Any business will indefinitely face a PR crisis at some point. As more people are interconnected digitally by day, it's much easier for content to get viral. This is why you need to be prepared to respond and mitigate negative content anytime.
There are various available platforms and strategies to mitigate a PR crisis, one of which is online reputation management. But what is online reputation management?
Online reputation management (ORM) is a type of digital marketing strategy where businesses manage their perception on search engine results pages (SERPs). It requires monitoring online reviews and addressing negative reviews to name a few. The goal is to protect your brand's reputation.
The main tool to monitor your brand reputation is called search engine optimization (SEO), and as such ORM is a necessary part of your SEO strategy. To recap, SEO is the process of optimizing your content so that it appears in the top-ranking results. SEO strategies may include keyword research, using target keywords, and backlink building to name a few.
A 2018 study shows that 97% of business owners have said that ORM is important to their business while 98% of them have said that online reviews are important. Business owners around the world have made it clear how important it is to maintain their company's online reputation positively and engage with existing and potential customers. A negative online reputation, on the other hand, could lead to a loss of search traffic and brand value, which would affect your conversions.
Google reputation management and reputation SEO is essential to achieve an effective marketing strategy. It ensures that you have a positive brand image on Google, which often leads to trust and profit.
Here are some instances of how a negative online reputation can affect your business:
Organic search traffic is defined as unpaid visits from unpaid search results. They are visits that naturally find their way to your website. If consumers see negative results about your business when they do their search, they might think your company offers low-quality products. They may then look for another business to buy from.
Moreover, Google prioritizes negative reviews. Even if you have numerous positive reviews from your previous customers, it may get pushed down in the SERP where potential customers can no longer see it.
Negative reviews or articles can affect your paid ads as well, making them less effective. You may try to pay more to take out the negative results, but your ads will often appear just above the negative review or article. It would confuse your future customers, and they'd think twice before trusting your business.
Brand value is the worth of your brand in money. Meanwhile, brand equity is the value of your brand determined by consumer perception of its quality and desirability. Negative reviews can affect both your brand value and equity, which makes it harder to gain customers as they'd find other businesses without a negative reputation.
Every business strategy is for one goal only and that is to profit. When you lose search traffic and consumers due to negative reviews, you'd also lose profit. When mishandled, you might have to invest more money in good reputation management or SEO efforts to get back on track.
As we've said, ORM is a marketing practice of protecting your business's online reputation and managing consumer perception of your brand. It's a continuous process of protecting against future crises and boosts your brand's online reputation and visibility.
Moreover, ORM involves the following processes:
When an online searcher is curious about a certain business, they turn to search engines to check information. Thus, your search result will serve as the first impression your new customer will have with your business. If you want your ORM to succeed, you need to control what search engines display when users search for your business.
Your SEO efforts are wasted if you have a negative brand perception. No matter how great your hired SEO specialist would be, if your brand perception remains negative, you will struggle to get clicks.
This is why SEO professionals must be aware of how their brand is perceived online. It's important to monitor them closely so you'd be able to counter this perception.
If you're a corporate brand, unfavourable comparisons and negative reviews can be made by an objective third party. There are times as well that articles with misinformation be written against your business.
You have to actively monitor them so you could easily address and spot potential issues. Otherwise, it would be much harder for you to counteract any incorrect information or negative press.
Moreover, you have to ensure that your personal brand and corporate brand are painted in a positive light online. What information do people see upon searching? Your new and potential customers must see you in a positive light.
You can also seek the help of a boutique SEO agency on what wonders SEO could do for your business or brand.
Search engine reputation management uses various techniques and strategies to place positive content on the first page of SERPs for a specific term. It includes boosting positive stories and articles, social media accounts and posts, Google Business Profile listings, and more.
If you want to manage perception using SEO, here are 10 techniques you can follow:
When you create a profile on social media or other review sites, it always comes with a risk. There are times people would deliberately leave negative comments and reviews. However, this is inevitable. Even if you don't have an account, negative articles and reviews would still come.
This is why it's better to have an active presence on social media and review sites so you could keep up with negative comments and reviews. You can respond to them so you could address any misunderstanding. Doing so would keep them off the front page of your branded search results.
Google Business Profile is a tool that allows you to manage how your business appears on Google Search and Google Maps, featuring important business information online. You can also create articles, updates and inject timely offers in your Google Business Profile.
The best part? It only takes a few minutes to start your GBP account. Since it's a Google tool, content from your profile takes up a significant portion of the search results so negative content is pushed down.
A social media profile enables you to engage freely with your customers and partner up with influencers. When you post regular content on your account, it helps move positive content on top of organic search results. Social media sites have a strong domain rating and large search traffic, which are metrics in Google's ranking algorithm, and usually appear at the top of branded search inquiries.
Since social media sites have a strong domain rating, creating profiles on multiple sites would help you push down negative content. However, you have to be careful in choosing where to create your account. If you have a specific brand image, some sites might not work for you. Learn more about the certain demographics each site serves so you'd know how to better create and optimize content.
If you don't want to create your account, you also have the option to collaborate or employ influencer marketing. Google sometimes feature snippets featuring top tweets from celebrities or influencers. You can use this as leverage to promote your products and push in positive content.
Posting images is one of the best available reputation management tactics. Google has a separate and dedicated SERP for image search results. You can upload high-quality images to edge out the negative content. However, make sure to add alt text, image title, and caption text with strategic keywords as web crawlers rely on them to understand the image subject matter.
Nowadays, people consume content more visually. The growing use of video-streaming platforms and the popularity of TikTok is a manifestation of how many users consume video content. Moreover, Google has focused on including video content in search results, and a lot of businesses have used video content as leverage to engage and market to a particular target audience. It's like hitting two birds with one stone: you get to advertise your business and push down negative content.
Moreover, since videos are highly pleasing, you can use them as a way to recover from a crisis. You also have the option of collaborating with influencers or popular content creations to elicit positive content.
Public Relations or PR is one of the traditional tools in your online reputation management campaign. You can hire a PR agency or create PR campaigns with your in-house team to turn negative press around or increase positive news related to your business.
Reviews from respected journalists and news reporters will help build a positive online reputation.
As a business owner, you'd want consumers to only see the positive search results. Of course, you only have limited powers in making sure that only positive content is seen in search rankings. More often than not, negative search results can still plague your protected reputation.
You also have the option to make this negative content less seen by focusing on your positive reviews. A well-thought SEO strategy can ensure that the positive news and content tune out the negative content.
If you have a physical store, you can always ask satisfied customers to leave reviews on your website or any preferred platform. When they leave reviews through personal social media posts, this gives you an ample boost not only with trust but also in terms of content marketing.
If you want to know how customers engage with your business and in turn, anticipate their future actions, you can also use Google Analytics for insights.
It happens to anyone. At some point in the existence of your business, no matter how hard you protect your reviews, there would be times that your 5-star review will be marred by 1-star ones. Rather than moping on the review, you have to address it quickly and efficiently to avoid it affecting your brand perception.
You can have negative reviews removed when it contravenes the review system guidelines of a specific site. If the content is libellous and defamatory, you can also resort to legal means.
If the review can't be removed, you also have the option of replying to the review to address any misunderstanding. This shows your existing and future customers that you listen to feedback and make changes to prevent issues from happening in the future.
You can also invest in link-building to push down negative results. Since link building is a Google ranking algorithm based on trustworthiness, having other sites link to your site will help bring more positive Google search results on the first page.
Some phrases would likely elicit negative results, so you have to be aware of them so you'd know which keywords are affected. Reputation management SEO, however, goes beyond branded keywords. You also have to figure out how people look for your business online. Google Search Console and other paid tools can help you see the brand terms used by people to find your business.
You can also monitor articles from blog posts and news sites with the help of Google Alerts. With this tool, you just have to input any brand term or brand keyword you're monitoring and it will remind you of any mention across multiple websites through e-mail.
As we've said, search results serve as the first impression of your target audience about your business. If negative content outranks your website, then it would change how most people view your business.
SEO reputation management helps you take control of your business's reputation in SERPs. It monitors and reacts to all negative mentions of your site.
To start with this, you have to clean your site's technical SEO issues with a full SEO audit. Then, you add more quality content to your site and build backlinks from authoritative sites. This helps improve your reputation and rankings in search engines.
If you're planning to use SEO reputation management, here's a comprehensive list to guide you:
How is SEO relevant?
SEO is a main factor in how much traffic is directed to websites from organic search results. As search engines like Google change or add certain factors when crawling sites over time, SEO also evolves. Local businesses use SEO as one of the ways to increase traffic, boost revenue or promote their products and services. As we've laid down above, it's essential in reputation management as it helps tune out negative content from search results.
What are the types of SEO?
Here are the three types of SEO:
Are ORM and SEO the same?
Though both share similarities, ORM focuses on the management of a brand through search results while SEO involves multiple layers and practices on improving a site's visibility in search engines.
At some point in your business, a PR crisis would indefinitely happen whether it be a negative article, review or comment. The best way to handle them is through proactive prevention so that when the time comes, it's easier to mitigate the consequences. While negative content will remain in the public sphere, you can easily turn around the discussion with the help of online reputation management.
If you remain undecided on how to go about your ORM, a digital marketing firm might help you start with it today.
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