.

3. Plan And Implement 

• Develop your SEO strategy based on your research.

• Identify immediate opportunities and long-term solutions.

• Implement the optimization to all different channels.

4. Measure, Report And Optimize

• Measure results based on data.

• Report insights and trends.

• Create a best practice checklist.

• Continue to test and learn.

Here are the key areas to focus on:

Technical

This involves code reviews and improvements on indexation, accessibility and site architecture. Make sure there are no coding errors that impact the crawl-ability of your website. Review the sitemaps and ensure all links are up to date. Improve your page load time and fix any technical issues that impact your ranking.

Don't forget mobile! Being mobile-optimized is always the key, not just for SEO but for your overall digital strategy.

Link Building

It's important to obtain relevant referral links for qualified inbound traffic. In other words, getting links from websites that mention your brand but have not linked back to the site. Google uses links to find out what content on your site is related to the search and the value of that content.

Building a good internal linking infrastructure will guide the bot when it crawls your site. The bot follows these links to render pages and determine why they are relevant to the search result — what are the relationships between each page, and which page is more important on your website?

Keywords

SEO starts with keyword planning. You should monitor the search volume and identify new audience opportunities with relevant keywords. Plan your targeted keywords based on how users search for content. A great source of data is your competitors. Analyze top keywords that drive traffic to their websites to give you some idea of what your competitors are after.

Always research keywords that align with your business's objectives, and direct keywords to the relevant pages. Improve your ranking by inserting targeted keywords to your page titles and meta descriptions.

Content

Optimize your content, metadata and product descriptions based on trending queries and topics. You can apply different schema, such as products, ratings and reviews, to help the search engines better understand the context of the site and enhance search results. This helps the search engine understand bits of information from your pages.

You should also create content to target long-tail keywords. Use "alt tags" to describe your image — these provide text alternatives for search engines.

Blog

Having a blog is becoming more and more important. Not only will your potential and current customers see the blog as a way to learn more about your brand, your industry and your products and services, having a blog also helps with your SEO strategy.

The right blog can contribute to your SEO ranking, generate more clicks from the search engine results page and help turn those clicks into sales. An efficient blog post should have a good mix of search keywords in the total word count, relevant pictures and videos, as well as links to and from your page.

Social Media And List Management

An important first step in any local SEO strategy is your Google My Business page setup. You need to claim and verify your business, and have it listed on Google. A Google My Business listing gets you free exposure for your company's online profile, and it helps with targeting a local audience.

Social media is one of the best ways to engage your audience, build brand loyalty and maintain your reputation. Always optimize your social channel to drive traffic and revenue back to your site. Your social posts should be optimized based on data from keyword and competitor research. Develop social content ties to trending topics to maximize your exposure, and monitor your target market through comments, likes and shares.

Because there are so many brands competing for attention, it's critical to ensure that your audience can find you. Online search engine optimization is an essential part of this. SEO requires a long-term, ongoing effort. You won't see results right away, but benefits from SEO can enhance your online presence and search visibility.

In order to get ongoing high rankings on the search engines, you need a comprehensive SEO strategy. It will improve your site's exposure, drive qualified traffic, rank for relevant keywords and eventually lead to potential conversions. This work ultimately contributes to your overall online reputation management.

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