What is e-reputation SEO?

E-reputation is the fashionable term for managing the reputation of a physical or moral entity, applied to the logic of the Web. To evaluate an e-reputation, all you have to do is search for the name of the entity involved, and assess the quality of the results, as well as the opinion you form of this entity as a result of this search. Then comes the consulting phase, in which several solutions can be proposed: PR, community management, content removal, and above all the deployment of a presence and conquest of the Google SERPs, so a digital strategy is necessary.

E-reputation and SERPs

When the SERPs presence/domination deployment option is selected, it’s at this point that mastering e-reputation SEO becomes essential to making your efforts profitable, and above all to getting valuable content to rise on credible sites. The main difference between traditional SEO and e-reputation SEO lies in this: in traditional SEO, you try to make a site rank higher on a maximum number of targeted queries, whereas in e-reputation SEO, you try to make a maximum number of sites rank higher on a targeted query.

This difference translates into different objectives, and thus into a new approach to how Google works: we need to understand how to reproduce the diversity that makes up the first page of results for the targeted query. On the name of a physical or legal entity identified as such, Google will mainly recommend :

• Personal/institutional website
• Social profiles
• Photos/videos
• Press mentions (news)
• Mentions in blogs/forums
• People/company directories
• Wikipedia article if available

How to make the most of e-reputation?

As a result, the work of an e-reputation agency is highly diversified: you need to be able to create one or more personal/institutional sites, have a good grounding in SMO to give credibility to social profiles, have a good sense of journalism to place articles, understand the logic of referencing images and videos according to Google, be at ease with the plurality of sites that make up the Web to know which are the most powerful, and be adept with the dynamics of change on Wikipedia. The work of a Web SEO requires an excellent general knowledge of the Web, as well as a certain hacker spirit to hijack the usefulness of certain sites.

In terms of tools, e-reputation SEO requires the same tools as traditional SEO, with a few exceptions: we add monitoring tools or feeds on social networks, search engines, certain Wikipedia pages, and any site or forum to be monitored. Any negative or low-quality content can become an unwanted competitor in the search engines, so it’s all about spotting this content as early as possible and trying to nip the chick in the bud. In e-reputation SEO, monitoring is above all preventive: it’s one of the levers you shouldn’t put aside!

In terms of actions, the methods used are also very similar to traditional SEO, such as linking campaigns, on-site optimization, writing original texts that carry strategic keywords, URL rewriting… You also need to ensure a minimum distribution on the main social networks with credible profiles, seek to have other users share the content distributed, which requires the distribution of original and high value-added content, all of which will aim to build a reputation in your market.

How can you improve your E-reputation?

Here are a few tips for improving your company’s e-reputation through SEO:

1. Pay attention to the keywords used in your website content. Make sure you choose keywords that are relevant to your business and match the search terms used by your target audience.
2. Create high-quality content and update your website regularly.
3. Pay attention to reviews left by customers on rating sites and social networks.
4. Use social networks to publish quality content and interact with your audience. It’s an effective way of building brand awareness and showing that your company actively cares about customers.
5. Ask an SEO expert to help you improve your website’s ranking in search results and manage your e-reputation. SEO experts who understand the latest SEO techniques and trends can help you achieve your goals.

White-hat on every floor

There’s nothing blackhat about e-reputation SEO, and these techniques are not recommended, because an e-reputation campaign is first and foremost an image-building exercise at the heart of the communication strategy of the entity involved: any slip-up can have collateral consequences for the entity’s activities, such as bad buzz. For example, avoid an overabundance of mediocre-quality texts, even if these only serve to place links and anchors to certain targeted pages. Obvious superficiality should be avoided, such as buying friends on social networks, buying links on commercial sites, creating fake profiles or sites to showcase others, creating fake comments, and above all sending links from sites penalized by Google to sites that we would also seek to penalize. In other words, skulduggery cannot be part of an e-reputation campaign, because the stakes are so high.

Image work

The other important aspect of e-reputation SEO is that it’s not ROI-driven: there’s no point in trying to measure profitability in e-reputation actions, the only thing that can be measured is whether or not the image of the entity being worked on has improved. Individuals, brands and companies suffering from a poor e-reputation know how priceless it is to restore their image in order to continue to exist and prosper.

Although e-reputation SEO is similar to classic search engine optimization in its approach to search engines, it differs greatly in its objectives and the mentality of the professionals working on it. The obsession is mainly with moving pages down the search engines, rather than moving them up (because only then is the customer happy). In this case, you need to do everything you can to get Google on your side, in order to get as many links as possible to the first page.

Working on your brand image isn’t as easy as it sounds: a reputation has to be built!