[Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two-part series. Part I appeared in the December 2019 edition of PRNEWS.]
It’s hard to predict what Google will do tomorrow, let alone in 1,095 days. As we noted in part I of this series, mastering Google is the best way to manage your reputation online. And I’m not talking about classic SEO, though that ranking undoubtedly has an impact on your reputation. These two articles deal with classic reputation management, which has nothing to do with SEO.
The search engine results pages (SERPs) are where most stakeholders will encounter your brand. We covered four ways to manage your reputation for free on Google in the first article. The y were: Google My Business, the Knowledge Panel, branded search and ‘People also ask.’
Below are numbers five to nine in our rundown of the nine ways to manage your reputation on Google, for free.
Image Search
Have you checked to see which images are returned when someone searches for your brand? In Q2 2019, Google images made up 20 percent of organic searches. That’s a lot of visibility.
What appears on Google when someone types your brand name and clicks ‘Images’? Do they see images? Logos? (Hopefully yours, not those of your competitors.) Are the images from your site? Perhaps they are images of your social profiles?
Maybe they are images of staff? If so, are they current staff or disgruntled ex-employees? Is that your CTO in a compromising position? Pictures associated with an environmental disaster your company was responsible for months ago?
It follows a logical pattern. The more publicity your company attracts, the more related images there’ll be.
Logo Mark-up
Which company logo is returned in Google image search when someone types in your brand? You can instruct Google what you’d like returned using structured data.
If you don’t take this relatively simple step, and the wrong logo is returned, then don’t be surprised when it starts popping up in content related to your brand. Besides being an embarrassing situation for you, it will be a confusing experience for stakeholders.
Other structured data
Continuing down the structured data route, it’s important to understand you can make it crystal clear to Google what your company name, address and phone number are. In addition, you can choose which social profiles it should associate with your brand, the jobs you have available…the list goes on. Click here on Google’s structured data development page (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/article), for a comprehensive overview of things that are worth marking up with structured data, and its impact on the SERPs.
Featured Snippets
These are the prominent results that appear at the top of the SERPs for certain queries. As they are so prominently placed (known as ‘position #0’ in the SEO industry) they can have a massive influence on your brand’s reputation. If you’re tracking keywords related to your brand, then look at those that return featured snippets. Do you own the snippets relevant to you? If not, then think about how to restructure your content appropriately, so it appears instead.
Meta Data
Know those old-school, ten, blue underlined links that pop up in the SERPs when you search for something? They can all be edited easily.
True story: a disgruntled ex-airline employee hacked the carrier’s homepage meta data. The airline didn’t notice for six months, but saw organic conversions dropped off the cliff. It turns out the site was no longer selling flights, but was offering, well, a product an airline would never sell. And this was what customers saw as soon as they conducted a branded search.
Even if you haven’t suffered the wrath of an ex-employee, there are plenty of instances where a site gets hacked and the perps create thousands of pages advertising little blue pills etc.
Bonus Tip: as of October 2019 Google enabled companies to limit how much of their content is returned in ‘snippets’ in the search results by using a new set of robot meta tags (instructions for Googlebot and the like). A snippet might be an instant answer, for example, where a paragraph of text is pulled from a web page and returned directly in the search results. There’s a way to prevent Google from doing this (use the “nosnippet” tag).
Now, though, you can specify: a maximum text-length, in characters, of a snippet for your page; a maximum duration in seconds of an animated video preview; a maximum size of image preview to be shown; and which parts of a page are eligible to be shown as a snippet. There are more options to help websites preview their content on Google Search: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/more-controls-on-search.html
Do You Need to Protect SERPs?
If you lack a dedicated resource managing your Google profile, you should rectify the situation. And I’m not talking about SEO, I’m talking about search engine reputation management. I’ve yet to encounter a chief Google officer or chief SEO officer with a team dedicated to managing SERP reputation. Yet the SERPs are where the majority of customers and stakeholders will first encounter your brand.
Are you happy to let Google’s algorithms scrape together the information they think is right, or do you want to take control of your company’s online reputation?
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