In today’s world, where most people search for everything on the internet, it’s crucial to invest in how you manage your online footprint. While starting and growing a business takes a lot of time, effort, and money, the long-term benefits of reaching new customers far outweigh the difficulties.
Entrepreneurs should be aware of the importance of online reputation management and how it can improve their search engine ranking. Improving your online reputation requires proper management, as a well-managed online reputation attracts potential clients to your website.
What Is Online Reputation Management?
ORM stands for “online reputation management,” which refers to all of an organization’s efforts to track, address, analyze, and shape the impressions customers and leads have of a brand. Monitoring and responding to brand mentions across various digital touchpoints is an integral part of online reputation management.
This could include the following, depending on the industry and customer base:
- product review sites (both on Google and platforms like G2 and Capterra)
- social media platforms
- videos
- press coverage
- websites, such as news sites & blogs
- and others.
Although the formula for local search optimization is complicated and constantly changing, the way your company manages its online reputation can impact your search engine optimization (SEO) rankings.
While the changes may appear to the online searcher to be minor or incremental, the underlying algorithms that produce the results change quickly and dramatically, causing many companies’ SEO strategies to shift from best practices to bad practise overnight.
Factors Affecting Google Rankings
It’s common knowledge that Google prefers high-quality content that is highly relevant to the users of a specific niche. It has strict protocols and algorithms in place that calculate a brand’s online presence. Search engines like Google use a variety of methods to accomplish this, including:
- Gauging the content’s uniqueness
- Website and social media ratings, reviews, and customer feedback
- Strong backlinking
- Rating compelling content and its originality
- Website optimization
- Website structure
- Site speed
- Mobile site optimization
- Use of keywords
- Location tagging
- Presentation of relevant and worthy information
- Audience communications
Impact of Online Reputation Management on Google Rankings
Because Google is designed to mimic the real world, your company should be among the most talked about, patronized, and recommended on the internet in order to achieve the highly coveted page one position.
The following are a few ways that provide insights on how ORM impacts your brand’s placement in Google rankings:
- Removes Unfavourable/Negative Online Content
It may take some time to restore a website’s Google ranking after it has suffered a bad online reputation. On some platforms, such as Yelp, you’ll have to send the user a message and offer them a coupon or a free visit before asking them to revise their review.
Fortunately, there are ways to keep negative content off your site, such as bad reviews. Most entrepreneurs nowadays use Reputation Saver, a simple but powerful plugin, to protect their online reputation. Because reputation management plugins filter reviews before reaching your profiles, your business is much safer. As a result, you can concentrate on the feedback that will benefit your company.
- Drives Online Businesses Forward Or Backward
Customer reviews can influence whether or not they contact your company. If a potential new customer reads a negative review about a bad customer experience, they may choose your competitor because they do not want to go through the same thing.
You can bet that if your business is ranked in the top three map listings on Google’s homepage and has more five-star reviews compared to the other companies’ then customers are more likely to reach out to you.
On the other hand, if you manage your reputation with positive feedback and run a solid SEO campaign, you’ll have a better chance of landing on page one. The need to address customer reviews is one of the reasons why many business owners hire professional marketers.
- Helps Build A Strong Online Presence
With proper management, you can assist in developing a solid online presence for your company. Nurturing a client’s online presence is the first step in establishing their business.
Entrepreneurs benefit from having an online presence because it improves accessibility, allows for easy marketing, builds relationships and consumer trust, and allows you to see what works and what doesn’t. The more people trust you and the more reviews you have, the more click-throughs you can expect, resulting in more conversions and customers.
Conclusion
It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Google reviews in terms of SEO ranking. Customers rely on online ratings and reviews to assess their product or service’s brand reputation and quality now more than ever. As a result, it’s safe to assume that a large number of positive yet genuine reviews will result in higher SERP rankings.
