Rainy-Day SEO: Brand Reputation Management

“I can’t move forward until I get feedback from {NAME}” is not something we say on the JDM SEO team. Feeling blocked on a big project? There are plenty of productive ways to lean into your organic efforts in the meantime.

We’re wrapping up what we call our Rainy-Day SEO series (which examines some of these efforts) with a look at brand reputation management, or a proactive initiative to control the way your brand is portrayed online.

If you missed the other posts, check the rest out here:

• Rainy-Day SEO: What Is It?
• Rainy-Day SEO: Third-Party Business Profile Optimization
• Rainy-Day SEO: Link-Building
• Rainy-Day SEO: Video Optimization
• Rainy-Day SEO: Digital PR and Content Promotion

There are obvious reasons to pay attention to brand reputation. If you’re in SEO, you may feel the downstream effects through no fault of your own – negative reviews in the SERPs, for instance, can tank CTR and stop a potential customer from even getting to your website.

Here are the five ways we approach brand reputation management.

Set up your review profiles online

Whether it’s general, like Google My Business or Yelp, or vertical-specific, like G2 for SaaS, just about every brand should have a few active online profiles where users can leave feedback.

Stay on top of online citations of your brand

We like to use Google alerts or SparkToro to keep track of brand mentions.

Respond to feedback

This one’s pretty self-explanatory. For every profile your brand has (including social media profiles), someone should be assigned to monitor and respond to comments and reviews, whether they’re positive or negative (here’s our take on how to respond).

Develop a content strategy that considers feedback

This involves building a moat around potentially negative keywords. If, for instance, you’ve released a new product update with sparkling new UX improvements that negate old negative reviews, make sure you’re creating and distributing plenty of strategic content about the improvements to control the narrative around relevant terms.

Preempt potential issues 

Make sure you have an evergreen system to collect a steady stream of feedback to serve as a hedge against any negative outliers. That may be an automated email campaign to ask users to leave honest reviews after a certain amount of time or a process where your customer service team asks customers to leave reviews after issues are resolved.

People are more likely to click through in the SERPs when they see a ton of reviews – social proof is powerful in SEO as well.

I hope you enjoyed our Rainy Day SEO series! If you’re curious about all the ways you can dig into your organic accounts to find growth traction, hit us up – we’d love to chat.