What is reputation management In SEO?
Reputation management in SEO is all about ensuring that whenever potential customers see your brand/ business in the search engine results pages (SERPs), they positively perceive your business.
Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your content, including blog posts, landing pages, and other types of content, so it appears among the first results on search engines.
Online reputation management involves monitoring online mentions of the company and requires businesses to address negative feedback.
Search engine optimization, together with online reputation management (although 2 unique marketing tactics), help to strengthen a business’s brand authority and credibility online.
Why is online reputation management important for SEO?
Online reputation management is critical for SEO because, no matter how good a website ranks, if the perception of its brand is negative, it will struggle to get clicks and will have a huge impact on conversions.
A bad online reputation can lead to a loss in organic traffic, brand value, and profitability. Here’s a deeper dive into how a negative online reputation can affect your business:
- Loss in organic search traffic
If there is negative sentiment about your brand, including negative reviews and results about your business/ product, it is unlikely that consumers will click through to your site. A poor click-through rate will negatively affect your rankings, leading to a loss of search traffic and, inevitably, a loss of sales.
- Loss in paid search traffic
If you have negative reviews lurking around online, your paid ads will be ineffective. You could spend double or triple what you paid before to try and help you score a top spot on the search engine results page, but your paid ads will often just appear together with negative information about your brand, and consumers will be wary of your business. You will gain alot more from investing in cleaning up your online reputation.
- Loss of conversions and sales
If consumers have a negative perception of your brand, it is unlikely that a good call to action in a page title will be enough to get consumers to click through to your site.
Even if a user does click through, it is unlikely that they will convert into paying customers. A poor online reputation can have a huge impact on conversions and sales.
- Loss of brand value
When a business’s reputation is damaged, the business gets affected on 2 fronts:
- your brand value and
- your brand equity.
When your reputation gets hit, your rivals gain a competitive advantage. That’s because consumers will look elsewhere for similar products from other companies without negative reputations. “Approximately 25% of a company’s market value comes from its reputation.”
- Loss in profitability
A good online reputation leads to one of the most important business metrics: profitability. On the flip side, losing your reputation, search traffic, and customers means losing money. If the loss of profitability is too significant, large companies may lose stockholders, and small businesses may need to cut employees.
A negative reputation can also mean you have to spend money on a reputation management service or affordable SEO services to turn things around.
Search engine reputation management in 2023
Search engine reputation management has become more critical than ever in the history of SEO. With up to 63% of a company’s value based on its reputation, any business that wants to rank well in search engines must have a strategy in place to protect its online reputation. Don’t worry! Web Drive SEO has you covered. Click here for our guide on 6 effective ways to manage and improve your online reputation.
