When you operate a business of any kind, one of the biggest concerns is making sure your company’s name is out there and readily available for any potential customers to see. Once upon a time, this simply meant that you needed to advertise your business using resources like billboards or television commercials.
However, as time has evolved, so too has the way consumers obtain information about potential products and services. Nowadays, virtually everything and anything someone might want can be found by tapping away on a keyboard to enter a question into Google’s search bar.
With Google becoming one of the main sources of information for your potential customers, there is nothing more disheartening than realizing that your business is buried under your competitors. Especially since most people who use Google do not bother to look past the first page of results before clicking on a potential company’s link, and your reputation could quickly plummet into obscurity.
Keeping ahead has become a game of finding ways to help your company stand out amongst the ocean of results Google can pull up for a single user. With this article, we hope to provide some guidance on how you can take advantage of Google’s results parameters to ensure that your company reaches the top results list.
#1: Make Use of Keywords
The algorithm Google uses to present results ties directly into the search terms put in by the searcher. Your reputation is directly tied to the number of people aware your company exists, and being buried in search results can hurt that. This has made advertisement efforts a far more tactical process to ensure that your company is listed higher.
Google analyzes the terms entered in the search bar and scans the web for any pages, posts, or videos that have those terms somewhere in them. However, it also looks for related terms to pull up supplementary results. Taking advantage of these keywords is part of search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the practice of lacing your website with keywords relevant to your industry to have a higher chance of being closer to the top of the list of search results.
Social media is one of the most readily available tools for companies to take advantage of in the modern era. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others offer an opportunity to communicate with potential clients and enhance the odds of piquing their interest. This has become all the more effective following the COVID-19 pandemic when social media presence reached an all-time high due to the lockdowns.
Through the social media platforms, you can offer comedic musings, insight into your company mission, and indirect support for customers having a hard time with your product or service. However, this also increases the odds of you being listed higher on Google’s results pages. This is because social media posts are listed in the search results relevant to an inquiry. As we stated before, the right combination of words can put you far above competitors when results pages are returned.
#3: Create a Wikipedia Page
Wikipedia is one of the most commonly used websites on the planet because it serves as a moderated information source for anything an internet browser could care to investigate. However, anyone is welcome to contribute to Wikipedia’s encyclopedia of information. This means you can author a Wikipedia page about your company and its services, relate it to other key industry components, and make it available on one of the most frequently perused websites on Earth.
Wikipedia is not always perfect, and your page will need occasional curating to keep the information up to date and purge unwelcome additions made by readers. Still, it can be an excellent way to pad Google results with your company’s name. Just remember not to violate any of Wikipedia’s many rules against self-promotion, or you’ll find your page deleted.
#4: Start a Blog
One of the best ways to get your company’s name out there is to make it a source of information about your industry. Most companies curate blogs on their company’s main website to address questions and concerns customers, both existing and potential, might have about the industry.
Are you a company that offers homeopathic health supplements? Make a blog post about the conditions your products are used for or about the ingredients within. Do you specialize in manufacturing? Offer insight into customers’ concerns about the quality of materials used in products similar to what you manufacture or a guide on how to tell a quality product from a shoddy one.
Blogs allow you to use keyword optimization while also spreading information about how your company can benefit the customers in this regard so you can cultivate a reputation as a leader in the industry.
#5: Guest Blog on Other Sites
In a similar vein to starting a blog on your company’s domain, seeking out opportunities to post on a host site is an immensely useful tool. It enables you to spread knowledge, reinforce your company’s reputation as an accepted authority in the industry, and boost the odds of being discovered.
Posting on a host site turns their customers and readers into an automatic audience for what you have to say and potential customers for what you have to offer. Plus, when they pop up in a Google result list, you pop up with them by combining keywords with the host’s reputation. Guest blogging is a little more challenging since you need to be approved by the host’s standards. However, once you have successfully posted on another site, you have proven your authority on the subject matter to another professional group. This definitely serves as a helpful boon to your overall reputation.
#6: Consider Making a YouTube Channel
While this is a little more involved than some of the other options we have listed, a YouTube channel serves as a two-pronged assault on your relevance. Firstly, it enables you to demonstrate your company’s products and their relevance to the industry with video evidence. This makes it easier for more visual consumers to get a feel for what your company can do for them while also giving your company a better reputation for being in tune with modern media and practices.
Secondly, YouTube is directly linked to Google, so having a company YouTube channel with videos that use SEO for the titles will double up your odds of being noticed in search results. Relevant YouTube videos to a search will be given a preview pane on the results page.
#7: Create an IMDb Page
This avenue is a little more niche to specific industries. IMDb is a valuable website if your company is based in entertainment like movies, television, video games, or other visual or audio-based content. It allows you to cultivate a page dedicated to the content your company puts out with details, trivia, production information, and cast lists that might interest your audiences.
IMDb pages are also some of the earliest scanned pages that Google puts on the list of results when certain media pieces are researched. Therefore, possessing an IMDb page for your productions will make it easier for Google to pull them up in its results and enable you to reinforce your reputation by providing direct access to your other works.
Other industries have similar niche information hubs you can use as well.
#8: Participate in Interviews
While it might seem a little antiquated to some, interviews are still extremely important to garnering notoriety among potential customers, competitors, and experts in the industry. It allows you to answer questions that might be asked about your company, your services, your products, and your history that customers want to know.
This serves to enhance your reputation as an open company willing to answer any questions posed. However, these interviews are also often heavily featured in Google search results. Even interviews going back a few years still tend to reach the top of the list if they are relevant to the search parameters being used by the potential customer. Therefore, agreeing to be interviewed or conducting interviews with your customers can help pad the search results with your company’s name.
#9: Turn Reviews to Your Advantage
In recent years, customer reviews have been weaponized by entitled customers looking to extort services and products from companies. However, they can still be a valuable tool for getting your company’s name out there in a positive light.
Often, when someone is searching for a specific product or service, reviews are some of the first results to pop up since they are direct criticisms and praises of the quality of the services and products. However, if you can cultivate a larger ratio of good reviews to bad reviews while also promoting an atmosphere that encourages your customers to leave reviews, you will find your company gets more traffic as a result. This is because Google will prioritize results where good reviews exceed the poor ones.
This option comes with an additional step to manage your reviews page to ensure that falsified reviews are addressed quickly and efficiently. There is a lot to consider when it comes to managing the reviews left about your company, but you will find it will circle back around to making sure your company ranks closer to the top results yielded from your customers’ Google search.
#10: Engage in Public Relations Efforts
It is not uncommon for companies to take to mainstream media to address a widespread concern or question with mass results. While public relations endeavors are meant to be a little more immediate in terms of results yielded, they are committed to record just like any other major post, statement, or video you make.
This means that people who might have missed your announcement will still be able to review the footage and read about the details from other news sources well after it was issued. These articles are also factored into Google’s results list and will likely be grouped with other relevant information surrounding your company.
Take Your Reputation Into Your Hands
Reaching the top levels of Google search results can be a challenge if you are not well-versed in the particulars of the algorithm employed by search engines. A combination of keywords and a very active overall online presence serves to tip the balance of SEO in your company’s favor.
The more actively you communicate and interact with your customers, the larger your digital footprint becomes. The larger your digital footprint, the more likely your name will appear near the top of Google’s search results. This has a two-fold effect of driving up traffic for your company’s domain and bolstering your reputation as an active and communicative entity within the industry. However, maintaining this level of SEO maintenance and attending to the custodial details of these options can be time-consuming.
Fortunately, it is not something you need to do alone. We at Reputation understand that cultivating your company’s best image and presence is a fairly intensive prospect. After all, it requires time and resources to be dedicated to managing your presence on humanity’s largest communications platform.
Managing your company’s social media accounts, ensuring reviews are attended to, curating your Wikipedia page, and everything else can require funds and time you simply cannot spare. That is why we are here to help. We offer services that allow us to manage these details on your behalf so that we can maintain your company’s reputation while you enjoy the glory of reaching the upper echelons of Google’s search results. So, if you need a hand to help make your company the outgoing entity you envision, check out our website and see how we can lend you a hand.
Do you or your company have any questions or concerns regarding ranking your name in Google search results? Was there anything that we mentioned today that you would like a little more clarification on? If yes to either of those questions, please feel free to reach out and contact us at any time! The world of search engine optimization can be quite confusing without the proper knowledge, so we would be more than happy to assist you with that by answering any of your questions and clearing up any of your concerns.
