The Role of SEO in Safeguarding Your Online Reputation

Whether you’re talking about an individual or a business, the importance of having a positive online reputation in the modern era simply cannot be overstated.

When you distill the idea down to its bare essentials, online reputation management is all about creating the most positive perception you can about a brand or business on the internet. If people are heavily influenced by what they see and read online when forming a long-lasting opinion about something, it stands to reason that you want to make sure they see as much beneficial content as possible.

While there are a lot of tools that are used to help craft and safeguard a person or business’s online reputation, one of the most important of those is also often the most misunderstood: search engine optimization. SEO is so much more than just a general marketing practice and is indeed an invaluable part of this process for a wide range of different reasons, all of which are worth exploring.

Why Reputation Management Matters

Research has indicated that about 90% of consumers say they wouldn’t frequent a business that has a bad reputation. However, 95% of consumers say they absolutely would trust a business with a positive reputation. About 79% of consumers say they value online reviews even more than the opinions of their real-life friends.

A reputation management strategy can be executed in a few different ways, depending on the needs of a business or client. The experts at Status Labs, for example, allow people to proactively impact their online reputation through SEO and other techniques. They also have services that act in response to some type of reputational damage or other crisis that has already occurred.

The Ongoing Impact of SEO

Search engines like Google are built on a very precise algorithm that takes the keywords and phrases someone types into a search bar and uses them, among other factors, to determine where sites rank for a particular query. SEO is the process of making sure that your content (or the content you prefer) ranks as highly in search results as possible.

If someone types the name of your business into Google, you obviously don’t want the first thing they see to be the website of a competitor. Using SEO best practices, you can make sure the first page of results is populated with not only information about your business, but also your products, your services, and more.

When you consider that over half of all website traffic comes from organic search, it’s easy to see why this is a concept that’s gotten the attention of so many people.

SEO has a major impact in safeguarding your online reputation in terms of general visibility. Remember that the goal of these techniques is to help the content you prefer rank as highly as possible in engines like Google. Now, consider the facts that, according to another recent study:

• Only roughly 5% of all Google users ever make it beyond the first page of search results.
• Nearly 32% of all traffic will go to the first item on the search engine results page.
• Google alone has a 75% worldwide market share on desktop search traffic.
• SEO drives approximately 1,000% more traffic than even organic social media.

Imagine a business was having a reputational crisis and wanted to retake control of the online narrative using SEO. Statistics like those outlined above show us that by using positive content to drive the problematic pieces off the first page of the Google search results, they immediately guarantee that 95% of people will likely never see it.

By focusing on SEO and getting desirable content to rank highly, they’re getting it in front of as many sets of eyes as possible. They’re reaching more people and generating more traffic than even popular sites like Facebook and Twitter ever could, and they’re doing it by leveraging the age-old principles of search engine optimization to their advantage.

In the end, SEO isn’t the only element that has a direct impact on a person or business’s online reputation — but it’s a pivotal one. Understanding this means being in a position to use what is admittedly a very straightforward idea to your advantage.