Reputation is the cornerstone of power
Perhaps not quite.
Reputation in an SEO metric sense means what has been published online about your company or website.
Google’s quality guidelines (Pages 15-19) speak volumes on how to define reputation and how Google’s real people quality checkers are advised to use what information they can find about a website to add to their scoring metrics.
If you are a health or financial website (YMYL – your money or your life (think health)) the quality metrics are much stricter.
But exactly what defines a positive reputation is not clear. A company with lots of reviews and a perfect Google review score of 5/5 could seem suspect? What impact does a negative 1/5 review have?
There are many questions and we do not have all of the answers. What we do know is that a regular drip-feed of semi-positive reviews does impact on improving a site’s rankings as we have tested this in the past.
Consumers/user-generated content
Additional reputation signals include reviews, both Google, Facebook and others like Trustpilot, and Reviews.co.uk.
Vanilla Circus has been minding and building client’s online reputations for 14 years

Simple reputation management starts with Google Local
11 Quick Wins to improve your business’ online rep
A customer’s online experience begins with a search
- Address negative search results
- Answer all reviews
- Fine-tune content on all platforms
- Make Google My Business Listing a priority
- Consider Google posts of your local Business listing
- Questions & Answers within the same listing
- Establish a presence on ALL review sites
- Employ more video content – Youtube and onsite
- Social media channels – Is there engagement?
- Managed listings – Is their information correct everywhere?
- Propagate your content on other site where you are listed as the author
Food for thought
- Map the search landscape
- Estimate a client’s share of voice with a focus on Google
- But what about when someone searches your name.
- Control the first page of Google
- Balance negativity with positivity within reputation
86% of UK consumers read online reviews for local businesses when making a purchase over £75
Page Updated: March 21, 2022