Reputation Management is a part of SEO
When it comes to ranking in search your online reputation matters quite a bit. The days of just building a landing page or two blogs a month and saying that is doing search engine optimization is not enough. That does provide content for the website. It doesn’t necessarily help you rank better if the other factors are not up to par.
Say that your Google reviews are in the toilet and you are a three star car dealership in Southern California, no matter how many cool landing pages or blog posts that are made on your behalf they are not going to show up in any type of local search. Your blog post could have the keywords for the city that you are in with beautiful pictures and a video talking about a certain model vehicle that you have but it won’t rank with a bad review score.
Google, after doing this for so long and having the top minds in the world working for them, do not have a straight black and white ranking of pages to where putting up two blog posts a month is sufficient. Again, not if your reputation is in the toilet on Google reviews. Why should Google send traffic to your website that has a three star ranking on Google my business when your competitor the next town over has 4.5 stars and is doing the same thing? It makes no logical sense that just throwing content out there is going to rank if you are not paying attention to the other factors.
In automotive marketing reputation management and search engine optimization are treated as two different things. They should be together in one package or one solution since they are closely tied together. How a dealership ranks on Google reviews and Yelp is somewhat of a reflection of how they are treating customers and their views on the business. Search engines understand this and factor in the language that they see in reviews. The search engine will score the amount of reviews that you have, how far back the reviews go, if there’s any trends as far as it being negative or positive, and then factors that in with other signals.
Blogs and landing pages are not independent of the overall domain (cardealers.com) or the business itself (Nissan car dealers of Anaheim) If online reviews are a major factor in ranking why are so many companies offering SEO and not touching on reputation management or process?
