Search engine optimization (SEO) is critical to managing your online reputation. If you want to control what others see about you online, a fundamental understanding of best SEO practices is necessary. SEO is a major determining factor when it comes to the information about you the search engine results pages (SERPs) produce for searchers when people look for your business name or other information related to you.
What Is SEO?
SEO is the art and science of ranking in SERPs for specific keywords and terms. Keywords and terms can include things like your business name, products and services, or locally-related phrases people look up to find information about you or your business.
As a practice, SEO has been around for decades. In the initial phases of the internet, search engine results were manually categorized and created, but over time, machines and their algorithms took over. Early SEO practices were spammy and introduced terms like “keyword stuffing,” which meant that people could rank for anything they wanted simply by filling a page with the related search terms. This resulted in poor results for searchers.
Google, however, has always focused on rewarding and ranking content that pleases the searcher — their ultimate goal as a search engine and advertiser. Therefore, they also reward content that is properly formatted, useful and informative to the reader, and readable on mobile devices. Because of this, content quality has become a major part of SEO in recent years. Currently, artificial intelligence (AI) is making its mark in search engine results, and search engines are contending with if and how they rank automatically generated content.
How SEO Impacts Your Name and Business
Because of how SEO functions, it can have a major impact on how people see your business. Prospects, customers, colleagues, and even journalists could use the internet to search for you — and when they do, they’ll find whatever comes up on the SERP first. Google serves a few sponsored results (ads) and then organic results related to any search term. Those organic results — that is, the content Google feels is most likely to provide the searcher with that information you’re looking for — is where you can find an affordable advantage to manage your reputation.
Let’s say you’re the head of the marketing department of a company that recently endured a high-profile lawsuit over a product defect. When people search for you, the lawsuit, your product, or even general info about your business, they might come up with news coverage about your business or statements about whoever sued you.
Surely, you wouldn’t want this negative press to live there forever, which is why it’s important to invest in an SEO-related solution to balance out or bury the negative press. This way, you can guide the narrative of what searchers (including prospective employees or business partners) uncover online.
How to Begin the SEO Reputation Repair Process: Research and Strategy
Repairing your reputation with SEO involves several stages. To begin, you’ll need to conduct some research, or hire an expert to do it for you. This research, at its most cursory level, reveals what people will uncover about you when they search for your business. Search for your name and your business’ name to do the most basic research. Search for anything concerning — in the above example, you’d look for your business name plus the word lawsuit to see what people are saying.
You’ll also want to set up Google alerts and other reputation alerts to monitor what people are saying about you. That way, when your business is mentioned or new content ranks initially, you will receive an alert.
Your research phase should also involve researching your competition and using keyword software to determine what search terms are related to your business name and your website. This will reveal what people are looking up to find you, including terms you might not have thought of.
The next phase in managing your reputation with SEO is to create a content strategy based upon your keyword research. Your strategy should include content on your website, as well as pages like your Glassdoor employer page, your social media pages (including LinkedIn), and more. You might also want to create an internal communications campaign to let your employees know what you’re doing.
Your strategy should cover multiple types of content, all of which is indexed by Google and other SERPs. This means social media (main pages and individual posts), blogs, articles, webpages, review pages, video, audio/podcast, interactive content, and more. Don’t forget to include responses to any negative reviews about your business online as a big part of managing your reputation — not only does that impact how viewers see you, it ranks, too.