In today’s digital marketplace, it’s of immense importance to ensure your business is perceived as reliable, and online reputation management (ORM) helps with that. It involves taking steps to properly monitor and influence your digital footprint. At the same time, it enables you to prepare your business to prevent — or deal with — negative attention.

As you’re competing with hundreds of thousands of similar businesses, it matters a lot to shape public perception positively by influencing the narrative surrounding your business or brand. One way to influence ORM is through search engine optimization (SEO), which helps rank your business in search engine result pages (SERPs).

Interestingly, both ORM and SEO are mutually beneficial, as a better reputation through positive mentions, reviews, and user-generated content can tell Google that you’re an authentic business, which ultimately boosts visibility and rankings. But, you have to consider many factors when using SEO to influence ORM and maintain a positive brand image.

The Basics Of Online Reputation Management

ORM is important because of its potential to build credibility, trust, and brand authority. With active reputation management, it is possible to increase customer loyalty and get positive word-of-mouth referrals. Ultimately, it will lead to business growth and success.

You also need to know that search engines can influence brand perception and your digital footprint because what shows on the first page of SERPs for your brand name will have a huge impact on your business’s initial impressions. It also helps get more traffic, especially considering the fact that the top three Google search results get more than half of all clicks.

That’s the reason why you should pay attention to SEO and have a well-rounded tool with you to analyze your efforts. In most cases, you can begin with a high-quality on-page SEO checker because how you optimize the content on your page will affect the perception people have about your brand.

Depending on the tool you use, it can also help you learn how your off-page SEO performs, including link building and keyword rank tracking.  In fact, you can also learn about other SEO aspects that affect ORM and personal branding, such as social media mentions, online reviews, and more.

However, you need to move in a systematic way to boost your digital footprint and online reputation, so here’s how to proceed:

Assess Your Online Presence

The first step to effective online reputation management is an audit to assess your online presence.

A comprehensive audit that focuses on online presence will establish how the brand is perceived online. The audit provides a benchmark for future monitoring, an essential SEO task. And it’s vital considering  97% of all consumers research brands online before committing to purchases.

To conduct a thorough audit:

• Examine search engine results pages;
• Examine the brand’s presence across all major platforms using tools like Google Alerts;
• Use social listening tools to check reactions, mentions, and comments;
• Check and correct inconsistencies in branding, messaging, or engagement;
• Respond to reviews, positive and negative, to confirm the brand values all feedback;
• Build a good reputation online by promptly addressing issues;
• Evaluate employee activity on social media for potential reputational risk.

Regular auditing and monitoring mean issues can be dealt with before they escalate and negatively impact the user experience, harming the brand’s SEO and the bottom line.

Create Positive Content that Impresses

For effective online reputation management, it’s essential to create high-quality content. That’s when you have to learn how to leverage SEO to create positive content and increase your online presence.

Working together, they signal positive content to search engines that rank the content higher on their SERPs. This creates a strong online presence and benefits businesses. Important at a time when 98% of consumers begin their purchasing journey by reading reviews.

Securing a visible place is a vital practice in online reputation marketing, but it is dependent on delivering the diverse, high-quality content search engines like Google are primed for. To Google, quality content signals a good user experience, which is why reputation management is vital to all successful marketing strategies.

Any factor impacting the user experience ultimately impacts your digital footprint. With careful management and good ORM SEO, the insights produced help increase brand awareness. Quality content is linked to consistent online visibility and brand growth over the longer term.

What are some ways you can improve your personal brand? The most effective way to improve brand visibility is to deliver diverse, well-optimized content.

This high-quality content can take several key forms:

• Blog posts: Optimized with relevant keywords, header tags, and meta descriptions, blog content should be informative and engaging. To attract regular blog traffic, the content has to be perceived as consistently being of value. Having value builds credibility and increases authority;
• Articles: Publishing thought leadership articles also helps establish authority, particularly when they appear in industry publications or on other authoritative websites. Each article should be well-researched and logically presented with backlinks to the brand’s site in its optimization;
• Videos: Video content should always align with the brand and be optimized for sharing across platforms as well as for search visibility in titles, descriptions, and tags;
• Social Media: The most important factor in maintaining a presence on social media is engagement. Engaging with the users puts a human face to the brand, encouraging perceptions of authority and trustworthiness.

Take Advantage of Social Media for Reputation Management

These days, social media maintains a pivotal role in brand perception.  Overall, 5.04 billion people use it regularly, making SEO branding across all its platforms essential in modern-day e-marketing.

These platforms, particularly the market leaders Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, are an opportunity to showcase expertise, share values, and connect with a wider customer base.

Negative reviews, therefore, have the potential to rapidly damage a business and its reputation. Monitoring mitigates this risk.

For effective ORM, each social media profile should be optimized but consistent with the overall strategy in keywords and messaging. Similarly, interlinking profiles enhances the user experience and boosts the SEO.

Focus on Building Authority and Credibility

In order to strengthen your personal brand image, you also need to work on building credibility in your industry. And the best way to do it is by delivering SEO-optimized content, which showcases your expertise while engaging your audience.

At the same time, you can share social proof, which could be in the form of positive reviews, endorsements, and testimonials from satisfied clients. These endorsements give potential customers some “peace of mind” and make them feel more comfortable when interacting with your brand.

Interestingly, these positive reviews can also boost your search engine rankings, which again highlights the connection between SEO, high-quality content, and online reputation management.

Be Sure to Monitor Success Regularly

ORM makes use of a variety of metrics and their valuable insights. With these insights brands can fine-tune their marketing strategies, resolving issues that might otherwise hamper the user experience and from there, perceptions of the company and its services and products.

So how does ORM work? Online reputation management helps brands quickly identify and address any aspect of the user experience that could impact how they rank on the search engine results pages.

Maintaining reputation involves monitoring:

• SERPs for ranking;
• Social media for mentions;
• Customer reviews for opportunities for interaction;
• All other media channels where the brand is likely to be discussed.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) help with monitoring the effectiveness of campaigns over time.  As well as providing the starting points to measure success from, the KPIs identify highs and lows in real time continuous performance. This capability enables the proactive data-driven decision making that has become an essential of modern online marketing.

In ORM, the key KPIs are:

• Search engine visibility;
• Average star ratings;
• Sentiment analysis of mentions;
• Engagement rates.

ORM meaning online reputation management, is the constant tracking and monitoring of brand image. The data collected reflects market share. However, the many metrics from across a range of platforms quantify sentiment, including perceptions of the brand and the habits and attitudes of its target audience. Monitoring reaction to content helps keep it relevant so that it always has value, a key contributing factor for ranking for search engines like Google.

Managing Your Digital Footprint With SEO

ORM means being proactive and engaging with users as professionals and experts. It allows brands to develop a positive customer service image. There are many benefits to enjoying a strong reputation — for example, it increases visibility.

However, monitoring is crucial, as it helps manage misinformation to limit its impact. So, be sure to use the right tools and software solutions to monitor and tweak your campaign for proper online reputation management.