Your brand reputation affects the perception of the public. However, it can also impact your online visibility and search engine algorithm. This article will discuss how your brand awareness, mention, and reputation affect your website’s organic ranking. We will tell you why it is necessary to ensure the success of your business and how it can be designed to heavily target your SEO efforts and boost your ranking on the search result.
What is Brand Reputation and Mention?
Brand mentions pertain to the conversation of the people about your brand. It is one of the key metrics to measure your brand awareness. Most marketers have the goal of increasing their brand awareness. As more people become aware of your brand, your number of loyal customers also increases. This simply makes sense since people will be more comfortable doing business with a company they are familiar with. Brand reputation management is somehow different. It pertains to how your prospects think of you and can affect how reputable or trustworthy your brand is. To make it simpler, brand mention refers to how many people have heard about your business, while reputation is the things they heard about your business.
How Google Evaluate My Brand Reputation
Any company can claim that they are in the business. You can think of it as applying for a dream job. You will mostly say that you are the best in the things that you do or that you are committed to your work and a great team player. However, HR will still require some references to support your claims. The same concept can also be applied when evaluating the company’s brand reputation and awareness. A company can claim that they are an SEO expert on their website. Therefore, Google will heavily weigh those external mentions and user-generated content. If you want to advance your Google SERP, you need reliable sources to act as your social proof.
If you want to make sure that you are getting a top-quality score from Google, you want to pay attention to getting positive brand mentions on these kinds of sources. It may include forum discussions, customer reviews, Wikipedia, user-generate content, news articles, awards and commendation, references, and expert recommendations.
Additional Factors that Google May Consider
Suppose Google may find little information about your company through the aforementioned sources. In that case, Google will pull data from influencers, YouTubers, vloggers, authors, journalists, and comments and evaluate them. It means that you should consider investing in your influencer marketing strategy if you want an improved online reputation. Due to the spread of misinformation, especially in the time of Covid, Google finally decided to add the weight of brand reputation and awareness to their algorithm. If you have been suffering from a poor reputation lately, then you may notice a slight decrease in your organic traffic.
Most of the brands in North America have a particular rating system on BBB (Better Business Bureau). It is a non-profit organization that aims to promote trust in the market. It comes with a grading system that ranges from A to F, with A being the highest. A brand with a high score means that they are committed to resolving any customer concerns and providing confidence to their customers. It highlights 17 factors that they consider when grading your business. We’ve noticed recently that the higher the BBB rating of the company is, the better their quality score in Google is. It highlights a strong relationship on what is brand reputation and SEO. Therefore, you should consider claiming your BBB page.
The Search Volume of the Brand
The search volume of your brand will also impact your SEO; it is closely associated with brand awareness. The times that people will search about the name of your business will be reflected on Google Trend. Branded search has a significant impact on today’s SEO and relates to the organic growth of the traffic. Also, as more people become aware of your company, it will be reflected in your search traffic. So, how do you advance your brand reputation and awareness in a way that will impact your search volume? Here are some of our suggestions.
- Digital PR- Your digital PR can indirectly impact your SEO. It has already been proven many times in the past. However, you should also not undermine the effect of offline marketing. You need to take a holistic approach when tackling the health and reputation of your brand.
- Stay in Touch with your Brand Mentions- Some tools will help you remain updated on your online mentions. However, we understand that not all companies, especially start-ups, will have the resources to pay for these expensive tools. As an option, you can use Google Alert that will send you a notification every time a new publication mentions your business. You can also use Google search. You can type the name of your website, but be sure that your website is excluded from the search. For instance, “reputationtreatment.com”-site:reputationtreatment.com
Take Advantage of Your Social Mentions
Social media is also a part of your brand reputation management and SEO strategy. Therefore, you need to stay on top of all your social mentions. With this, you can guarantee that you will respond swiftly every time a user mentions your brand. Be sure that you will respond to these mentions appropriately. Let’s take a quick refresher on how you react to these comments.
- Be Polite- If you receive a negative review, how fast you respond to them can help prevent the damaging effect. Respond to it politely, admit your lapses and tell them that you will do your best to give them a reasonable resolution. Give them your contact information and try to move the conversation in private.
- Be Grateful-For the positive comments, make sure to respond to them by showing how grateful you are. They have many options to do business with, and they still choose your company; you should be thankful. Don’t make your reply too generic. Your audience should feel that you greatly value their loyalty.
Where Do You Begin In Growing Your Brand Reputation?
Since you’ve already known that brand reputation can impact your SEO and SERP, you need to make sure that it will be reflected in your campaign. However, knowing where to start could be a struggle with so many things involved in your online reputation. Here’s what we often tell our clients.
- User Review: If your business is in various databases, monitoring the reviews you will receive here would be an excellent start to advance your brand reputation. Nonetheless, the number of online listing sites, platforms, and review sites can make it impossible to keep on track of all your brand mentions. Therefore, start with the major sites such as Google My Business and Yelp. Listen to what the customers are saying and strive hard to improve your services. The improvement should reflect in the comments that the customer leaves.
- Forums- The user comments on Q&A sites like Quora and Reddit and other forum sites may also affect your SERP. It would be best if you have a business account on those sites and keep in touch on the conversation made about your business.
- Using Knowledge Graph-It would be best to present all relevant information about your business using schema markup. It helps the crawlers establish that connection between your information and your brand reputation and awareness.
What Properties Should I Add to My Schema Markup?
It is recommended to add as much information as possible to your schema markup. Here are some of our recommendations.
Wikipedia
If your brand does not have a Wikipedia page, it is about time that you create them. Add information related to the founder of your brand, logo, services, products, foundation date, and other things that you believe are necessary. Google will often evaluate the Wikipedia page of your brand and gauge if it is reliable. In addition, it also improves the trust level. You don’t want another user to create a page about your company.
Connect With Other Websites
As a business, you understand how important it is to be in partnership with a complementary business to boost your brand reputation management. For instance, if you are a water damage restoration company, associate yourself with a real estate agency or a plumbing organization. The renowned events and projects your business participates in are also an excellent place to find a company to collaborate with. You can connect to news sites and journalists. Cooperate with them, and you might get a shout-out from them. Let us remind you that not all shout-outs can be pleasing. Stay away from paid and auto-generated mentions.
Influencer Marketing
We’ve already mentioned that Google cares a lot about user-generated content. Therefore, you should have a solid influencer marketing strategy. Try to collaborate with influencers that could be relevant to your brand. They will help you widen your reach and improve your organic performance. Create a deal with them; depending on the number of followers, they can be happy with a simple gift or charge you a talent fee. Check their followers, make sure that they are not fake users. Consider how they interact with their audience.
If you have done everything but are still not landing on the top page of Google search results, there could be some problem with your brand reputation and awareness. Talk to us today, and we will help you find the root cause of your SEO issue.