4 SEO strategies to build your online reputation
Creating your own website is just the beginning of your attempt to engage with audiences. You need to keep working towards enhancing your reputation to ensure that others will want to learn more about and visit your website. This is where off-page SEO comes into the picture. Off-page SEO can be simply defined as the act of enhancing your brand's online and offline footprint through the use of content and links to create an optimal experience for search engine crawl bots. Off-page SEO typically leads to an increase in search rankings, positive brand mentions, traffic to your site, as well as conversions.
Image: Shutterstock
Here's a list of the four key areas worth focusing on for off-page SEO.
Provide excellent customer experience
If you want your prospects to remember your brand name, you have to provide them with excellent customer service. Poor customer service has the ability to make a brand's SEO and PR team's reputation management efforts a nightmare. Any individual who interacts with your brand's spokespeople, either online or offline, should feel like the interaction couldn't have been more positive. Encourage your employees to wear a smile and empathetically interact with anyone they meet so that people leave feeling good about your brand.
Ensure your product/service is the best in the market
As an entrepreneur, your first and foremost priority should be to create the best product or service you can. When your product or service begins to be recognised as the best in its class, your SEO team's job will become much, much easier. This is because, both online and offline, people will be saying great things about your brand, which will lead more people to visit your website. Great reviews will also result in positive feedback on third-party sites as well as increased sales of your product.
Read also: SEO trends which will help you stay ahead in 2017
Develop relationships with social media influencers
Every brand should focus on creating and nurturing lasting relationships with influencers as it is one of the biggest benefits of social media for off-page SEO. Influencers have a fan following, a huge reach, and connections with several high-ranking websites. Even if Google doesn't use social signals to determine rankings, the interplay of influencers and the sites they like and visit makes being on their radar a good thing.
Ensure your brand is active on social media
It goes without saying that social media should be a crucial component of your off-page SEO strategy. However, making an account and forgetting about it will do your brand no good. Make sure someone is constantly monitoring it and responding to comments in a timely fashion. While you're at it, ensure that your responses aren't robotic as people expect genuine interaction online. Unresponsiveness on social media will negatively impact more than your SEO and therefore brands should be proactive about it.
Not caring about off-page SEO is like owning a great house but having no visitors because the word on the street is that it smells like trash. This is why your brand should do off-page SEO to ensure that the work done onsite does not go waste.