Combining SEO And Reputation Management To Get Your Online Store Noticed

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Google updates and changes that affected websites empowered by gray hat optimization tactics. A lot of people jumped to the conclusion that search engine optimization is now ‘dead’.

I’ll try and prove the opposite by showcasing some of the white hat organic SEO practices that helped me with my own monogram necklace website and other popular jewelry platforms.

By creating related content, engaging in social media activity and using reputation management as a way to build a healthy online presence, you will be able to get better organic results for your online store.

Local Presence for Local Businesses

If you run a local business with a physical store location, you can push your store website all the way up the organic search results for relevant location searches.

Google Places, Yahoo local and Bing Local all provide services which allow you to claim and optimize your business listing.

Claiming your listing, updating store information, relevant categories and adding a few lines of text about your business, can help you to get featured on one of the local results, which appear at the top of the search.

Since Google now combines its Google + service with the Local listing service, managing an active + page and adding relevant content and imagery on a regular basis can really boost your actual results.

Reputation Management

If you are running a healthy service which provides great customer service, you can boost your online presence with correct reputation managements.

Let’s start with Google reviews. Many business owners fail to realize their importance and how easy it is to accumulate them.

Any customer with a Gmail account can easily leave a Google review about your business. Those reviews are featured as a five star rating system, next to your business name in search results.

SEO photo

Getting more reviews is easy; all you need to do is ask. Send a friendly follow up email to your customers, ask them if they were satisfied with the transaction and if you can do anything else for them. In the same email, include a link and a request for them to share their experience of your service and write a Google review.

You can add links to other review services such as Yelp and Epinions for people who do not have a gmail account.

Social Media Presence

Active social media accounts will help you to create positive fingerprints for search engines to indicate interest in your business.

Success with social media depends on engagement and interaction. Google +, Facebook and Twitter accounts will not help your business, unless you get a fair amount of comments, likes, shares, tweets and so on.

In order to do that, you need to update your accounts on a daily basis with appealing content, visuals, specials and discounts, polls and giveaways.

Gaining social media followers may take time and patience, but it will be well worth it.

In order to manage multiple accounts, you can use professional services such as Hootsuite which allow you to post, manage and update several different social accounts at the same time.

By Doron Heifetz

Doron Heifetz owns several popular jewelry websites and is an SEO expert that specializes in promoting small businesses by using e-commerce and content based optimization.

Photo by Sean MacEntee

Photo by Sean MacEntee

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