April 7th, 2010 by Nick

There is a tendency to assume that truly successful search engine optimization comes at the cost of ethical marketing and brand reputation; in reality, the very opposite is the case, and a white hat SEO campaign can only benefit your business not only in terms of search engine’s results, but will also help to bolster your brand presence and reputation.

Internet reputation management and SEO might at first appear to be two completely distinct aspects of online marketing, however not only is there some crossover, but for either discipline to be entirely successful there must be a thorough intergration of the two ideas.

Briefly, search engine reputation management is the practice of engineering a search engines results to carry only sites positive to your brand near the top of the page, and around your specific website. Whilst this practice might at first seem a little unnecessary, as long your page is at the top of the results set, it is actually inherent to the success of your online brand; did you know, for example, that if there is a page negative to your brand beneath your website 70% of users will click on the negative page, and base there decision to interact with your brand on that experience.

With that in mind, reputation management will not only directly affect the relationship that you enjoy with the consumer, but it could have an indirect effect on your SEO, by distracting users from clicking on your page.

So – how exactly do you engineer a page of results? Well, although there are no guarantees, and bearing in mind that your strategy will have to constantly updated to reflect the changing results set, the methodology for creating a “positive” results page, is basically the same as an SEO strategy.

I.e. By creating articles, for example, that reflect your brand in a positive light (either by obviously promoting your brand’s strengths, or more subtly by linking your brand to quality content) you will be increasing the chance that they will appear in the results set instead of negative or neutral pages. This is where SEO and reputation management practises become intermingled: as in order make it to the top of a results page your “positive” articles need to be optimized, i.e. by relevant keyword occurrences.

Of course this means that if you create your content shrewdly then you will be achieving reputation management indirectly, without any additional costs or effort – how? Well every bit of SEO content that you create could include a paragraph or two that mentions your brand in a positive way. Or if there is a specific negative point about your brand that keeps recurring online, then you could address it either subtly or obviously in your blog or article.

As a final point, it is important to remember that reputation management, like SEO, is not just a clever business strategy, but it is a cornerstone in building a successful and durable online presence.

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