In an industry like home care, a business’s reputation is everything. The number one reason people select a home care agency is because that agency has a stellar reputation. Something that you may not consider, however, is how your brand’s reputation can affect your SEO. A bad brand reputation can have a disastrous impact on clients’ impressions of your business. But it can also make it harder to find backlink and content partners: those who will allow you to add a link from their website to yours, or who will share your blog posts or other content on their site.
What Are Backlinks and Why are they Important for SEO?
Simply put, backlinks are links from one website to another. Google looks at a backlink as a vote of confidence for a specific page. A high number of backlinks generally improves a page’s organic search engine rankings. There are a number of ways to get backlinks. For starters, you can be featured in a guest blog on a site with content related to your brand. Commenting on other blogs is a good way to get backlinks as well. You may ask businesses in your area to add a link to your agency on their resources or helpful links page if they have one. But above all, establishing yourself as a thought leader and having expert content that others truly want to link to is the best way to build high-quality backlinks.
Obtaining backlinks can benefit your brand in several ways, including:
- Boosting your SEO efforts
- Helping you achieve a higher rank in search results
- Exposing your website to a bigger audience
- Bringing in referral traffic to your website
- Making your site look more reputable by association to other reputable sites
Partnering with other websites creates a network for your agency. It shows Google that other respected sites trust you and the content you produce. When your reputation isn’t well managed online, however, the opposite can happen. Bad reviews can make other brands reluctant to work with you. Afterall, who wants to be linked to a company with poor customer ratings? A lack of backlinks has the ability to negatively affect your SEO rankings.
Are Negative Reviews ALWAYS Negative?
It’s no surprise that negative reviews leave a sour taste. They cast your agency in a bad light, and can drive away potential qualified leads. Online reviews are an important ranking factor for businesses on Google. Why? Google trusts the power of word-of-mouth marketing. Just as consumers use reviews to vet a business, so too does Google. A company’s reviews work as a kind of crowd-sourced recommendation in that sense. A business with 100 four- and five-star reviews will likely outrank a similar business with fewer, especially if they are lower rated.
But are bad reviews always a negative? The simple, and possibly reassuring, answer is — no. While you hopefully work hard to ensure that the reputation of your agency is as stellar as possible, a handful of bad reviews won’t cause your rank to plummet. Google verifies the authenticity and diversity of a company’s reviews before adjusting rank. For example, one review about a late caregiver won’t tip the scale in terms of SEO ranking. But multiple reports of mistreatment by a caregiver will not only hurt your reputation, but can hurt your SEO ranking.
Now more than ever, consumers rely on the internet to scope out a business’s reputation. Thus, having a large number of authentic and positive reviews is key for not only your reputation, but your SEO rank as well. Make sure you’re including customer service training in your marketing campaigns to help ensure your reputation shines.
What Do I Need to Know About Domain Authority?
Domain authority is a ranking system that predicts how well a website will rank in search engine results. A number of different factors go into calculating this prediction, including the number of links on the page and the root domains of those linked URLs. Although it is not a Google ranking factor, it does take into consideration how often Google is showing a website in its search results.
Domain authority fluctuates as different data points become available and are included in the calculations. A newly launched website, for instance, will always start with a domain authority of one, and will increase over time as authoritative backlinks are earned and the site’s SEO health improves.
Enhancing your company’s reputation takes time and effort, but is achievable by partnering with an industry-specific digital marketing expert who can help your care company stand out from the crowd to both potential clients and caregivers.
