ORM: How to improve your online rankings

Posted by Anton on Oct 19, 2011 in ORM

With the world getting more digital everyday, users have become a lot more accustomed to the internet over the last couple of years, especially when it comes to parting ways with their cash. It is now very common to expect clients to have weighed their options online and asked recommendations from their network before making a purchase that involves any amount of money.

Users interested in buying are busy flocking to various review websites to find information from other users in order to make the final decision.  What does this all mean for businesses? It means that Online Reputation Management (ORM) is becoming extremely important. Companies all over the world needs to be more transparent than ever before, making sure that they are producing the best quality of service possible to their clients.

The days are gone when companies were able to simply sweep disgruntled clients under the rug and forgetting about them. Every consumer has a voice and it is extremely important that a company monitors how it is being used online.

Be proactive with your online reputation management

Always be proactive with your ORM strategy. One of the best ways that I have found in managing your reputation online is to control and have high rankings on the search engine result pages (SERP’s) for your brand. How do you get those rankings? Of course I can say: “With a proper digital marketing strategy“, but it is not as easy as it sounds.

A few years ago while I was working for a top internet marketing franchise we had a client with a very bad reputation online. All the result pages on the search engines about them were negative and this has been going on for a couple of years. With extensive research and monitoring, we conducted the following steps towards improving how their brand appears online.

Follow the steps towards the long road on improving your brand online on the search engines.

Improving your brand online

Brand name: Include your brand and business name in all the meta titles of your online profiles including page specific keywords. Always make sure that your brand name is clearly identified and visible across all your websites with a strong about us page.  This can improve your rankings drastically on the search engines.

Start a blog: My favourite! There’s really a thousand reasons why any business should start blogging, but the most important part is that it gives your brand and company a voice. It allows you to talk directly about your brand, services and products. A blog can also give your website a massive boost with your rankings on the search engines increasing your website’s authority online. By creating well thought out and original content on a regular basis is looked upon well by the Google.

Social media profiles: Create profiles on popular social media channels and make sure that they are indexed by the search engines. A small link building campaign can help with this. By creating profiles for your business as well as key individuals is another smart way that you will be able to take more space on the search engines.

Local listings: Local SEO is a simple method of occypying more space on the top of the search engines. Add your business listing on Google Places and other relevant business listing channels. This method can achieve you a ranking alongsided your web page and also provide users with another fun way of discovering your company.

Monitor: Regular monitor your results. This is often the job of a digital marketing specialist, but with time to spare can be done by yourself. Once you have achieved the results on the search engines that you are after, spend some time to make sure it stays that way. Setup services such as Google Alerts to track any mentions of your brand online.