The primary goal of Google when assigning SEO ranking to businesses is to model the real world. It strives to give a better ranking to companies that are the most prominent and popular in their market areas as a reward for doing the best in their business activities and customer satisfaction. Reputation management is one of the major tools that contribute to how search engines such as Google view the credibility of a business website.
Search engines can identify such companies from their high customer regards and that individuals generally talk well about them, patronize them and recommend them to their friends. The fact that searchers want to get results for businesses that have a history of making their customers happy makes reputation management to have a great influence on SEO ranking.
Web marketers who implement effective reputation management protect and improve their SEO ranking while considerably improving their website conversion rates. This article looks at how reputation management affects SEO and what organisations can do to come up with effective reputation management strategies.
The use of a company’s reputation by search engines
Search engines are presently using online customer reviews as a major ranking factor especially when it comes to local search results. They can collect these online reviews from a variety of places. For example, they might go and index ranking data from websites such as The BBB, Google My Business and Yelp in order to obtain customer review data for SEO use from these sites. Search engines are more likely to rank higher businesses with lots of positive reviews.
On the other hand, business with many negative reviews many attract wrong kinds of visibility by Google while it is even harder for those without any customer reviews. The fact that search engines trust reviews collected from authentic source supports these possibilities. Besides, the content of a customer review plays a vital in ranking with a detailed one being more helpful for SEO.
As aforementioned, search engines will always want to show the best-rated business in their first page results compared to those with less reputation or with no reputation at all. They have to rank this way for a simple reason: people will continue to use and trust a search engine if it consistently shows them where the best businesses are, without much effort.
Developing effective reputation management strategies
In recent years, companies are struggling with reputation management services that are over-promising but under delivering. Some business owners are even going out soliciting for reviews altogether, despite the prohibition of this act by major review sites. These review sites automatically detect such kind of solicitation by the use of sophisticated filters.
Because of this, companies need first to study the rules outlined on a review website they intend to use. However, it is important to know some tips that many different sites allow in regards to the requests for reviews. Companies should see that they have made it easier for customers to leave their reviews. They also need to provide visible links to other sites that accept reviews for their businesses. They should create these links easily visible on their social profiles and websites as well.
They may also include posters or leaflets in their mortar and brick premises that tell clients where they can leave their reviews. However, this does not imply telling people to leave a review, but just the place where they can leave it.
