Reputation Management SEO: the Art of controlling the SERPs

They say you can’t make a second first impression. Like it or not, but potential customers form their first impression of your product or service simply by looking at Google SERPs. So, when they google your brand name, you would probably want them to see nothing but positive vibes and rave reviews about your company. So, trying to sustain an impeccable brand’s reputation is basically the very aim of reputation management SEO.

But then, the BIG question arises: “How the heck do I do this?” So, in this article, I’ m going to share with you some advice on how to control search results through reputation management SEO tactics or, in other words, how to become the Lord of the SERPs 😃.

Sadly enough, the search results’ content can hurt the whole bunch of things like: your conversion rate, brand reputation, customers’ expectations and satisfaction, etc.

So, let’s get straight to the meat of the question and specify what it is in Google’s search result pages that we can actually DO change and work on:

• Ranking pages and their order
• SERP features
• Content of ranking pages
• New pages

Ranking pages and their order

1. Reasons why your site might not be ranking #1

Naturally, when someone is searching for your company in Google, you are expecting them to see your website proudly waving from the first place of the podium, aren’t you? However, sometimes it might happen that the position one is brazenly taken by someone else, or your site is nowhere to be seen at all. Well, there is a number of common reasons for that.

Of course, the very first thing to check is whether your site is blocked from indexing or not. Luckily, with the generous help of WebSite Auditor it’s as easy as pie.

1. Create a new project, enter your website’s URL, and hit Finish.

2. Once the tool is done with scanning your website, switch to the Site Audit submodule, which is right under Site Structure.
3. Now, have a look at the Resources restricted from indexing tab to see your current robots instructions. Make sure that none of the needed pages are blocked from indexing, and you’re done.

I guess it goes without saying that to conquer Google’s top, your page’s content needs to be optimized for a certain query. In this light, the second reason of your website’s poor rankings is not enough unique content or not enough unique value provided by that content. What is more, it needs to contain a good amount of key phrases.

So, let’s get back to our old trusty WebSite Auditor to check how well your page’s content is optimized.

1. In the Content Analysis module, move to Page Audit. Now press  and pick the page you’re willing to audit, or you may start typing your page’s URL in the Pages field.
2. After that, specify keywords that you want your page to be optimized for and click Finish.
3. Once the tool has scanned your page, go through the parameters under the Content optimization column to spot those that need fixing. I would strongly suggest resolving issues marked with Error statuses  in the first place.

Whether you like it or not, backlinks still firmly stay one of the most significant ranking factors. And this is hardly going to change any time soon. Because of that, lacking a good amount of both internal and external links is the third possible reason of your site not ranking in the first position.

So, let’s now move a bit from the website audit to the backlink one. Thanks to SEO SpyGlass, it will only take up about 10 minutes of your time. To get you some idea of how many links you’re supposed to have, we’re going to compare your backlink profile to the ones of your nearest competitors. By the way, a very cool thing about the tool is that you can create a project for one certain page rather than for a whole domain.

1. So, create a new project and enter your page’s URL first.
2. After that, move to the Domain Comparison module. Then, in the Summary section, hit the  button and enter competitors’ URLs to be compared.

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