How to Align Local SEO Tactics and Online Reputation Management Strategies

If you think about it, local SEO tactics and online reputation management strategies aim to achieve the same goal - To build trust in a business and develop its credibility through its online presence.

Online reputation management refers to maintaining a positive public image of your business. Local SEO, on the other hand, helps drive traffic to a site by boosting its visibility online. Now, if you see, all of this translates to one thing ā aligning local SEO tactics with online reputation management strategies will be one of the best things you can ever do for your business.

But how can you align both of these? Keep reading to know more!

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

Before we move on to our main subject, let's discuss some basic terms that you should know.

Firstly, how do you define online reputation management?

Online reputation management means taking control of the online conversation. The strategies and techniques of ORM make sure that individuals find accurate information when they search for your business on the web. It simply helps you put your best foot forward.

Essentially, the aim of ORM is to counteract misleading trends and strike a balance.

Take a look at the different online reputation management activities:

1. Social Media Management

Over the years, social media has transformed into a business hub. If you open a popular social media platform, you can easily see businesses and consumers communicating on it. Chances are, you yourself might be using different social media platforms to communicate with brands.

Now, the great news is, Google recognizes social signals. Hence, some of the things that can help your business with ORM and ranking are having different social media profiles and maintaining continuous activity on your social media accounts.

Image Source: SproutSocial

Examples of reputation management activities on social media include reacting to posts, replying to reviews, scheduling regular posts, and answering questions.

2. Listing Building

Listing building refers to the creation of listings for every relevant citation, including famous directories and niche listing websites. There is also a benefit linked to a higher number of citations ā increased visibility in search.

3. Listing Management

Listing management means regularly updating the information of your business. You also reply to every review of your business (negative or positive). Google views these activities as citations and review signals and hence they are very crucial for your business.

Image Source: SMS

Another important part of listing management are photos. Make sure your business photos are the most recent ones and also relevant.

Note: Google favors listings containing all filled-out sections as compared to listings containing only contact details. So, ensure you fill out every section for Google to take note of!

Aligning Local SEO Signals With ORM

Every reputation management practice is a signal that Google uses in local SEO for the purpose of ranking businesses. Take a look at these local SEO signals:

1. Citation Signals: These signals include the number of citations and the consistency of business information across citations. Here's an important note ā popular listing sites and directories like Yellow Pages, Yahoo, and Bing Places are high-quality and trustworthy sources in the eyes of Google.

2. Google Business Profile Signals: Google Business Profile sets up a local business via Google Maps with the help of signals such as NAP data, proximity, and categories.

3. On-page Signals: Keywords are incredibly important for on-page signals. Google looks for them in the tags, metadata, and landing page titles. It also considers the relevance of these keywords across a website.

4. Review Signals: Examples of these signals include keywords used, the number of reviews, and the number of reviews having text and not only just a star rating.

5. Social Signals: As social media users have started liking as well as sharing business pages, search engines have started to count social signals as a factor in ranking. These signals include mentions from community websites like Reddit and the volume of shares, comments, and likes on different social networks.

Image Source: LinkedIn

Google uses all of the signals mentioned above as ranking factors. These signals pair well with the following online reputation practices:

1. Listing Management: Proper listing management means keeping the information updated and filled out on every applicable listing website. This improves searchability while keeping a positive reputation.

2. Website Management: A web page with a poor design will only give a hard time to the users who interact with it, diminishing your online reputation. To keep your online reputation positive, you need to create webpages that have an intuitive design, offer ease of use, and contain clean on-site copy incorporated with the necessary keywords.

3. Social Media Management: This ORM practice includes on-brand posting carried out on a frequent basis. Ensure you have accounts on those social media profiles that your target audience hangs out on.

4. Review Management: You know what's key to a good online reputation? Prompt replies to both negative and positive reviews. Another practice that adds to the reputation of a business is review requests.

The combination of reputation management practices and local SEO tactics set your business up for success. The right practices and solutions help businesses boost their local search rankings.

Image Source: Synup

The Local SEO Tactics to Follow

Here are some best practices to follow to improve your local SEO rankings and get the benefit of combining both your local SEO and ORM efforts:

1. Local Citation Building

Make sure you focus on Google Business Profile, Yelp, Bing Places for Business, and Yellow Pages. Ensure you are aware of review websites and other citations that apply to your business. Apart from this, all your business information needs to be correct and filled out. Using local citation software can help you manage and update your business information efficiently across multiple platforms.

2. Local Link Building

You know what is one of the most powerful tactics for boosting local SEO rankings? It is local link building. Backlinks are defined as links on one site that point to another site.

Today, you can use a variety of tactics to build a network of links. And the good news is, local businesses can create backlinks more easily than franchises or large stores. The reason behind this? They can ask other businesses, community groups, and local papers for a backlink, all thanks to the strong support of their community that they have with them.

Note: Before you link with a site, check if Google considers the linked site as a trusted source. For this, it should have a Domain Authority of 40 or higher. Use the domain analysis tool by Moz to check for Domain Authority. Another metric to check out is Domain Rating, which you can measure with Ahrefs.

Build Your Credibility Online With DashClicks' Reputation App

Wouldn't it be simple for your business if you had one software that helped you quickly gather reviews from around the internet and respond to them at any given time from a dashboard?

Enter, DashClicks' Reputation app.

This highly reliable reputation management software helps you manage your reviews across different sources from one dashboard. This, in turn, saves time and also helps you win more customers!

If you decide to use the app, you can currently integrate your Google My Business reviews and Facebook reviews. This best-in-class app also helps you track your average rating, peak performance months, and best review sources.

Another interesting feature of the app that you should know of is ā it enables you to invite customers to leave business reviews by sending them SMS messages and emails with a single press of a button. You can also share your public review page with contacts and customers around the internet to get more reviews and useful feedback.

Further Reading:How DashClicks' Reputation Management Software Can Help You Protect Your Brand Online.

Wrapping It Up

The alignment of both local SEO tactics and online reputation management practices helps contribute to creating an excellent online presence for your business. Also, when your site starts to rank higher in search, it becomes even more crucial that it functions intuitively and looks fantastic to anyone who finds it online. Needless to say, ORM and local SEO should always happen simultaneously in order for you to see the best results for your business.