Some of the differences between reputation management, social meda promotion, and search engine optimization… and how they can be tied in together:

Introduction

The internet today has evolved into the #1 marketing and business development platform. Almost no business can grow and succeed without a strong internet presence in their market. Even small businesses such as convenience stores, hair salons and grocery stores can improve and grow their business along with customer/client relationships by leveraging the resources of the internet.

One of the biggest areas that businesses fail to take advantage of is in the area of branding. While “branding” is often thought of as a “big business” venture (Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi for example), your own business brand and name is vital in this day and age.

It’s important for maintaining your reputation with your business brand as well as for ongoing search engine optimization.

Reputation Management:

Almost every business owner today wants to provide value in their services and products. We all strive to do the best we can and to deliver quality products and services. There are times however, when a customer may not be totally happy with their experience; this can be for a variety of reasons including not understanding or managing expectations, dealing with a very picky client, or simply having a bad day.

More often than not, clients that are not happy with a service or product from a business are more likely to voice their complaints publicly than clients who are satisfied or have had their expectations exceeded. Often, these complaints may be “voiced” on social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, or on any of the dozens of “business review” sites on the internet – or even on associated topical message boards and forums.

This can cause situations to arise that can affect a business negatively. Today, the Internet is the new “word of mouth” and it is faster, can leave a deeper impression and what potential new clients see or read about a business on the Internet can quickly persuade them to make a decision – either to do business or not to do business with you.

Recent market studies show that the vast majority of people, before hiring the services of a business, will do a search for the business name in any one of the major search engines. What they see in the search results is often what will be their motivating factor in their decision.

Google (and other search engines) know this and they have a mission to provide the best search results that they can, to their users. Therefore, this includes showing links in the search engine results to the business website as well as social media and other websites where the business has been mentioned. Google does not “care” whether any of the results may have a negative impact upon the business; rather their goal is to provide the best results to the searcher.

This is very important to keep in mind. While we may not like the way Google and other search engines work, or the results that they provide, we need to work with the fact that their goal is to provide the best results for their users. Whether we like those results or not.

Proactive Reputation Management

As we’ve discussed, potential new clients and customers will “Google” your business to look at information including all the results they see. Searchers may not even click on all of the results – but what shows up on Page 1 (and even subsequent pages) will have an impact on their buying decision.

There is a way to be proactive about this to ensure that what shows up paint a generally good and positive picture about your business. Even if there is the odd complaint, having lots of “positive” links about your business will often negate the odd negative thing that may ever be written about a business.

Much of this can be accomplished through social media – by using social media as a way of branding your business and having regular updates to various social media platforms. Google, at this time, puts a great deal of emphasis on social media.

It also expects that a business will want to ensure a good branded presence on the Internet and while it is known that Google and other search engines are quick to penalize what they see as rapid artificial back link building, this is not the case when it comes to branding on social media.

Additionally, social media branding can also have a positive impact on your search engine rankings when done correctly.

Of course, it goes without saying that pro-active reputation management is also the responsibility of the business owners in their methods of actually delivering services and/or products, and ensuring a good overall experience with their customers. If indeed a business has a number of unhappy customers which are posting bad reviews, then the business must look at it’s own practices to find out why this is occurring.

Search Engine Optimization

In addition to a strong Branded presence, the internet affords businesses greater opportunities for being located by new potential clients inexpensively and efficiently, through having a strong and high quality website. However, a website on its own will not do a lot without receiving targeted traffic.

This is where search engines come in – originally, search engines were created when the Internet was relatively small and existed to help users find content. Today, the purpose of search engines is the same, but there are considerably more websites today that are competing against each other to get some piece of the enormous potential traffic that is available.

Today, it is not only about obtaining good search engine placement for key words, but to obtain good rankings for a variety of targeted terms. Terms that have a better likelihood of converting visitors into new business. There is no point in a website obtaining high rankings for a search term that is not likely to turn into new business. Our goal is to focus on key words and phrases that are more likely to be used to find potential new clients.

There are two major elements of Search Engine Optimization:

On-Site Search Engine Optimization

Good search engine optimization always begins with the website development. While there are many websites which are visually appealing, they have been created with absolutely no thought given to how a search might rank the site and as a result, many business spend money but end up with no concrete foundation for ongoing SEO.

There are a number of important technical considerations which are beyond the scope of this document, and do not simply include the use of Title and meta description tags (and although easy to implement, are often overlooked or poorly thought out by many web developers).

On the other hand, some developers who believe they are creating a website with SEO in mind do not take into consideration that ultimately, the website is about converting potential business into new business for the site owner. Care must be taken to not simply write content for a website with search engines in mind, but to also create content that visitors will find valuable and motivate them to take action.

Once a website has been created that has a solid SEO foundation, generally speaking, it is an ongoing process to gain or improve rankings by keeping up with changes in search engine algorithms and adding new content. While many websites, depending on the niche or market they are aimed at, can get away with rarely adding new content, most websites could see improvements with the regular addition of new content.

One of the important things to keep in mind is that Google and other search engines prefer to give websites that appear to be “authoritative” in a market, the higher rankings. Appearing as an authority to Google is accomplished in a number of ways; one of which includes regular additional content and commentary on the website, that is of value and that is original.

External Search Engine Optimization

The second element of search engine optimization is “off-site” SEO. This type of SEO can both be very effective as well as very dangerous, depending on the techniques used. Off-site SEO is all about obtaining “back-links” to a website, and again, detailed methods used are beyond the scope of this document.

However, it is our philosophy to take a conservative “white-hat” approach, which, while perhaps taking a longer to see strong results, is also much safer in the long run. There are a number of “back-link” service providers who will promise you thousands of links in a very short period of time, and which might temporarily give a website a major lift in the search engines, this type of backlinking is prohibited by the major search engines and will usually be flagged for human review after a short time.

We have also found that having a strong Branded social media presence with backlinks being added on a regular basis also has a strong impact on search engine rankings. In some sectors and niches, but not all, a strong branded Social Media presence can be the majority of the work that is needed to enjoy increased high quality traffic that turns visitors into business. This is especially true in smaller more specialized niches. However, every business situation is unique and frequently adjustments need to be made to any time series strategy that is ongoing and very much dependent on external criteria over which there is no control. This of course includes changes in search engine algorithms, keeping up with new social media platforms and of course, user behaviour and studying and knowing trends about where your existing and potential new clients are “hanging out” and how they discover you.

How We Can Help

Every business is unique and while many can fit into individualized services and perhaps only require SEO, or only require Social Media, some businesses require a hybrid service that ties them all in together. Give us a call and we can help analyze your needs and fit something into your budget that will help you see results!