SEO is an important component to shape and regulate your brand portrayal in the SERPs.

All forms of marketing play a part in good brand management.

Using the same tone of voice throughout your ads and emails and choosing the same photo assets for your website as your billboards contribute to the picture painted when a customer considers your product or service. Sometimes, however, your brand might be in receipt of some negative press or reviews that can alter the way it is seen.

If a potential customer wants to know if your business is reputable, they will likely search for you online.

Visiting your website isn’t enough; they’ll want more objective feedback.

So, online reputation management,  is critical.

It is the process of shaping and controlling the history around your brand online.

SEO is an important step to consider in that process. Reputation management in SEO is all about ensuring that wherever a searcher encounters their brand in the search engine results pages (SERPs), they take away a positive message about it.

This often means ensuring that the brand influences the front page of the SERPs and the articles pushed in Discover feeds, as well as the News results.

Online reputation management (ORM) is critical for SEO because, no matter how good a website ranks, if the perception of its brand is negative, it will struggle to get clicks.

SEO professionals must stay aware of how the brand they are working on is perceived elsewhere on the internet. .If there is negative sentiment about the brand, it is unlikely that a good call to action in a page title will be enough to get a click.

It’s also important to realize that organic traffic that doesn’t convert will not be very valuable.

A brand’s online reputation can have a huge impact on conversions.

Research into a brand, product, or service often begins online with a search.

Your website will likely only be one or two of the results brought up when someone searches for your brand.

All those other search results will potentially say something about your brand that might not be as favorable as you would like.

Unfavorable comparisons between your product and a competitor can be made by an objective third party.

Bad press can be high-ranking.

If you aren’t actively monitoring what appears at the top of the search results for your branded keywords then you could be missing out on the opportunity to spot potential reputation issues.

Once a news story starts circulating about your company, or even incorrect information is added to a third-party website, it can be hard to repair the damage to your brand.

It is important that your brand’s message is what’s seen on the first page of the SERPs. Proactively working on your online reputation management can put you in a strong position to correct misinformation or outrank unfavorable content.