Today, with over 800 million Internet users, India – one of the world’s fastest growing digital markets – is witnessing a phenomenal boom in the nation’s digital marketing industry, which is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 30.2% over the upcoming decade. As demand for digital/online services rises in our country exponentially, digital marketing and allied services’ providers have, of late, started relying heavily on two distinct but complementary strategies for online success of modern brands/businesses– Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Online Reputation Management (ORM).
If you’re a digital marketing enthusiast, or a business owner actively seeking to make your brand shine and make waves online, chances are: you’ve already heard about SEO and ORM being spoken about together in the same breath. But have you ever wondered why? In this article, we will delve deeper and find out.
SEO and ORM: Understanding their Significance and Objectives
SEO is a well-known practice to rank a brand’s website prominently on search engine results (SERPs); it involves optimizing webpages, content and technical aspects of any website to make them search engine-friendly. The main purpose of SEO is usually to improve online visibility – achieved by making one’s site appear on top of Google/Bing/Yahoo search results. With great SEO, your brand’s content reaches to people when they look for related keywords and phrases, which aids in increasing organic (unpaid) traffic.
On the other hand, ORM is all about taking charge of your narrative and shaping your brand perception in the online universe – it encompasses monitoring, influencing and managing how a brand is perceived across various digital touchpoints. ORM is a proactive, long-term process – it assists in keeping a brand’s image clean and safe, earning trust and mitigating reputational threats over time. To those ends, ORM utilizes a plethora of strategies to enhance and promote positive narratives while simultaneously mitigating or erasing negative feedback or information on the Internet that can potentially damage a brand’s digital reputation.
SEO often forms a pivotal component of a well-rounded ORM strategy. In fact, today SEO is considered one of the most effective techniques being used as a part of contemporary businesses’ reputation management toolkit, along with multiple other tools/techniques such as public relations, content management, etc.
“We are not the same” – Differentiating SEO and ORM
Besides serving different objectives, SEO and ORM often have different success metrics and catering to separate business goals. ORM focuses on several sites, including those not controlled or owned by a brand; however, the same brand’s SEO would primarily focus on one main (official business) website. Unlike the ORM domain, SEO experts hardly ever attempt to clean online content or engage in negotiations with third-parties. Also, while SEO often focuses on product/service/industry-oriented search keywords, ORM majorly focuses on branded searches such as company name. Broadly speaking, SEO as a practice is more technical and objective, and ORM is a more subjective one.
Interestingly, SEO and ORM are capable of creating maximum impact at different stages of the buying process. For SEO, it’s in the early ‘awareness’ stage where it matters the most – by putting out useful content in front of a prospective buyer at the right time (when they’re searching about it online), SEO fosters brand awareness and/or solution awareness. On the other hand, ORM emphasizes on later stages of the buyer journey – the ‘consideration’ and ‘decision’ stage, wherein building credibility is paramount in convincing them to make a purchase decision. Research has shown that today’s businesses are at risk of losing out up to 70% of potential customers to negative reviews – this is exactly where proactive ORM steps in, highlighting the positives about a brand or product/service in question, reinstating trust, and enhancing revenues in the long run.
Combining SEO with ORM: The Way Forward
Given their complementary role in bolstering each other’s potential and outcomes, SEO and ORM should go hand-in-hand towards growing your brand – here are a few ways how:
– The positive content created for improving a brand’s online reputation often gets indexed by search engines and thus contributes in improving SEO
– Receiving a positive brand mention on an authority site via ORM efforts reflects as a vote of confidence for Google rankings
– When many people leave positive reviews for a small business, it not only helps them to move up in the local search results but also plays a key role in easing and elevating their ORM game
SEO and ORM are essentially two sides of the same coin – SEO helps people in finding out about the brand, and ORM helps them be happy and satisfied with what the brand’s offerings and eventually become loyal customers. Together, they build a strong online profile; hence today’s brands must stay on top of both.
In today’s digitally-driven age, new-age brands can no longer afford to make an ‘either/or’ choice between SEO and ORM – they need to invest in both, as both these strategies are equally important. By partnering with an expert service provider, embracing the integration of SEO and ORM efforts can become seamless for brands, thereby enhancing their online visibility, building trust with target audiences, and most importantly, achieving greater success within and across the digital landscape.
