In today’s online access, people have the power to research you and your business before they engage any transactions with you. The links and information that appear on the first few pages of Google when your name is searched for are what potential partners perceive you are. That’s why online reputation should be your priority if you want to create that powerful first impression.
In this article, you’ll learn how the right SEO strategy will accomplish the following areas:
– Optimize pages of your website to appear atop of Search Engine Result Pages and rank for target keyword phrases.
– Feature your genuine social profiles representing your company or brand name.
– Optimize company-hosted and third-party review website pages to populate when an interested person Googles “your brand name + reviews.”
– Influence search engines to highlight positive content and simultaneously push negative or irrelevant content down beyond the third or fourth page.
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How to optimize content for better discovery on the internet?
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1. Types of content to optimize for optimal results –
Authentic and concise writing attracts back-links from credible websites. Naturally, optimizing these digital assets insulates you from defamatory content and suppresses negative or erroneous links. Below are several examples of concentrated SEO content:
— A guide or tutorial article: Guides are content that takes the reader through the process of understanding a subject. Guides may be harder to create but will rank higher for keyphrases over time. They earn backlinks easily.
— Whitepapers: Releasing an original-content white paper is a widely accepted strategy for positively impacting search results. Similar to an actionable guide, the white paper can offer in-depth forecasts and developed arguments, which will further establish you as a reputable authority.
— Website bearing your name with a press page: If you do not already have a website bearing your name, now is the time you should create one. Nourish this cornerstone digital asset with SEO-rich content about yourself and your brand. Begin with the end in mind so that you eventually rank on multiple keywords organically.
2. Scores to target for achieving higher content discovery
Connect your goals with the creation of authoritative SEO content to best support your online reputation management campaign. While originating SEO-rich content will rank favorably with Google, consider these benchmarks to drive measurable results:
— Aim for depth: You want your content to be as in-depth as possible, giving your readers all the necessary summary information they would want on a single page.
Ex. Why should a buyer invest in a property in West Vancouver, or the reason why your listing has the best neighborhood, etc.
— Link to credible sources: With in-depth content, you will notice that you’re making claims that would need to be backed by sources. More so, when you’re attempting to win readers over to your side, ensure your facts and data are referenced from credible sources like a link from your real estate board for information about investing on the right place, or a link from the local newspaper on why your listing is situated in a child-friendly neighborhood, etc.
— Break your content into digestible formats: You do not want your content to be skimmed over and abandoned because it is difficult to read. Aside from the fact that in-depth SEO content would help you dominate search results, it’s an opportunity to have all of your positive sides ingrained in the minds of your readers, helping you to earn their trust once more.
3. Where brands should focus on when optimizing content for reputation enhancement
To ensure your content performs well, make sure you’re publishing them on high-authority websites. This goes for both visual and text-based content.
For the content hosted on your personal or business website, ensure that all of your website properties are optimized and maintained. SEO and reputation campaigns will yield relatively marginal results if users are driven back to a website that is not functional or responsive.
After optimizing your website to perform highly in search results, you should also level up your reputation campaign and promote best-performing content. The next step is to identify positive pillar content sources.
Identifying positive content – Best practices
You want to make sure you’re not only creating rich SEO-driven content but are actually putting your optimal effort into promoting the type of content that highlights your strengths. To identify positive content that may benefit your brand image, consider these milestones you may overlook:
— Received congratulatory wishes – Such as successfully selling a listing, receiving an award from your brokerage firm, reaching a new real estate industry milestone, getting featured in an important publication, and so on.
— Documented a partnership goal – Has your brand always dreamed of working with another brand, and have you always talked openly about this? Such content could augment your brand’s reputation image by investing SEO efforts into it.
4. How to use image search ranking to augment online reputation efforts
Images are often ignored in any online efforts because it’s assumed that it is difficult to rank images. Images still provide many opportunities to claim your branded keywords, create authentic back-links, and build a strong reputation within search engines.
Consider this: Why is it that most of the time, when you run a query of a famous person’s name in Google, images of them usually rank at the top of the results? And images often dominate the Knowledge Graph area for popular names such as celebrities, brands, or popular destinations.
Below are some techniques for using images to dominate search results for your online reputation repair campaign.
— Optimize alt tags and keywords
Alt tags in images are strings of connected texts that help search engine crawlers to understand what an image is about. When adding images to your content, always include your branded keywords in the alt text area of the images. For the most effective results, keep the texts connected to each other by adding the underscore sign “_” after every string of text. So, say I was to add an image of my company brand and this blog post, I’d add the following text to the alt text area: “Ubertor_SEO_and_your_website_online_reputation”, instead of just including random text or just barely adding my name to it.
— Name the image after the branded keywords
If you’re uploading an image to your website as a part of your SEO content, you’ll be missing out on keyword ranking opportunities if you’re saving such images with random texts, or, in some scenarios, with numbers. Instead, use the branded keywords you want to rank for as the name of the images. This means renaming the image file from your local storage before uploading it online. Again, you can use the alt tags approach to optimize it by linking the texts together.
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Conclusion
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The SEO strategy helps align your sales, marketing, and technology efforts to build your online reputation. SEO content is a key pillar for achieving the results you seek on the internet over time. By learning the top-performing SEO strategies to rank atop search results for your branded keywords, you’ll be able to maintain a clean image on the internet and create opportunities.