SEO
Online Reputation Management: A Beginner’s Guide
Has someone written something about your business online that’s misleading, inaccurate, or just downright nasty?
If you’re worried this could impact your business, you’ll need to start online reputation management (ORM). But where should you start with ORM? And what the heck is it?
In this beginner’s guide, I’ll explain what online reputation management is, why it’s important, and how you can manage your business’s reputation effectively online.
Online reputation management is the process of monitoring, maintaining, and positively influencing the perception of your business across the Internet using digital marketing tactics.
Although ORM may seem similar to digital PR, it focuses more on responding to customers’ reviews and correcting misleading information that could negatively impact your business’s reputation.
Online reputation management shows customers their opinions matter and encourages them to contact you directly if they have an issue.
ORM usually focuses on Google, websites, and social media—because that’s where people leave reviews. But, as we can see below, the emergence of LLMs adds further complexity into the mix.
If we zoom in, it’s clear that managing your online reputation is actually even more nuanced than this.
You’ve probably noticed that almost everything feeds back into Google. Google uses SERP features to highlight important content from third-party sites, such as social media, within its search results.
So if there’s a bad review about your company on any of these platforms, it could be pulled into Google’s search results.
Sidenote.
Despite recent headlines, Google is still at the core of our online experience, and with 95.32% of people using it on mobile to search, managing your online reputation matters the most here.
ORM is important because, if done right, it can help you win back potential customers and protect your business’s sales and revenue.
It’s also important because:
- Certain online places hold a disproportionate influence
- It’s never been easier or faster to put a review online
- Responding to customers’ feedback builds trust and credibility with your brand
Let’s explore these concepts further.
Certain online places hold a disproportionate influence
When people think of online reviews, they think of Google reviews first. There’s a reason for this—Google has made it ridiculously easy to leave a review for any business, making them an important focus for ORM.
Often, all you have to do is search for the brand and click the “write a review” button—right from the search results.
This star rating also shows on Google maps. These ratings can make or break a business.
I held a quick poll on LinkedIn to confirm whether this was true, and this was confirmed:
Maintaining a good star rating is vital for customer-facing businesses like restaurants or hotels and anyone with a small business.
For example, someone looking for a restaurant can filter Google Maps results to show only businesses with a specific rating.
Put yourself in the shoes of your customers who notice a terrible review—this might be the journey they go through:
TLDR: If your business doesn’t have a good star rating on Google, you’ll miss out on potential sales due to your online reputation.
In addition to Google reviews, you may have noticed that Reddit has recently started to appear more frequently in Google searches. This is due to Google adding the new discussions and forums search feature to the search results.
Here’s what it looks like:
This feature highlights forum results from sites like Reddit and relevant forums in the search results where “diverse personal experiences” are considered beneficial.
The issue for ORM is that these personal experiences could pose a reputational threat to your business, as they can be highlighted in the search results, as in this example, from a UK broadband provider.
A quick check of Ahrefs’ Site Explorer shows that Reddit URLs with the word “review” that rank number one in Google have skyrocketed since last year. This means Reddit is influencing review keywords more than ever before.
This means you can’t afford to ignore platforms like Reddit anymore for online reputation management. At the very least, you’ll need to monitor and respond to conversations there.
It’s never been easier or faster to put a review online
As we’ve already seen, creating a negative review is now easier and quicker than ever before. Anyone can leave a bad review in minutes by Googling a brand’s name and then selecting one of the following:
- Google local reviews
- 3rd party review sites e.g., Trustpilot
- UGC sites like Reddit, Quora
- And many more!
Here’s an example of a guy who went to a restaurant, didn’t like the food, wrote a negative Google review, and then made a viral TikTok video.
After he placed the review, the restaurant owner responded by sending him a meeting invitation for a fight in the car park at 3 a.m.
In this example, the restaurant’s name wasn’t mentioned. Still, the fact that it got 2.1 million likes shows the reputational damage this kind of content can do.
Sidenote.
Hopefully, it goes without saying that sending a meeting request to your customers for a fight in a car park following a negative review isn’t the best way to manage your reputation online.
Responding to customer’s feedback builds trust and credibility with your brand
Leaving negative reviews without responses can suggest that your business doesn’t care about its customers, so it’s really important for ORM to respond when there’s a negative comment.
Here’s an example of where I complained about service at a restaurant and then left a negative review.
What made my review experience different was that the business contacted me with a comment to discuss further and followed up with an email.
Returning to their reviews on Google now, I can see that this business has made a decent effort to respond to almost every comment on Google reviews—good and bad.
Because they replied, I would consider going back there, but if they didn’t, I probably would have written them off completely.
In other words, responding to customers shows a commitment to customer satisfaction and can help limit damage if a negative incident occurs. It can also help attract new customers and retain existing ones.
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.
If you want to improve your online reputation, start by doing these five things:
- Check the 1st page on Google for reputational threats.
- Find popular branded searches… and create content to address those searches.
- Ask for feedback from your customers… and take action.
- Promote fair reviews on big authority sites.
- Set up brand alerts for Reddit and websites.
1. Check the 1st page on Google for reputational threats
ORM often starts with a quick search on Google to see how your brand is represented in the search results.
For a brand search, you should own all the first-page results, or they should at least portray your brand positively.
Here’s an example of a UK broadband provider that doesn’t own all of the top 10 results:
These highlighted results could pose a reputational risk to this company.
If we click on the Trustpilot review, we can see that 92% of users have given this company a 1-star rating—impressively bad.
Although many companies won’t have this level of negative sentiment against their brand, it’s important for online reputation management to be aware of the status of the first page of Google for your brand.
Sidenote.
When a review site like this one ranks in the top 10, it’s usually because of a negative reputation issue. A fun way to check if any third-party review sites are impacting a website’s reputation is to do a blank search in Keywords Explorer and then add the third-party review site to the Target filter.
So far, we’ve easily identified some obvious brand weaknesses, but to go further, we need to do a SERP SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis on other brand-related keywords.
Although this may seem like a boring business school 101 exercise, it’s the fastest way to determine what to focus on from a reputational standpoint.
Here’s how I’d do this using Keywords Explorer’s SERP Overview.
1. Search for “your brand + review”
2. Label each search result as a strength, weakness, opportunity, or threat
Once you’ve done this for your brand and brand + review(s), you’ll know the degree of risk for these keywords.
2. Find popular branded search terms…then create content to address those searches
Some Google SERPs may have results that could influence your brand narrative in the wrong way.
Here’s an example of how we addressed this at Ahrefs for the keyword “ahrefs affiliate program.”
Rather than leaving a question like “Does Ahrefs have an affiliate program?” unanswered or letting third-party sites answer it, Ahrefs’ CMO, Tim Soulo, decided to take matters into his own hands and write a blog post about the Ahrefs affiliate program to answer the question once and for all.
The result was that the new article ranked number one for this query in the space of a year. Tim also followed it up with a LinkedIn post on Ahrefs’ affiliate program, which also started ranking.
Within a year, all of the competitor results were displaced, and now Ahrefs owns most of the SERP for this keyword (shown in yellow).
In short, the trick here is to:
- Identify a branded keyword that poses a potential reputational risk (or that you want to control the SERP for)
- Fill the gap with your content – As Tim did by creating a blog about the Ahrefs affiliate program
- Back it up with 3rd party authority sites or related onsite content – As Tim did with the LinkedIn post and our authors did with the supplementary blog content
3. Ask customers how to improve your products and services
Asking for customer feedback is one of the most important things you can do to understand how to improve your business and proactively manage your online reputation
But you’d be surprised how few companies do this regularly. At Ahrefs, we get feedback in three different ways:
- Canny.io, our product feedback platform
- UGC platforms like Reddit
- From our customer support platform
Our Ahrefs canny.io board allows customers to share feature suggestions to help improve our product.
This is important because it helps our customers be part of the journey and invest in the product. On the platform, customers can upvote their favorite feature requests or add their own suggestions.
Another way Ahrefs gets feedback is through UGC platforms like Reddit. Impressively, our CMO, Tim Soulo, has asked Reddit for feedback for over eight years.
It’s no secret that sometimes feedback can be challenging to read, but it’s a necessary process for improving your service.
We also collect feedback from our customer support team and monitor customer sentiment through Intercom.
We also have a feedback channel on Slack that is dedicated to highlighting customer feedback—good and bad.
4. Promote fair reviews on big authority sites
Sometimes, big authority sites will write something about your brand that’s unbalanced, outdated, or inaccurate. This can potentially mislead customers or damage your online reputation.
If this happens, you have a few options available:
- Contact the author and ask them to correct the information – usually the best option
- Build links to other more positive results in the SERP to try to displace that result – use as a last resort
Here’s an example from Forbes for an Ahrefs review page.
One criticism from the review was that Ahrefs doesn’t have a free trial. They haven’t mentioned Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, which gives website owners free limited access to Site Explorer and Site Audit.
Another criticism was that Ahrefs “wasn’t competitively priced.” Since the review was written, we have introduced a new starter plan that is only $29 per month—so it seems unfair to say this now. This article is a good target for our own ORM efforts.
You should monitor these things on big authority sites that mention your brand. Ensure you’ve set up your brand alerts to keep track of these reviews.
5. Set up brand alerts for Reddit and websites
We’ve already established that Reddit and third-party websites are essential places to monitor for ORM. So, how can you monitor them?
I use a tool called Feedly to monitor important Reddit threads and Google News related to Ahrefs.
This is one of the best ways to monitor this type of information. You can even track newsletter mentions through the platform.
If you want to track your brand’s web mentions, my favorite tool is Ahrefs’ Alerts. This tool allows you to track conversations on third-party websites.
Here’s how to set this up in Ahrefs Alerts:
- Go to Ahrefs Alerts > Mentions > + Add Alert
- Create an alert for your company name (e.g., “ahrefs.”)
- Hit Add
To prevent Ahrefs from sending alerts for mentions on your own domain, add your website as an excluded domain. I also recommend adding sites like youtube.com and other sites you prefer not to monitor as well.
How to manage your online reputation on social media
Social media management management is faster-paced than managing your reputation on Google.
As such, you need to:
- Monitor your most important social media channels in realtime
- Set up brand mention alerts
- Endorse any praise you get to influence the brand narrative positively
- Be humble and learn from customer feedback
Here’s how we approach this at Ahrefs.
Monitoring your most important social media channels in real-time
At Ahrefs, we monitor our Twitter—sorry, our “X”—feed in Slack, so the whole team knows how our brand is being discussed on that platform.
Set up brand alerts for social media
In addition to real-time monitoring, you can set up brand alerts to notify you of the most important mentions of your brand.
At Ahrefs, we use Brand24 to monitor our social media presence. It’s a great way to track critical mentions of your brand, analyze sentiment, and create reports.
When you get praise on social media — endorse (and amplify it)
Along with monitoring for potential social media threats, you must endorse and amplify your brand when you get positive feedback from others.
At Ahrefs, we do this on a company and personal level for other team members. It’s easy to do this on LinkedIn. Rather than going for a bland “Like,” try another more spicy option.
Here’s an example of the Ahrefs account doing this—it stands out much more.
Here’s another example where my colleague Shermin Lim shared that she loved a post from a Ahrefs’ workshop attendee sharing positive feedback.
Finally, here’s an example of when SEO superstar Aleyda Solis mentioned my article on SEO challenges in her newsletter.
And Ryan Law was the first to love my comment on the post—thanks, boss!
All this activity helps to ensure that you are putting your best foot forward online.
Final thoughts
If you’re not careful, online reputational threats can eat away at your sales, meaning you could be in for a nasty surprise further down the line.
However, if you’re diligent about online reputation management and monitor, listen to, and respond to customer feedback, you can avoid this situation entirely.
Tools like Keywords Explorer’s SERP overview can help dissect Google’s SERPs and identify reputational threats for your brand. Got questions? Ping me on X.
SEO
How Mid-funnel Content Can Be Your Secret SEO Weapon
Recent changes to Google’s user interface have affected the volume and quality of organic website traffic.
For instance, AI Overviews and the commoditized answers Google serves directly in search results mean fewer top-of-funnel clicks reach websites.
There are also fewer clicks for bottom-of-funnel keywords as Google inserts itself in the conversion process. For example, if you look for any product-related search, it’s likely you’ll see features that would typically belong on an ecommerce product category page, like:
- Filters
- Product tiles
- Price information
- Discounts and deals
- Reviews
What’s worse, clicks on these product tiles don’t go to merchants. They open up a panel in Google with multiple sellers, including large marketplaces, instead:
These changes mean that as top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel opportunities diminish, the mid-funnel can become your secret SEO weapon instead. I’ll explain how below, but first…
What makes mid-funnel marketing different from top-of-funnel or bottom-of-funnel?
As a quick refresher, top-of-funnel (TOFU) content is educational in nature and fulfills an informational search intent. This content is the furthest from a sale in a typical conversion journey.
Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) content is the content a user interacts with immediately before a sale. It fulfills a transactional intent and typically consists of sales pages and product landing pages.
Middle-of-funnel (MOFU) content is the murky in-between.
The goals of mid-funnel content are to:
- Transition searchers from being problem-aware to solution-aware
- Help searchers make a decision on the right solution
- Improve brand awareness by increasing your brand’s touchpoints with searchers
- Build trust in your brand so that when folks are ready to buy, they think of you first
It’s also where searchers may prefer information from other humans, not AI. For instance, in the words of Eli Schwartz:
While [Google’s AI] answers could appear on these keywords, the user will potentially still click search results because those answers will not be satisfying enough.
This is why it’s an excellent opportunity for SEO. It’s the type of content that cannot easily be commoditized in many industries, especially B2B.
6 creative mid-funnel content ideas and how to find them
When done well, MOFU content can deliver a higher return on SEO investment than either TOFU or BOFU content.
Here are six ideas that will spice up your strategy and leverage opportunities most other SEOs don’t even consider. I’ve used all of these with great success on client campaigns, especially for B2B brands in narrow verticals.
1. Feature roundups
Roundups are a type of list post. They’re commonly used in affiliate marketing to compare products by different brands for keywords like “best air fryers” or “best wireless headphones.”
Sites like The Wirecutter use such posts as a staple in their content strategies.
However, most affiliate sites only focus on comparing products by different brands, which is why this type of content is underutilized by other businesses, like e-commerce and SaaS brands, that don’t want to feature competing products in their editorial content.
The mid-funnel opportunity for e-commerce and SaaS companies is to think past brand vs. brand comparisons and instead create feature vs. feature or product vs. product roundups.
To find these opportunities, search for your main topic or product category in Keywords Explorer and then apply a filter to include words like:
- Ideas
- Best
- Vs
- And
- Or
- Types
- Alternatives
- Comparison
Sidenote.
The exact words that will be relevant to your niche may differ.
Look for opportunities to compare your own products or solutions. For instance, the costume store Fancy Dress has a listicle targeting the keyword “group costume ideas,” and each idea is a product they sell.
You can also compare features of your solution against each other. This can work well for SaaS businesses. For instance, consider a keyword like “best mobile banking app features.”
It’s not the lowest difficulty score but rankings are achievable for a banking brand with some authority behind it.
This is especially true when we consider that there’s only one post that’s loosely optimized for “best features” and a 403 post ranking in position three:
In either scenario, product vs. product or feature vs. feature, it’s about positioning your brand as the only option so that when readers become ready to buy, they choose you over a competitor.
2. Solution hijacking
One of my favorite MOFU content ideas is solution hijacking. It works by converting people who are already solution-aware… but for the wrong solution.
Your content should influence them to favor your product instead of the solution they already decided on.
For example, Freshbooks used this tactic to convert people using Excel for accounting and bookkeeping. It created many pages offering Excel-based solutions and templates but with calls to action to try out their tool for free.
In total, these pages deliver around 6,400 monthly organic traffic sessions.
To try this out for your website, look for keywords that are about an alternative solution to yours but do not have a clear purchase intent (e.g., “excel invoice template” if you run an accounting app). The intent bit is important, so don’t skip it.
If you’re unsure of a particular keyword’s intent, check out our AI-based “Identify Intents” feature. It will give you a percentage breakdown of the keyword’s dominant intents in the SERPs.
Here’s why intent is an important qualifier.
Let’s consider Purple. It sells hybrid mattresses but also once had the following pages for other mattress types on its website:
These URLs have since been redirected but the fact remains, they wrote about stuff they don’t sell.
At first glance, these pages seem like a decent example of solution hijacking. However, they target commercial intent keywords that are too far down the funnel.
For example, let’s look at the keyword “waterbed.” When you check out the SERP for it, it’s clear that Google treats this as a bottom-of-funnel keyword. Shopping results are at the very top of the screen, and 92% of results are targeted at searchers looking to buy waterbeds.
So, looking at the performance of these pages, including the new ones they now redirect to, there’s a big decline.
It’s unlikely Purple will be able to recover this traffic for these keywords unless it starts selling these types of mattresses.
Key takeaway: Find keywords for alternative solutions to what you offer. But make sure they don’t have such a strong purchase intent. Instead, you want to see a mixture of content types ranking, like a handful of blog posts and some product pages. That’s a decent opportunity to consider.
3. Quizzes
Quizzes are a type of interactive content that provides answers or recommends solutions to users based on their responses to specific questions.
Not all quizzes are part of the mid-funnel. For example, consider a skincare quiz.
It’s TOFU if it focuses on identifying your skin type. It’s MOFU if it recommends the perfect skincare routine for your skin type.
To find relevant opportunities, follow the same steps as above. Pop your main topic into Keywords Explorer, but this time filter for keywords including things like:
- Quiz
- Test
- What’s my…
- Find your…
- Finder
- Recommended
The few brands that do create quizzes usually don’t know how to optimize them for SEO. For example, the current top-ranking page for “skincare quiz” has fewer than 100 words of optimized content:
So optimizing the landing page is a very quick and easy win in most cases.
As for creating the quiz itself, there are so many no-code platforms, like Outgrow, that can make quiz-building a simple process. Or you can follow an infographic-style design, similar to this piece from Healthline.
Either way, quizzes can attract thousands of visitors monthly and help them decide which of your products to buy!
4. Niche calculators
Like quizzes, calculators are a great MOFU strategy that can often be created with no-code tools. They’re a great angle for MOFU content if the answer delivered by a calculator is essential for helping a searcher make a purchase decision.
Finding opportunities is straightforward, per the above process. But this time, filter for words like:
- Calculate
- Calculator
- Ratio
- How much
- Formula
- Estimate
- Estimator
It’s crazy just how underutilized this strategy is, especially by small businesses or niche websites.
For example, the keyword “neck injury settlement calculator” has all the makings of a great SEO opportunity:
- Very low difficulty score
- Very few links are needed to rank
- Loads of search volume, especially on mobile
- Projected increase in searches
- Traffic potential is about 6x the monthly search volume
- Aaaaand the top-ranking page is not well-optimized for this keyword
What a find!
If your calculator is helpful enough and provides a great user experience, you may not even need to create all that much supporting content or build many links to help it rank.
For example, let’s check out this flooring calculator:
It’s simple, provides a great user experience, and is very helpful since you can calculate the floor space of multiple rooms in one go.
It also doesn’t have much content by traditional SEO standards (~100 words) or very many links (only 16) and yet, it brings in over 8,500 visitors a month.
A helpful calculator like this gets people one step closer to purchasing, which makes it a great MOFU content asset to consider. There are so many untapped opportunities worth looking into, even for small or niche businesses.
5. Scorecards
Scorecards are another type of interactive content designed to give the searcher a performance grade.
For example, they start by asking questions, similar to a quiz, but the goal isn’t to offer an immediate solution. It’s to provide a score that helps a searcher identify potential problems they may need to fix.
In other words, quizzes are great for developing solution-awareness, while scorecards are for people who may first need to develop problem-awareness and be eased into finding the right solution.
Unlike quizzes and calculators, which both have very obvious search patterns, there are more nuances for finding scorecard-related keywords. You often can’t filter for “scorecard” or similar. So try things like:
- Rate my
- How good is my
- How bad is my
- Checker
- Grader
Anything that indicates the user wants their performance rated will suit a scorecard.
For example, consider a keyword like “rate my resume”:
It’s a great MOFU asset for a resume-building SaaS company or a resume services marketplace.
If you have a PC-related ecommerce store, you could create a scorecard for “rate my PC” searches where you recommend better components or mods to improve the user’s current computer.
The opportunities are right there for the taking if you know where to look.
6. Alternative assets
It’s clear by now that content can take many forms. In many cases, the solution someone is looking for can’t be delivered in a blog post, social post, or audiovisual format.
That’s where alternative assets can be a great solution.
These are my favorite assets to create for most B2B SEO campaigns, especially if they’re in a small vertical with few TOFU or BOFU searches. The mid-funnel becomes very lucrative in such cases.
For example, you can consider alternative assets like spreadsheet templates for knowledge workers, CAD blocks for engineers, or wiring diagrams for electricians.
There are many ways to find these types of opportunities. You can start by filtering your keyword list for:
- Common file extensions in your industry, like .jpg, .svg, .png, .psd, or .ai for designers.
- Words like spreadsheet, diagram, file, or blueprint.
- Industry-specific software like Revit for engineers, Canva for designers, and so on.
For example, in a narrow B2B vertical like personal access door manufacturing, traditional keyword research techniques may not be enough. This is the entire list of keywords about the product, for instance:
We can also forget TOFU blog posts. Answering questions like “what is a personal access door” that can now be handled by Google is often not worth the budget.
And that’s where creative thinking will be rewarded because, in this example, there’s a hidden goldmine of opportunity for CAD blocks and design files for builders and architects.
They often need CAD blocks for doors and surrounding elements like walls and windows.
Not only are there thousands of searches for stuff like this, but these are assets a door manufacturer probably already has on hand. And they may already share them with architects in their network anyway.
So why not optimize its site for such opportunities with the goal of connecting to more architects?
It’s all about solving your audience’s daily frustrations and building multiple touchpoints with them as you do so. When they’re ready to buy, they’ll likely think of you first before they even turn to Google.
Key takeaways
SEO opportunities have fundamentally changed and will continue to evolve as Google changes its interface.
With fewer clicks going to websites from top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel searches, there’s an untapped opportunity for SEO professionals to use the middle-of-the-funnel instead.
But, to do so takes far more creativity and out-of-the-box thinking, especially if you’re seeking opportunities your competitors haven’t yet considered!
If you have any examples of mid-funnel strategies that have worked wonders, feel free to share them with me on LinkedIn anytime.
SEO
Enterprise Link Building & The Power Of Links
Enterprise link building is the process of acquiring links to a large, enterprise company’s website to improve its visibility and rankings in search engines.
Enterprise companies get a lot of links naturally. While they may have some challenges with link building, these companies also have a ton of opportunities because of who they are and how much money is at stake.
Links play a role in many of Google’s systems including Experience Expertise Authoritativeness Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). As Google says:
Google’s algorithms identify signals about pages that correlate with trustworthiness and authoritativeness. The best known of these signals is PageRank, which uses links on the web to understand authoritativeness.
Links are still an important ranking factor in Google. I ran a study to measure the impact of links and removed good links using the disavow tool. The pages lost both rankings and traffic.
Let’s look at what it takes to do link-building in an enterprise environment.
Most teams in enterprise companies face similar challenges. Being successful in large organizations requires more than just subject matter expertise. You also need to know politics, sales, and project management.
Getting buy-in and budget
Most companies I’ve worked with didn’t allow employees to represent the brand. That’s legal speak for “the employees aren’t allowed to do outreach.” That doesn’t mean you can’t get links, it just means you have to be creative and get them in other ways.
It’s not the same for every company. I know some that just don’t do link building, some have minimal link building programs where they can do a few tasks, some have fully developed programs, and many just offload link building to third-party vendors because that is likely the easiest option.
Your first step is to plan out what you want to do and figure out who you need to work with for approvals and to get the work done. I’ll cover this more in the next section.
Depending on the project, you may have to go through legal and compliance teams to get permission. In my experience this is where many projects die. If you’re required to go through legal, the chance you’ll be approved goes down by a lot.
The next challenge is getting a budget for the activities. My best tip is to equate the projects to revenue, or as close as you can get to it with some other value metric. For example, I’ve managed to get redirect projects off the ground by using a number like $400 for each referring domain recovered as the value.
Here’s how to find those opportunities in Ahrefs:
- Paste your domain into Site Explorer
- Go to the Best by links report
- Add a “404 not found” HTTP response filter
I usually sort this by “Referring domains.”
So for this example, let’s say I do 250 redirects that on average have 10 RDs. That’s 250 x 10 x $400 = $800,000 as a value I can use to pitch for the redirect project. It’s typically a large enough number for the project to get attention and resources.
Prioritization
Enterprise companies have a lot of products and services, and enterprise websites usually have a lot of pages. What teams do you work with? What pages do you prioritize building links to? These aren’t easy questions.
My best recommendation is to align to company or team goals. Most companies or teams have some products they prioritize or want to improve and that’s where you’re most likely to be able to get buy-in for link building projects. Someone’s bonus is likely tied to the success of these projects, and they’re willing to invest resources to make sure they hit their targets.
Coordination
At the enterprise level, a lot of link building is done by other teams, not necessarily the SEO team. Big companies have a lot of exposure and they’re doing a lot of different things that may result in them getting links.
You may see TV commercials, hear radio ads, have teams creating new content. Then there’s public relations, social media, paid advertising, content syndication, events, corporate partnerships, influencers, celebrity advertising, affiliate programs, and more.
Most links will probably happen without you, but you can help guide many of the teams in charge of these channels with best practices that can help you get more or better links. Take advantage of any internal training sessions where you may have the opportunity to present. Get on one of their weekly calls, create best practice documentation, internal courses, etc.
You’ll have more impact if you can make a lot of people or teams do a little bit better than you would have if you tried to do everything yourself.
You have a lot of different options for link building in an enterprise environment. If you’re not sure where to start, I’d check out the Links section in Opportunities report in Site Explorer. This report has shortcuts to other reports with filters applied, that help you with some common tasks.
Here are some of the things you might want to try.
Create linkable assets
In SEO, we use the terms “linkable asset” or “link bait” to refer to content that is strategically crafted to attract links. Such linkable assets can take on many different forms:
- Industry surveys
- Studies and research
- Online tools and calculators
- Awards and rankings
- How-to guides and tutorials
- Definitions and coined terms
- Infographics, GIFographics, and “Map-o-graphics”
You can also use any industry-famous employees or thought leaders you have to create interesting quotes that might be linked.
There’s also a phenomenon where high-ranking pages get linked to more over time. If your content is good enough to get you near the top, you’re more likely to get more links. Tim Soulo calls this the vicious circle of SEO.
For more ideas, check out our guide to enterprise content marketing.
Combine similar content to create a stronger page
Keyword cannibalization is when a search engine consistently swaps rankings between multiple pages or when multiple pages rank simultaneously for the same keyword but are similar enough to be consolidated. Consolidating similar content into comprehensive guides or pillar pages can improve your chances of ranking and earning links. To do that, you usually combine the content and redirect one page to the other.
Promote your content
The more visibility your content gets, the more links you are likely to get naturally. Leverage those other teams I talked about earlier to promote your content on social and maybe paid media. Use influencer relationships to amplify your reach. Use your PR teams for potential media coverage.
Keep in mind that these other teams are busy and have their own priorities as well. Be selective on what you ask them to promote. If you ask for them to promote everything, they’re likely to promote nothing.
Go after unlinked brand mentions
Unlinked brand mentions are online mentions (citations) of your brand—or anything directly related to your brand—that do not link back to your site.
Enterprise companies tend to get talked about a fair bit, and each one of those mentions offers a chance to get a link. Even if there’s not initially a link, it doesn’t hurt to ask for one. You can use Content Explorer to find these mentions on the web, and the inbuilt filter for highlighting unlinked domains to hone in on unlinked mentions.
You can also look for unlinked brand mentions of key employees, famous quotes of theirs, or statistics from your studies.
Recover links with link reclamation
Sites, and the web in general, are always changing. We ran a study that found that ~two-thirds of links to pages on the web disappeared in the nine-year period we looked at.
In many cases, your old URLs have links from other websites. If they’re not redirected to the current pages, then those links are lost and may no longer count for your pages.
It’s not too late to do these redirects, and you can quickly reclaim any lost value and help your content rank better.
Here’s how to find those opportunities:
- Paste your domain into Site Explorer
- Go to the Best by links report
- Add a “404 not found” HTTP response filter
I usually sort this by “Referring domains.”
I even created a script to help you match redirects. Don’t be scared away; you just have to download a couple of files and upload them. The Colab notebook walks you through it and takes care of the heavy lifting for you.
While this script could be run periodically, if you’re constantly having to do redirects, I would recommend that you automate the implementation. You could pull data from the Ahrefs API and visits from your analytics into a system. Then create logic like >3 RDs, >5 hits in a month, etc. and flag these to be redirected, suggest redirects, or even automatically redirect them.
If you had redirects in place for a year or more already, the value is likely already consolidated to the new pages. That’s what Google recommends and seemed to be true when we tested it. You could also add a flag for “was redirected” into the automation logic that checks if the page was previously redirected for a year to account for this.
Copy competitor links and strategies
There are a few different ways to do this. The usual recommendation for SEOs would be a link intersect report, which we have, but it’s pretty noisy for large sites.
What I would recommend instead is the Best by links report in Site Explorer.
This is going to show you the most linked pages on a website. For us, that’s our homepage, some of our free tools, and our blog and data studies.
Another option is the Site Structure report in Site Explorer sorted by Referring domains or Referring pages.
This lets me quickly see that things like our blog, free tools, glossary, and training academy videos are all well linked.
Build internal links
I’ve always found internal links to be a powerful way to help pages rank higher.
Even these links may be difficult to get in an enterprise environment. Sometimes different people are responsible for different sections of the website, which can make internal linking time-consuming and may require meetings and a lot of follow up to get internal linking done.
On top of the political hurdles, the process for internal linking can be a bit convoluted. You either have to know the site well and read through various pages looking for link opportunities, or you can follow a process that involves a lot of scraping and crawling to find opportunities.
At Ahrefs, we’ve made this simple, scalable and accessible so anyone can find these opportunities. The easiest way to see internal link opportunities is with the Internal Link Opportunities report in Site Audit. We look at what your pages are ranking for and suggest links from other pages on your site that talk about those things.
I’d also recommend watching out for opportunities to use better link anchor text. It’s common for page creators to overuse generic link anchor text such as ‘learn more,’ ‘read more,’ or ‘click here.’ You can look for usage of this kind of generic copy in the Internal anchors report in Site Explorer.
Build links from other websites you own
If your company owns multiple websites, you’ll want to add links between them where it makes sense. Ultimately you may want to consolidate the content into one site, but that’s not always feasible. Even if it is, it may not happen within a reasonable timeframe, so you may want to add links between the sites in the meantime.
This can be abused and goes into a gray area, but for the most part, if you’re linking naturally to relevant pages you’ll be fine.
Buy other companies websites
I wrote all about SEO for mergers and acquisitions. When you buy another company, you inherit their content and their links. This opens some nice options for consolidating content and links to stronger pages.
There are a lot of tools that can help you with enterprise-level link building including:
- Ahrefs’ Site Explorer – Shows you all links of any website or URL with an option to sort and filter them by many important SEO metrics.
- Ahrefs’ Content Explorer – A unique link prospecting tool, which helps you find thousands of relevant websites for link requests and guest posting. Also helps to discover linkable assets on any topic from all around the web.
- Ahrefs’ Web Explorer – Lets you search through our search engine’s (yep.com) entire database of pages, domains, and links using search operators.
- Ahrefs Alerts – Similar to Google Alerts but has more flexibility with SEO-related filters.
- Pitchbox / BuzzStream– Email outreach tools. There are many other tools that let you send personalized emails at scale, but these are popular with SEOs.
- Hunter.io / Voila Norbert – Email lookup services help you find contact details of websites at scale.
Also check out our guide to enterprise SEO tools.
Final thoughts
There’s so much at stake in enterprise SEO and so many opportunities. When a company and its people finally get behind SEO, they can dominate an industry.
If you have any tips, enterprise SEO experiences you’d like to share, or questions, let me know on X or LinkedIn.
SEO
WordPress Plugin Supply Chain Attacks Escalate
WordPress plugins continue to be under attack by hackers using stolen credentials (from other data breaches) to gain direct access to plugin code. What makes these attacks of particular concern is that these supply chain attacks can sneak in because the compromise appears to users as plugins with a normal update.
Supply Chain Attack
The most common vulnerability is when a software flaw allows an attacker to inject malicious code or to launch some other kind of attack, the flaw is in the code. But a supply chain attack is when the software itself or a component of that software (like a third party script used within the software) is directly altered with malicious code. This creates the situation where the software itself is delivering the malicious files.
The United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) defines a supply chain attack (PDF):
“A software supply chain attack occurs when a cyber threat actor infiltrates a software vendor’s network and employs malicious code to compromise the software before the vendor sends it to their customers. The compromised software then compromises the customer’s data or system.
Newly acquired software may be compromised from the outset, or a compromise may occur through other means like a patch or hotfix. In these cases, the compromise still occurs prior to the patch or hotfix entering the customer’s network. These types of attacks affect all users of the compromised software and can have widespread consequences for government, critical infrastructure, and private sector software customers.”
For this specific attack on WordPress plugins, the attackers are using stolen password credentials to gain access to developer accounts that have direct access to plugin code to add malicious code to the plugins in order to create administrator level user accounts at every website that uses the compromised WordPress plugins.
Today, Wordfence announced that additional WordPress plugins have been identified as having been compromised. It may very well be the case that there will be more plugins that are or will be compromised. So it’s good to understand what is going on and to be proactive about protecting sites under your control.
More WordPress Plugins Attacked
Wordfence issued an advisory that more plugins were compromised, including a highly popular podcasting plugin called PowerPress Podcasting plugin by Blubrry.
These are the newly discovered compromised plugins announced by Wordfence:
- WP Server Health Stats (wp-server-stats): 1.7.6
Patched Version: 1.7.8
10,000 active installations - Ad Invalid Click Protector (AICP) (ad-invalid-click-protector): 1.2.9
Patched Version: 1.2.10
30,000+ active installations - PowerPress Podcasting plugin by Blubrry (powerpress): 11.9.3 – 11.9.4
Patched Version: 11.9.6
40,000+ active installations - Latest Infection – Seo Optimized Images (seo-optimized-images): 2.1.2
Patched Version: 2.1.4
10,000+ active installations - Latest Infection – Pods – Custom Content Types and Fields (pods): 3.2.2
Patched Version: No patched version needed currently.
100,000+ active installations - Latest Infection – Twenty20 Image Before-After (twenty20): 1.6.2, 1.6.3, 1.5.4
Patched Version: No patched version needed currently.
20,000+ active installations
These are the first group of compromised plugins:
- Social Warfare
- Blaze Widget
- Wrapper Link Element
- Contact Form 7 Multi-Step Addon
- Simply Show Hooks
More information about the WordPress Plugin Supply Chain Attack here.
What To Do If Using A Compromised Plugin
Some of the plugins have been updated to fix the problem, but not all of them. Regardless of whether the compromised plugin has been patched to remove the malicious code and the developer password updated, site owners should check their database to make sure there are no rogue admin accounts that have been added to the WordPress website.
The attack creates administrator accounts with the user names of “Options” or “PluginAuth” so those are the user names to watch for. However, it’s probably a good idea to look for any new admin level user accounts that are unrecognized in case the attack has evolved and the hackers are using different administrator accounts.
Site owners that use the Wordfence free or Pro version of the Wordfence WordPress security plugin are notified if there’s a discovery of a compromised plugin. Pro level users of the plugin receive malware signatures for immediately detecting infected plugins.
The official Wordfence warning announcement about these new infected plugins advises:
“If you have any of these plugins installed, you should consider your installation compromised and immediately go into incident response mode. We recommend checking your WordPress administrative user accounts and deleting any that are unauthorized, along with running a complete malware scan with the Wordfence plugin or Wordfence CLI and removing any malicious code.
Wordfence Premium, Care, and Response users, as well as paid Wordfence CLI users, have malware signatures to detect this malware. Wordfence free users will receive the same detection after a 30 day delay on July 25th, 2024. If you are running a malicious version of one of the plugins, you will be notified by the Wordfence Vulnerability Scanner that you have a vulnerability on your site and you should update the plugin where available or remove it as soon as possible.”
Read more:
WordPress Plugins Compromised At The Source – Supply Chain Attack
3 More Plugins Infected in WordPress.org Supply Chain Attack Due to Compromised Developer Passwords
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Moksha Labs
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