How Online Reputation Management and SEO Differ

Online reputation management, as the name may seem to suggest, is the process of managing your reputation online. While that might sound pretty simple, the confusion for many people is in understanding how this differs from online marketing techniques such as SEO or social media marketing. Both are about getting the word out about your business and ensuring that you are in charge of creating your own reputation online. This article will answer the following questions. What is the difference between online reputation management and SEO? How is online reputation management different from offline reputation management?

Processes Are Different

What doesn’t make life any easier, is the fact that the processes involved in online reputation management (or ORM) aren’t all that different from SEO in some cases. In fact, SEO itself is one aspect of ORM. Say for instance that the first thing to come up is a bad review when a customer searches for a service your business provides, then you may be able to use certain SEO techniques to get the positive review to show above the negative one.

You might even just aim to raise your own website above the review site for your specific brand name. In this case, SEO and ORM are processes that are linked to each other. In some cases, the only difference between SEO and ORM is the objective – which in this case is to get more people to find your business versus getting more people to think highly of your business. Ideally, you would use both synergistically. On top of SEO though, there are also many other processes involved in ORM that are entirely unique. For instance, ORM might also involve responding to negative reviews. Or it might be writing press releases and encouraging professional reviews of your products or services. Either way, you will be using strategies that are distinct from SEO in the interest of raising your profile online.

There are many more unique tasks that are involved in reputation management.

Online Reputation Management vs Offline Reputation Management

As for how ORM differs from ‘regular’ reputation management, the difference is that you will be focusing on the web. These days many of us will learn about a company for the first time when looking for their services or products online and reviews are one of the main drivers potential customers use to choose who to do business with. Online reputation management is thus highly important then – but it’s also distinct in terms of the processes which simply don’t exist ‘offline’.