Many consider the main strength of SEO to be the ability to boost your organic traffic. Although that is true, Search Engine Optimization can give excellent results on other fronts and help you stay ahead of the competition. Seeing as your brand is your company’s most valuable asset, let’s look at how SEO can improve your brand’s reputation.
SEO is a Marketing Tool
If you look up what SEO is, you can easily find many different explanations and definitions. We’re not saying that all of them are wrong, but many are missing the point. Search Engine Optimization includes web design and content creation guidelines and principles intended to help your site achieve a better rank on search engine results pages. By ranking highly on SERPs, you are improving your organic (unpaid traffic coming directly from search engines). Many business owners and web developers get so caught up in traffic metrics they sometimes miss the forest from the trees.
Adopting an SEO mindset will boost your online visibility and let more people find your company. You can, therefore, treat it as a marketing tool. However, just being visible won’t get you far if users don’t care about what you have to say. As most online marketers know, managing your brand’s reputation is a critical element in winning over customers’ trust and loyalty. Since Live Web Media provides SEO services, we always work with clients to help them achieve their business goals, which often includes creating a stronger brand impression. Here’s how we make that happen.
5 Ways SEO Can Improve Your Brand's Reputation
1. Improve the User Experience
We typically start our SEO journey by improving our client’s website. If you want to launch an SEO campaign, your best course of action would be to do a complete website audit or develop your website from scratch. Having a professional and easy-to-use website is paramount for improving the UX. On the other hand, if users arrive at your site and it isn’t properly optimized, takes forever to load, and just looks unprofessional – they probably won’t stick around.
Regardless of how large your marketing budget is, all of those online ads inevitably lead users back to your website. When you are on your home turf, you can control the narrative, generate leads, and convert visitors into paying customers. If users who arrive at your site have a positive experience, they will be more receptive to your value proposition and have a higher opinion of your brand.
2. Have a Strong CTA
Of course, it is up to you to use that initial excitement to nudge visitors into performing your desired action. This is another situation where SEO can improve your brand’s reputation. We previously mentioned the importance of having a clear value proposition. Most business owners mistakenly believe that they should use the CTA button to push visitors into making a purchase. Unfortunately, your site visitors will see right through this tactic, and your rate of conversions will suffer.
Try offering your visitors something that will genuinely interest them. This can include subscribing to your newsletter, where you will provide them with additional information and helpful tips. Users are much more likely to click on your CTA if it accurately reflects what your brand stands for. Therefore, you should reassess your value proposition, use positive language and avoid being too pushy. SEO can help you improve the copy you use for your CTA, and you can even test different versions to see which one is better at engaging users.
3. Use SEO Guidelines to Create Quality Content
Content marketing has become the new trend, and an increasing number of marketing experts are relying on inbound marketing. If you haven’t heard about inbound marketing before, the core concept is that instead of searching for prospects, you can draw them in by offering them what they need. Content is one of the best ways to deliver free value to users and give them a reason to visit your website.
If you structure your content in a way that solves the common problems your users are facing, you will gradually build up a following. Once users realize how informative and helpful your content is, their trust in your brand will improve. Additionally, they will be more likely to recommend you to others; and word-of-mouth marketing through brand ambassadors is something money can’t buy.
4. Monitor How Users Interact with Your Website
The customer journey isn’t always a straight line. Visitors may come to your website, look around and explore for a bit and then leave without making a purchase or subscribing. Most business owners will struggle to explain why this happened and will just accept mediocre bounce rates. The best way to identify potential choke points is to monitor the behavior of your website visitors. This is an often-overlooked part of the customer journey, but through careful observation, you can pinpoint which areas of your website need improvement. You can use CRM software to improve your website’s SEO and get valuable feedback from your visitors.
5. Respond to Reviews
One of the essential ways to manage your brand reputation is how you handle reviews, especially negative ones. Realistically, customers will ignore your brand if you have overwhelmingly negative reviews. It’s normal to get a negative review or criticism through your comments from time to time; however, the way you handle negativity can set your brand apart from your competition. Show your users that you are listening to what they are saying and that you are willing to make improvements based on their feedback. Collecting customer reviews is a necessary step to get the feedback you need. Thankfully, there are several easy ways to accomplish this. Google recommends giving your users a direct URL for reviews on your Business Profile. You can incentivize customers to leave reviews by simply asking politely.
In Conclusion
As you can see, SEO can improve your brand’s reputation and help you connect to your user base. Simply stick to the advice we have outlined here, and you are bound to see a boost in customer confidence and brand loyalty. If you are struggling to implement these improvements yourself, feel free to reach out to us at Live Web Media. We would be happy to solve all your business problems the digital way.