Good SEO Is Reputation Management

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

I was asked the question, “Should I spend more time on SEO or reputation management? My response: Good SEO is reputation management.

Think about what the latter is. It’s using search engines, social media, and other online marketing tools to maintain a positive image of yourself and your business. If you do it right, you’ll build reputation management into everything you do. Search engine optimization included.

You can’t keep thinking either/or when you live in a both/and world. You will eventually come across a former employee or customer who had a bad enough experience that they want to tell the world about it. If you SEO your website and blog properly then you’ll make it more difficult for them to gain a foothold with your name. But what you need to think about is breadth instead of depth.

Most Internet marketers think in terms of ranking one website for as many keywords as possible. That’s good, but it’s elementary. The most important principle to understand about reputation management is that Google – by far, the most important search engine (though Bing is gaining some small traction) – will only rank one page per website per keyword. Reputation management by its nature a name-focused, brand-focused keyword strategy.

What I mean by that is you aren’t targeting generic keywords, but your name or brand name. That’s a very specific type of SEO. And since Google will only rank one page on your site for your name or brand name then you need more web properties – or at least more pages that target your name or brand name. Therefore, you should have several social media accounts that you remain active on as well as your primary website and a few other websites. In fact, you probably want to secure your name as an URL and make a portfolio site, or what I like to call a reputation management tool.

The time for thinking of SEO as just a way to target keywords is over. It’s time to start thinking of search engine optimization as a reputation management tool.

8 Responses to “Good SEO Is Reputation Management”

Oscar Del Santo says:

October 4, 2009 at 11:52 am

I absolutely agree that SEO and online reputation management are mutually reinforcing.

And yet, it is important to point out that ORM is more than just SEO. SEO is one of the ‘holons’ (to use Ken Wilber’s term) of ORM just like an atom is a holon of a cell.
Nick Stamoulis says:

October 4, 2009 at 12:07 pm

Hi Oscar,

Thanks for stopping by and the comment, great analogy!
Samuel says:

October 4, 2009 at 6:14 pm

You made a fine point worth mentioning and worth recalling when working on keyword/link building for one’s online business.

Thanks for the reminder.
Business Management says:

October 4, 2009 at 10:43 pm

This is an mportant responsbility of a manager to build a reputation of the comapny in the market. Further more, I would like to contribute that Seo can spreaed the knowledge of your business to millions of people. I agree that the harder you try to get users to click on your ads the worse the user experience. So the solution is to provide the users with an easy back-link.
Jeff says:

October 5, 2009 at 1:03 am

This is a Great article. Reputation Management can help restore your online reputation. I couldn’t agree more! There’s so much misinformation out there that people don’t really know what is and is not. It’s refreshing to see people that know what they’re talking about. You have an Informed commentary seems to be a rare commodity these days. Keep it coming.
Nick Stamoulis says:

October 5, 2009 at 8:36 am

Hi Jeff,
Thanks for reading and the kind words!
Michelle Tee says:

October 6, 2009 at 10:23 pm

Thanks for the post… I sometimes forget this… I am constantly focused on keywords.. keywords… thanks.
Business Management says:

October 7, 2009 at 4:04 am

I would comment that Search engine results pages (SERPs) are probably the single greatest source for featuring potentially infringing or damaging video content, especially when you take into account that they index video (and content and links around the video) from practically all areas of the Web. We’re not just talking popular video sharing websites like YouTube; you can include social networks, blogs, and even image sites that have video capabilities. (For example, an account on the popular image sharing site Flickr can show 90-second video clips and are index-able and optimizable for the SERPs.)