How to Build A Good Reputation for Your Business That Will Entice Viewers and Create A Positive Brand Image

Many businesses don’t think much about online branding and reputation unless they really have to. That’s usually when something goes wrong and customers are filing in negative reviews and comments about their services or products.

How to Build A Good Reputation

Your online marketing team is most likely late to the game because now your negative review is up on the internet for the world to see and if there’s anything you should remember about the world wide web is that what goes up here, stays here.

Understanding Online Reputation and Brand Imaging

Positive brand and online reputation management are two things that need to be worked on long before something goes wrong. Now, it’s unrealistic to assume that you’ll never get a negative review or bad press ever. However, your task should always be to ensure that the positive feedback significantly outweighs any bit of negativity. This is important because surveys show that 97 percent of online customers always read reviews before choosing to buy a product or service. That’s quite a big number to pass up on.

If you’re running a small business and want to figure out better branding techniques, here are some tips from us!

1. Create Your Own Website

Do you have a website and domain address for your business? There’s no online reputation management without a solid online presence. If you’re still thinking about the name for your new website, we suggest you put in your business’s name exactly how it is.

If you’re a one-man-show, you can put in your own name. In terms of SEO marketing, websites that have a person or business’s name in them tend to rank higher than vague, edgy named websites. If you want to own more domains, make sure they’re related to each other and the essence of your business i.e. go for sub-domains.

Some websites have separate domains for their social networking feeds, online radio channels, video sharing platforms, contact pages etc. Separate domains will always be harder to rank on search engines, even when they come from the same name.

2. Blog Away

The blog page listed on your business website doesn’t have to be the only one you use. You can mix your personal and main blog easily. Just tell Google a blog is a related to you or your business and have the blog page show up alongside your business homepage! You can also connect your blog to your social media so it pops up under the same search results.

Another thing to keep in mind when you’re linking your blog pages is to insert relevant keywords into the title or URL. For example, you can write “your-business-CEO-your-name.com” and add something in the bio section that you think potential site visitors would be looking for. If you sell used cars for example, mention that! Feel free to let your creativity flow and link your blogs to your personal social media profiles with the help of Google authorship.

The point is that you want more people to get an insider look at your company. Blogs serve as a great opportunity to reach out to a broad group of consumers and get those SEO rankings going too!

3. Be Active on Social Media

Rule number one of social media activity is to not create an account on a medium that you’re not going to use. This is super important in terms of reputation management. It reflects very badly on your brand image when your social media accounts don’t have a complete profile, missing images, dated posts and no new updates.

You don’t have to be on every social medium out there. However, for the ones that you do use, make sure you’re regular on them. Try building strong networks with your audience and other local industries that could link back to you.

If you’re not sure if you can give time to all your social media sites equally and regularly, you can always get in touch with us for professional social media management services. We can help you come up with marketing strategies and content for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and more.

For each platform, just remember the following pointers:

  • Your profile name should match your personal or business name. This will help determine the category of your SEO rank.
  • Always upload a profile picture with your business’s name.
  • Three strong social media profiles will fare better than ten weak ones. Post content regularly!

Active on Social Media

4. Create E-Business Cards

Back in the day, business cards were a popular way to manage brand reputation and draw networks with potential partners and clients. You can do the same online. There are plenty of websites that let you create customized pages that show a brief bio and have room for links to your blogs and other social media. Whatever website you choose to create your online business cards on, make sure you’re using your name or your business’s name so it shows up under relevant searches.

5. Claim Your Local Profiles

If your business is local, make sure you claim all those directory listings in your name. Create them if you’re not yet listed in local directories. From Google My Business to Yahoo Local, there are plenty of places to get your business listed. This should also help you with some advertising because an embedded local business map can make it easier for customers to find you online.

6. Write as a Guest

Guest posts are helpful for reputation management because they allow you to reach out to a broader market segment than your target one. Don’t go looking for one time opportunities where your guest post barely features you on the byline. It’s better to be guest writing for websites that let you have your own author profile or custom bio page.

7. Always Say Yes to Interviews

If you ever get the opportunity to do an interview, even if it’s a transcription posted on a blog—say yes! The thing with interviews is that they rarely go un-credited. Your personal name as well as your business name is going to be in the forefront; preferably, in the title, which will help the entire content rank well. Not to mention, the number of people watching or reading your interview is going to improve your brand visibility, which is always great for a positive image.

8. Put Up Loads of Images of Yourself

Loads of Images of Yourself

When you’re creating your social media profile or putting out guest posts, you’re already uploading lots of images of yourself and your business. This is a useful strategy to push down any negative reviews or search results associated with your name. When someone types your name into the search bar what they’re going to get is lots of image results. This includes all those blog posts, bios, social networks and profiles where you have uploaded your image.

However, this trick will only work if all your images have been uploaded with the same name—not with something vague and descriptive. If you’re going to embed your picture on a website then make sure you optimize the code to SEO standards. The embedded link will enable your picture to pop up immediately for image searches and will lead your visitors to your webpage—a nice trick to generate some traffic.

9. Make Lots of Videos

Want to boost your SEO rankings? Videos are a surefire way to do it. If you want to improve rankings specifically for Google, your best bet is to upload your videos on YouTube since they’re owned by Google and are definitely going to show up in the search results. However, there are other options like Vimeo too. You can upload your work there too. In any case, the interesting thing about videos for brand and reputation management is that it’s less about the content of the video and more about how it’s indexed. The title of the video is especially important. Always include your name and your business name in the title and description sections. Also, keep the title short.

10. Write Press Releases

Press releases are a tried and tested method to get your name out there when all else fails. This is a time sensitive reputation management option and works best when it comes to handling a crisis of sorts. It’s also a formal way to respond to a query or accusation when posting on social media doesn’t seem appropriate. In any case, press releases are a great way to introduce a new product or service and keep your clients updated with business happenings. You can get professional press releases prepared with Search Berg at a fraction of the market rate.

11. Integrate All Your Links

A top SEO ranking makes a major positive contribution to your brand image. Studies show that over 80 percent of people will click on the first brand listed on the search results. So in a way, brand familiarity builds alongside SEO ranks. To get that rank however, you’ll have to ensure all your links are interconnected. Back-links are king! Here are some tips on how to effectively back-link:

  • Mention your blog and website on all your social media profiles.
  • Add links to all your guest posts, interviews and podcasts so people can be led to your homepage.
  • Embed videos to your blogs and then share them onto your social media platforms.
  • Link your sub-domains and blog posts to your homepage.
  • Proudly mention all your notable achievements on your social media and directory listings.

Want Professional Reputation Management Services?

Positive brand marketing and online reputation management isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It takes serious dedication and SEO marketing knowledge to get quick results. Perhaps then seeking professional help is the ideal solution for small businesses.

Search Berg offers online reputation management services to all kinds of businesses and is a specialist in the White Hat SEO marketing department. Get in touch with the leading content development firm in the United States today!

20 Small Business SEO Tips for Entrepreneurs and Small Business Owners

small business

Getting your small business or startup in the public limelight would have been considered an arduous challenge a decade ago. Today’s entrepreneurs have the advantageous possibility of advertising their business on search engines—and it’s called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is a crucial element of any digital marketing for any small business striving to succeed. Most people hop on Google whenever they’re searching for a service or product. If your website is ranking on the first pages for these targeted search terms, then your chances of improving web traffic, enhancing customer interaction and securing a conversion increases tremendously.

In today’s post, we’re going to be talking about Small Business SEO tips that collectively play a pivotal role in bringing about these conversion. As one of the leading Small Business SEO agency in the United States, we have put together 20 tips that you must incorporate in your SEO campaign.

1. Make sure your web copies are written for humans

Search engines are much smarter than you think. They can tell apart an organic sentence, link, and paragraph from forced ones. Don’t make the mistake of stuffing keywords on your website or keep talking about the same topics. It’s never worked before, and it won’t work for you any time soon.

2. Narrow down your keyword list to use for your entire website

There’s no SEO without keywords. However, you don’t guarantee any visibility for search terms if you’ve got pretty much every keyword stuffed into the mix. The aim is to develop ownership for a particular set of keywords, so if anyone looks it up, you’re the first result they get.

3. Use Keyword Rich URLs for Landing Pages

If you want to know how to make domain names that are rich in the right keywords you can simply Google the results for your choice of keywords. For example, if your business sells men’s shoes then your folder and domain pages should clearly mention these two terms something like this:  http://www.yourdomainname.com/mens-shoes/mens-shoes-foldername.html.

4. Don’t Go Overboard with Keyword Density

As a rule of thumb, the total number of keywords and related phrases that you have on your page should be somewhere between 3 and 6 percent of the total written content and links on a page. This rule goes beyond your homepage. Indeed, from an SEO point of view, it makes up nearly half of your search criterion but it’s important to have the rest of your pages contribute to the rankings too. For this, you’ll need to ensure that there’s a certain theme that’s being followed across all pages because the more of them are ranked, the greater are your website’s chances of climbing up the SEO ranks.

5. Titles are Entitled To Be Different For Each Page

Switch up your keyword phrases and mix up their combinations in a way that the first few words in your title are SEO-friendly. Also, try to keep all phrases under 70 characters.

6. Insert a Unique Meta Description For Each Page

Any time you look up a phrase on a search engine you’ll notice a small piece of text accompanying every title. That’s a Meta description. It’s like a summary of your webpage but it’s also a very convincing call to action. For example:“Buy stylish shoes for men today! We offer free shipping for all locally made shoes. For more information give us a call at 123 45.”

Try to keep the Meta description under 150 characters.

7. Don’t Forget to Style Your Keywords

Keyword styles can really change the game. You need the search engines to pick up your keywords as organically as possible. For this purpose, using bold or italic fonts and header tags are crucial. If you’re not sure how to go about this one, try some Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to match the layout and format with that of your website.

Style Your Keywords

8. Add ALT Tags Your Images

Whenever you’re naming your images, remember to insert your keywords and related phrases into the Alt tags as well. The contextual reference provided by Alt tags can really help pull your pages up the rankings.

9. Smart inter-linking is Intelligent interlinking

We’ve seen plenty of websites use internal links but very few of them do it right. Any time you have the opportunity to insert keywords to your webpages—do it! Again, specificity in links is important.

10. Create an XML Sitemap

When your internal linking game is weak, it helps to have an XML sitemap that leads Google through all the most important pages on your website. In fact, all search engines love an XML site map.

This brings us to the next point.

11. A Simple, Straightforward robots.txt File Is The Way to Go

These are files that can be considered a web crawler’s best friend. They tell search engines all the important details on what pages are allowed to be shown on their index. Now here’s a neat SEO trick; insert your XML sitemap location onto the robot TXT file so you don’t have to provide details to search engines on all URLs—now they can find it automatically!

12. Your Website Must Have external links

SEO-friendly websites are those that aren’t afraid to link other related websites. The impact is greater when you’re linking to businesses and groups that are local—not just in terms of the city or state but also in terms of being in the same industry. Also, don’t forget to use keywords with all your external links!

13. Update Your Website With New Content Frequently

Of every SEO tip that we’ve mentioned here so far, we have a feeling that you’re probably worried the most about new content. Where do you get all that new information?

Don’t worry, we’ll help you! We’ve produced over 20,000 SEO projects and are still going strong! We can help you churn out relevant content and add new pages to your site so you’re getting recommendations from others in your industry frequently.

Update Your Website With New Content Frequently

14. Make Sure You Are Getting Links from the Right People

You want to get links from all the popular websites in your industry. By popular, we mean the ones that rank on top. Make it a point to check the ranks of your chosen websites and ask them to link to you so you can link back to them. To make this effort more effective, give them a list of keywords that should go into the text. Emailing your peers can seem labor intensive but trust us; links from local industries can help your SEO ranking soar high in no time.

15. Create a Linkable Page

When you want link-backs from visitors to your website, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to do the job. Create a page with your logos and keyword-laden text links and send them to your visitors, customers and subscribers.

16. Broaden your SEO horizons

Don’t just stay cooped up in the corner of the SEO rankings with some trusty keywords and phrases. Make the online community feel your presence. You can do this by writing guest blogs for popular websites and industry leaders. You can also start your own blog and integrate with your website and social media pages. Perhaps, even submit some reviews or answer questions on chat forums and online knowledge communities. However, know when to stop because overdoing it can get you listed as a spammer.

17. Get your website listed on various directories

Online directories have been with us for a long time and because of their high reputation search engines are likely to scan them for updated links. Note that some of these directories will require you to pay a small fee.However, the advantage of hiring a local SEO service firm is that you can get access to directory lists for a fraction of the cost.

18. Cement your online presence with a little creativity

It’s tempting to chain down your content behind subscription fees and other exclusive membership programs but it helps to make a lot of your content available free of cost. Think of it this way, if you’re posting about giveaways, discount codes, contest prizes, tutorials and other freebies people are more likely to link to you and pass on the information. It’s a win-win situation for your small business!

19.  Syndicate Your Press Release Documents

Press releases are a great way to boost your outreach and become visible to an audience beyond your target market. Any time you’ve introduced a new service or have created a new product, it’s time to send out a local or national press release.

20. Get listed on Google My Business

Getting listed on Google My Business or Google Places is a heavyweight move in the world of SEO marketing.This should improve your visibility for local searches and your small business should show up in the form of a Google Map too!

Getting listed on Google My Business

Final Word

There is a science to SEO for Small Businesses and it takes times to perfect. Years in fact. At Search Berg, we have the roadmap to put businesses on the road to digital success. This is due to the tried and tested policies we have put in place in our SEO process over the last decade; most of which we have shared in today’s post with our viewers. We hope that you will find these tips and strategies useful.

Get started with SEO today and take the first and decisive step towards digital success with award-winning SEO agency, Search Berg. Do let us know what you think about the post with your comments.