Having nothing but positive press out there is practically impossible in today’s day and age, when anyone with access to the internet can write a Google or Yelp review. Even more alarming are the spammers who leave bad reviews without ever having interacted with your business. Positive customer feedback can be swept away within a moment’s notice, if you’re not on top of managing your company’s online presence.
With these concerns in mind, how can you ensure that you’re maintaining not just a positive online image—but a consistently good one? Let’s talk about online reputation management.
What Is Online Reputation Management?
Once primarily thought of as a PR term, Online Reputation Management (ORM) has morphed into something else entirely with the rise of the internet and social networking. It’s not just about people saying nice things about your brand anymore.
Now, ORM also focuses on the content that shows up in online searches for your business. Ideally, the highest-ranking pages will be the ones that make your company look the best. Primarily, you’re using search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to showcase the positive feedback your brand has received, which influences search results and leads to even more click-throughs.
What Are Some Strategies for Maintaining My Brand’s Online Image?
Knowing about ORM is a leg up on the competition in and of itself, but what’s a superpower if you don’t know how to wield it? With the help of a digital agency, individuals and businesses alike can maintain a strong online presence.
Collaboration With News Outlets and Other Publications
Building up your own blog is important, but external sources can provide an added boost. Why not partner with a news outlet (online or print, local or national) or an industry publication to gain some additional ranking content
An official press release is a great way to promote your brand’s presence, for example, while increasing your chances of getting picked up by relevant publications and websites in your industry.
Search Engine Optimization
We’ve already touched on this, but SEO encompasses a huge portion of ORM. And there are many ways to keep your search results looking positive, such as:
- Generating exemplary, original written content for your company website. You can achieve this by connecting with talented writers at digital agencies to develop content for regularly-scheduled blog posts.
- Responding to customer reviews—even the less-than-favorable ones! This SEO tactic is a two-for-one; you’re engaging with your customers while actively working to make their experience better, in the present and in the future.
- Using keyword optimization to highlight positive reviews, Google My Business posts, and blogs.
Image Optimization
Pair that glowing written press with an engaging picture or two! Well, to be more specific, use pictures that will also load quickly, so your customer doesn’t get impatient. This is what we in the business call image optimization.
In a nutshell, image optimization is about reducing an image file’s size without reducing its quality. Doing so keeps your pages loading quickly, ensuring your customer enjoys browsing your site, and thus adding to your reputation. It’s about getting those stellar images to rank in search results, too.
How do you get an image to rank, exactly, without using keywords in the traditional sense? For one, you’ll want to name your images descriptively and accurately, rather than, say, saving them as a random jumble of text. Those image names will rank, after all!
Another tip? Avoid decorative images on your site, like borders and buttons—that is, if they don’t add anything to your marketing campaign. They tend to take forever to load, and may give your site a less-than-professional look.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising drives traffic to your site through ads. An advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked, typically on popular search engines like Google. PPC lifts your website—and its positive reputation—to the very first page of the search results, while blending seamlessly with links that aren’t ads. And what better place for all that positive feedback to be visible than, quite literally, front and center?
Cultivate a Strong Online Presence With Snap
Guess what? The vast majority of your potential clients will either be finding you online or looking you up before making a purchase, so crafting a powerful digital presence is of the essence. Snap is a digital marketing agency dedicated to using powerful, SEO-friendly content, PPC management, and other digital marketing tactics to position your brand for success. We’ve been recognized as one of the top PPC management companies, because of our dedication to helping fellow businesses thrive online.
Ready to repair, maintain, or improve your already strong reputation? Partner with Snap today; we’re here to guide you through every step of the ORM process.