Transcript
For the most part, the way that Google, AI, and your ideal customers view your business is all based around the information that’s out there on the internet.
And if you’re not actively taking the time to control what information is getting put out there around your company, then you’re leaving that perception up to chance.
So, in this lesson, we’re going to be looking at some of the main things you need to be doing when it comes to your online reputation management.
Branded keywords are the searches that include your business name or close variations of it. So that could be people searching for your exact company name, a shortened version of your company name, or even misspellings of your company’s name.
Now, if you’ve ever created any of your own products, these products would also count as branded keywords. In fact, anything that only exists because of your business should be treated as part of your brand search footprint.
Sometimes these branded searches are going to be used as navigational keywords like we spoke about in a previous lesson.
However, a large amount of these branded searches are coming from people who are in the research phase. This is when someone is trying to decide whether or not they can trust your business.
They’ve probably already heard about your company or your products and now they want to see what they can find out about you when they Google your name. This is becoming even more important as more and more people are using AI to do research into companies for them because both Google and AI are only able to show people the information that they have available to them.
So now what we’re going to do is have a look at the main things that you can do to influence that.
The important thing to understand is that neither Google search nor AI tools can form any sort of opinion on their own. All they can do is work with the information that they already have access to.
For example, if one unhappy customer starts posting negative things about your company all over the internet, that could be all that Google and AI have to show people. Whereas, if you’ve taken the time to build out the various pages, profiles, and mentions across the internet, you can actually shape the narrative that people see around your company when they use Google or AI.
That’s why it’s so important to be setting up things like your company’s social media profiles because not only are they a trust signal in Google, but they can also rank for your branded keywords as well and allow you to push down the pages that are appearing that maybe you don’t want to be there.
On top of that, they can also influence AI with the information that you actually want AI to understand about your company. And it can show your customers that you’re a real active company that’s doing a lot of business creating what’s known as social proof. Especially if you’re posting photos of your recent work, your customer reviews, photos of your team working behind the scenes, etc.
Just anything that shows customers that you’re a real business that’s doing some great work.
Another lesser-known benefit of having social media profiles is the traffic that they can drive to your website. And although you may think that this is a little bit outside the realms of traditional SEO, traffic is actually one of the most important ranking factors in Google, whether it comes from social media, paid ads, email marketing, push notifications, or anywhere else.
In fact, anybody who’s been doing SEO at a high level for long enough, will have noticed that rankings increase when a significant amount of traffic hits a page. And social media can actually play a good part in that if you’re creating content that sends people back to the website.
Another great tip is digital press releases. Now, these do great when you’re trying to rank for branded keywords and influence AI because it’s basically a news style article about your company that gets published across multiple publications online. That’s going to create a lot of authorative mentions about your company that both Google and AI can reference when people are asking about you. But the best part about it is that you actually control what’s said in the press release yourself. So, you can really use this as an opportunity to put your best foot forward.
Reviews play a huge role in whether or not somebody trusts you. They’re actually one of the main things that people are going to click on when they perform that branded search because they want to know what were other people’s experiences like when they used your company and they want to know that before they make the decision.
Now, the problem most companies have is that they don’t ask customers for reviews. And unfortunately, customers who are even slightly unhappy are far more likely to leave a negative review than customers who are extremely happy are to leave a positive one.
Which is why it’s incredibly important to get a review generation strategy in place and start building up your online reviews. Now, for most businesses, the main place that you’ll want to ask customers to leave a review is on your Google Business Profile. And this is because it shows up on the right hand side of the search results when somebody searches for your company’s name.
That’s why it’s got more prominence than the other review platforms, and you want to give it that priority. It’s also an incredibly powerful ranking factor if you’re a local business that’s looking to rank in the maps. Not just because it helps with your click-through rate, although it does, but because reviews are one of the most important ranking factors. The more reviews that you can get on your Google Business Profile, the better.
However, that doesn’t mean that you should only get reviews on your Google Business Profile. In fact, you should be getting reviews on all the major platforms like Facebook, Trust Pilot, and so on since these can also rank for your branded keywords.
And on top of that, reviews are being used more and more by the AI tools when deciding which businesses that they should trust and recommend. So, if an AI system is trying to work out whether your business is credible, reviews are one of the clearest signals that it can reference.
So, the main takeaway from this lesson is that you need to be intentional about what shows up when people are searching for your company online. And that means getting your social media profiles set up and keeping them active and make sure that you’re posting out content that shows people that you’re a real business.
You also need to have your review platforms in place and be generating as many positive reviews as you possibly can.
If you do those things, you give your business the best possible chance of making a strong first impression when people are searching for your company online.