Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is more than just "ranking on Google." SEO can be a very valuable and comprehensive tool to help monitor, control and build your image online.

Increasingly, potential customers use Internet searches to find information about your company online, your products, and your executives. Even if your official website is ranked first for specific search terms, what else appears on the first page? Negative or off-topic results (especially if it links to unseemly content) can greatly impact your business image.

Not only can SEO (Search Engine Optimization) protect your brand, but it is also a powerful tool to help you identify how to engage your customers and increase your overall online visibility and improve positive conversion optimization, which helps drive traffic, sales, and satisfaction.

For more information on the services that Amadeus Consulting provides, please visit our Search Visibility and Optimization pages, or contact our search visibility team directly.

We have highlighted four major outcomes that SEO techniques can help you accomplish, which can greatly supplement other reputation management efforts.

1. Own Your Search Engine Results Page

We call this "owning your back yard," which is the essence of using SEO for reputation and brand management. The purpose here is to control the first page of results for your company name, names of your specific brands, and names of key executives.

The benefit of "owning" the first page, or first few pages, is that it captures a vast majority of people looking for information related to your company (after the second page, it is over 99 percent or searchers have stopped searching). Considering the expansive use of search engines to find information, controlling and influencing what people see when they search for your company can greatly shape a person’s impressions about you.

Your Search Engine Results Page this helps establish your web identity, helps build leads and sales, and makes it harder for bad news to break into the top pages.

Most SEO efforts focus only on placing one listing in the top results. However, for reputation management and brand building, it is important to work to control or influence much more of the results page, especially for keywords directly relating to your company, your brands, and your executives.

(For a specific case study of this in action, we highly recommend this article in Advertising Age. You can also search popular search engines for popular brands or products, and see how well – or in some cases, how poorly – companies have done at controlling their image in search engine results pages. )

2. Own Your Communication Channels

It doesn’t take the spotlight of the national media to destroy your reputation. Your customers are completely capable of doing that themselves, if you do not take responsibility for listening and responding to complaints (and to satisfied customers as well)!

One goal of SEO reputation management is to help you control the communication channels so that people will post feedback and complaints in an area that you create or control, or at least in a place where you can directly respond. While you will never control the content of the conversation, you can have a very strong impact on where those conversations take place.

The goal is to use search marketing services (combined with proper engagement strategies, and more traditional online PR efforts) to steer feedback into specific channels, so that you can be involved in the conversation and so that you will be one of the first to be notified if there is a problem.

This means that a majority of people will voice their complaints (or satisfaction) directly to you (or through a medium that allows you to respond), rather than spreading discontent wildly online. This gives you the ability to positively impact what people say and think about your services.

Keep in mind that you are still responsible for appropriately responding to the feedback you receive.

SEO techniques can also be used as media monitoring tools to help find and identify where your customers go to talk about you and your products, and can help you understand how they talk about your product, which can be very useful for future search engine optimizations, as well as in refining your engagement strategies.

3. Own your profiles

Part of owning your communication channels as mentioned in point #2 involves owning your profiles. What does "owning your profile" mean?

At the very least, it means creating official profiles for your company on relevant sites that would be used by potential customers. These help people find you, and present a positive and official face for your company. It also makes it harder for people to spoof your information, which can be severely detrimental to your company and your customers.

In other words, you probably already have an unofficial profile or business listing on many of these sites. The best thing that you can do is to claim it, and use it for all the good you can. If you do not have a profile on these sites, then you should create one.

For example, some profile listings you should claim:

• Online Map listings such as Google, Bing maps, or Yahoo! Local listings

• Online rating listings, such as Yelp, Trip Advisor, or other ranking

• Specific product rating services

• Social media profiles

• Similar domain names, including .net and .org, and common or probable misspellings when applicable

• Business profiles on major listing services

This helps ensure that the information listed on these sites is correct, and that you can update the information should any changes occur. Secondly, it allows you to use these popular channels as a medium to connect to your customers.

4. Control your keywords

We mentioned above that it is important to monitor and control the Search Engine Results Page for certain specific keywords. In some case "control" might be the wrong word, but the idea is to influence and at least prune the top SERPs for search terms related to your brand.

This includes:

• Your company name

• Your brand name

• Specific products, especially for trademarked names

• Names of key executives

This may also include other search terms related to your industry or related market topics, however broader pages and search terms will be much more difficult, if not impossible, to influence in the same way that you might be able to with more specific searches directly related to you.

To be honest, this strategy is basically the same strategy listed in #1, except it is repeated multiple times across each of the identified keywords. The emphasis is that it is important to control multiple aspects of your brand identity, rather than just one specific facet.

However, as you delve into brand management using SEO techniques, you will also begin to learn how people talk about you. As a bonus for SEO, learning how people search for your products, what words they use to describe your products, and what sites they use to learn about your products (or business, or services, etc), can be extremely helpful for improving your online visibility and sales.

Of course, this information is also extremely valuable in connecting to your customers and engaging them to build loyalty, drive sales, and increase satisfaction. Often, it is important to leverage the strength of an Internet marketing company to help you leverage these strategies in order to manage your online reputation.