by What is Search Engine Reputation Management?
SERM, short for Search Engine Reputation Management, is an online marketing strategy that encompasses a range of activities. These activities include Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Paid Search Marketing, Press Optimization, Blogging and Social Media. Through SERM, businesses can increase their visibility in search engine results, while managing their online presence to ensure they are portrayed in a positive light.
Search engine reputation management (SERM) gives businesses and websites the opportunity to monitor activities that can affect their public image, both positively and negatively. This includes optimizing Search Engine Results, Paid Search Advertising, Press Release Optimization, Blogging, and Social Media Marketing. By taking advantage of all of these methods, companies can manage and maintain their reputation.
Why is SERM important?
The ReviewTrackers data shows that 94% of buyers are influenced by negative reviews and won’t do business with the related company. It is therefore essential to manage your online reputation, due to these three factors:
– Your company value is tightly bound up with public opinion.
– Many customers chose whether to engage with someone or an organization depending on what they learn when searching online.
– An increasing number of review sites on the web demonstrates that consumers check out what other people have said before communicating with a brand.
Search Engine Reputation Management in Fullerton (California)
Our team of experts can help you monitor and repair your online reputation, ensuring your best appearance to potential clients. Ignorance of your online presence is hazardous to your business, so it’s vital to remain aware and take action.
How does SERM Work?
Once a brand has faced reputation issues, the next step is restoring their online profile. At our company, we help brands influence a positive view of their brand through online reputation strategies. We use search engine reputation management (SERM) to manipulate the public reputation in a positive direction. SERM combines SEO, social media, and content marketing plus PR to enhance the overall online reputation of the brand. We take the following steps:
- Implement strategic content marketing and promotion on the website and various social media platforms.
- Enhance SEO tactics to encourage visibility of positive content.
- Eliminate any negative posts or content with negative sentiment.
1.- Proactive Monitoring
To maintain and improve your online reputation, you need to keep an eye on it. Utilize search engines, blogs, and reviews platforms among sources to monitor the landscape. Additionally, your company should have a presence on online platforms such as social media or forums where your customers are engaging. You should be able to answer queries and concerns before they lead to negative feedback.
2.- SERP Cleansing
For SERP Cleansing, the aim is to clean the top pages of the search engine results of any negative results. It’s essential to ensure that the top ten search results for your company are optimized. To make this possible, you need to actively produce content related to your business, such as reviews, testimonials, media coverage, guest posts, and other relevant pieces.
3.- Improve SEO
To improve SEO, you need to:
- Assess your website content, identifying weak points and opportunities to improve;
- Monitor your competition, track what strategies they are using and figure out how to beat them;
- Research the most relevant keywords for your industry, including long-tail phrases;
- Optimize content so that it’s seen as relevant to the search engine algorithms;
- Utilize backlinks, making sure they come from reliable sources;
- Periodically review and analyze your website performance to see if your efforts are paying off.
To enhance SEO, you should assess the content of your website, monitor your competition, research keywords relevant to your industry, optimize your content to appear more relevant to search engine algorithms, build up backlinks from credible sources, and analyze & review website performance regularly. Doing so will allow you to identify weak points, explore opportunities to improve, gain insights into competitors’ strategies, and track the efficacy of your efforts.
4.- Respond to Negative Content
Maintaining a presence on consumer forums and review platforms is key to gaining a better understanding of what people think of your brand. This allows you to respond quickly and appropriately to negative content, showing customers you have heard their thoughts and care about their opinions. If an unhappy customer has already left a negative review, you should reach out to apologize and try to resolve the problem. This provides a great opportunity to correct the issues the customer had and help to turn their opinion around.
5.- Social Media Presence
Social media is a valuable tool to boost your audience, leadership and trust. Not only does it provide a platform to connect with your customers, but it can also substantially improve your presence on SERPs. Generating positive mentions and feedback of your business on social media will have a large-scale impact on search engine rankings. The more engagement you are able to gain through social media, the more trustworthiness search engines can assign to your brand.
6.- Push Positive Content
Social media is an effective mechanism to increase reach, build leadership, and increase trust. It facilitates connecting with customers and carries huge potential for improving SERP rankings. Generating beneficial sentiment and customer reviews for your business through social media contributes to greater trust placed in you by search engines. The more engagement you can earn on social media, the more trustworthiness search engines attribute to you.
Conclusions for SERM
In order to get started with Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM), there are three important steps to consider:
- Monitor your online reputation. This is especially important in order to protect your brand online and offline. Monitoring activities on social media and building a loyal following is key.
- Pay attention to customer feedback. Transparency is important in order to build trust, so attend to all comments, both positive and negative.
- Leverage SERM experts. Our team of reps can guide you through the process and has worked on more than 500 projects across 30+ countries.
