In 2010 there was quite a lot of hype and controversy regarding the “death of search engine optimization”. Some SEO companies jumped on or off the band wagon based on how they wanted to position their services. Nothing really came of it all.
Because we are well-versed in SEO and provide that service in our client projects that require it, we never bought into all that hoopla, especially when much of the hype and controversy seemed to be faked and sensationalized attention-getting by SEO firms. After all, as long as search engines use keywords to make their decisions in how they rank pages, and as long as people use keywords and phrases to search for things at the search engines, search engine optimization is not going anywhere.
Businesses still want their pages in the top of the search results and proactively doing the things that make that happen (SEO) will go on.
So regardless of any of those claims or positions in 2010, SEO is still a big deal today with keywords even more important than ever. But as we knew even before 2010, reputation has always been a dominating factor over your SEO. That’s because no matter how well your web pages are ranked in the search results, if your reputation is less than that of your competition, you will most definitely lose a certain amount of business to those who have better, more trusted and respected reputations.
And the problem with your SEO is that you’ll not know when and why it’s not working as well as it should because of your reputation issues. And that’s why your keywords related to your reputation and reputation issues are a big deal.
Keywords and search phrases are used to find web pages and subject matter. And if your business has reputation issues that you aren’t aware of, you can use keywords to discover important information about your business that you might not have known exists.
You might find past complaints that are still unresolved, current issues potentially getting worse, or future situations that could blow up into bigger problems if they aren’t headed off first.
An article in 2014 from SearchEngineJournal.com, talks about the various values of keywords and search terms while relating some of those values to reputation:
Why SEO Still (And Always) Matters
“If I was working on solving a reputation management problem involving the term “revenge porn” and I found out that my name was also being attached to the word “fraud,” I’d know I had a bigger problem to solve. And keywords helped me spot it.
Those are big perks, but keywords can do even more. For reputation concerns, we want blogs that persuade and reassure, so that attacks seem to have less merit. This means that the pieces we write must be compelling and honest and true, and they must speak to issues that readers want to read about…
…Keywords can make that happen.
…That’s the kind of research that results in the in-depth, persuasive, compelling blog posts that boost reputations and increase market share.”
For most businesses reputation issues are focused on the present with one exception – those who have a past or unresolved reputation ‘event’ that continues to nag them to this day. In time many of these types of issues become noting more than a scar and a memory. But because of the longevity of what goes online staying online, few things like this are impervious to being brought back to life.
The last thing any business needs is a past reputation issue gurgling to the top of consumer awareness by way of the media or a still-disgruntled-customer. This can bring it all back to life unexpectedly, especially when the one who is still bitter is pointing out that nothing in the business itself has changed and customers are still getting the negative treatment/service or less-than-acceptable results from that business.
But the past is just one facet of what businesses need to confront. You still need to focus on the present and the future, guiding the latter as much as possible away from potential problems that are avoidable.
If your business is currently experiencing reputation issues you need to handle those terminatedly. In other words, permanently fix what’s causing them to avoid them from repeating.
This serves two important purposes:
- It helps your present reputation and your existing marketing and advertising work together
- It prevents current reputation issues from becoming bigger future reputation issues.
The last thing you need is a track record of less-than-stellar customer service, product or service deliver-ability, or some other key factor in how you run your business and how it is perceived by the public. Many reputation issues can be avoided. But businesses will have to do a better job of taking more responsibility for their reputation, anticipating problems and focus more on making happy customers a natural by-product of their operations to avoid, if not eliminate, most reputation issues from becoming issues at all.
We’ve long predicted that reputation will become a major tool in how businesses differentiate and distance themselves from their competition. The businesses doing this will put more effort into the things they do that stand for excellence – beyond just getting more positive customer reviews.
They will have to do more to utilize their reputation in their marketing and the reward will be an exponential return on their marketing investments.
In a future edit to this post, we’ll connect you to a brief video and show you how to do basic searches with keywords and phrases to get a more realistic view of how reputation marketing is becoming increasingly important to your business – whether you realize it, accept it and embrace it – or not.
The next level of evolution in how reputation affects consumer interest and decision-making are already well underway. It goes beyond a we’ll-put-out-fires-as-they-happen or a stay-on-alert approach Those approaches are not really approaches, but more reactions.
In fact, they’ really nothing more than a form of “reputation management” which, as we’ve covered in other blog posts is no longer enough. We hope you’re already committed to the new reality of needing to apply “reputation marketing” to your business. It requires the inclusion of all the other reputation activities and becomes your ultimate marketing solution.