Managing Your Brand’s Reputation

About the speaker

Chris Yoko

Yoko Co

 - Yoko Co

Chris focuses on helping people, and the heroic organizations they belong to, pave the road to a more Utopian world by empowering them to build and champion themselves using their most powerful asset, their web presence. His goal for himself and those he aids is to be driven by a purpose beyond profit.

Show Notes

  • Speaker 1: (00:00)Bridge toll California customer service number highway miles to the gallon Ford focus, high wind cave rescue operation. What is schema F best wine bars in San Carlos, California, best Western hotels, our oldest Rinaldo. What happened with big grub tips for a wedding? Should I send down the first series Imam Imam on other email clients identify fonts from where to find them or Speaker 2: (00:30)Welcome to the voices of search podcast. I'm your host Benjamin Shapiro. And today we're going to talk about building your brands, reputation and how to save it. Joining us is Chris Yoko, who is the CEO of Yoko co an agency that advances the web presence of organizations driven by purpose beyond profit and in clients by helping leverage their web presence in a way that applies accountability to the process. Yoko co highlights the ROI of your collaborative efforts. And today, Chris and I are going to talk about managing your brand's reputation okay. On with the show. Here's my conversation with Chris Yoko, the CEO of Yoko co Chris, welcome to the voices of search podcast. I have to commend you. You have the most rhythmic last name and company name combination, Chris Yoko from Yoko. It just sounds good coming off the tongue. I appreciate that. Speaker 2: (01:26)So you obviously are, the man in charge of the company is named after you talk to me a little bit about your practice. I know that your mission and purpose driven, talk to me about what your focus is really just collectively everyone on the team wants to help build a better world. And so we realized as an agency, the way we get to do that is by amplifying the impact of others. And so we only work with organizations that we believe are really well aligned with us and to build a better world. So are your clients all purpose driven, meaning that they are nonprofits, that they have some sort of social good tied to them? Are you working with traditional commerce brands and other entities as well? So it tends to be, I mean, we do work with a fair number of nonprofits, but majority of our work with commercial organizations and with the commercial clients we're working with it is that they have an impact that they want to make beyond just, you know, stacking profits. So they look a little bit past that whole phrase from target their mindset. So we push through proper tickets. Speaker 2: (02:34)So a big component of moving beyond just profit and having a business that is able to create some social good is having a reputation that stands for something. Talk to me about how you think of using SEO practices to help build and manage your brand's reputation. I think anytime somebody is building a brand, there's that first effort where you definitely feel like you're faking it before you make it, or I call Speaker 3: (03:00)It aspirational positioning, but it's almost like if you ask somebody that tells you, Oh, I stopped smoking. I was like, great for how long ago? Four hours ago. Right. Okay. Like technically yeah, you have, but have you really been mentioned yet? It's kind of the same with building new brands. And so one of the things you can do to help accelerate that curve is showing up when people are searching for the type of impact that you want to have in a way that aligns with the specific way your organization implemented. Speaker 2: (03:27)So when you think about brand's reputation, the first thing that comes to my mind is, you know, there's a content play and it kind of ties back into your domain authority where, you know, if Google believes that your brand has a positive reputation for a given term, you're going to show up for some big terms, right? That's really what the head term game is, is building up your domain rank and being positioned to be the expert in one given field. Talk to me about how you think about building a reputation and the content strategy behind it that helps you be positioned for some of the most important head terms in your business. Speaker 3: (04:06)Yes. I think a lot of that starts with identifying the audience. So you have to know first who you are, who you're speaking to, and then the what's in it for me factor, what kind of things are they going to be looking for? Whether it's an indication that you have a solution to their problem, something that's going to help them fix X, Y, or Z, or start a place where they're ready for like an impetus for change. Those are the terms we tend to identify. So you really want to get inside that personas head and then figure out what kinds of things they might be speaking into their phone and typing in their search engine, whatever the case might be. So you can start to identify and build out the content play for those specific terms and they tend to be really niche. Speaker 2: (04:44)So what are the brands that I think about that has a great reputation that goes beyond profit is Patagonia and right brand known for their outdoor gear, weather proof, you know, outdoor sports, but also very much tied to sustainability, reduce reuse, recycle is kind of a mantra of theirs and, you know, the sustainability community. Talk to me about your views on what Patagonia did well and what lessons can other brands take from that. Speaker 3: (05:17)So it's fu y, you mentioned Patagonia. So we ended up working with one of the platforms that they use is called phone to action platform. That used to be primarily phone driven, but now works with any technologies, but helps people get in touch with their representative legislators, et cetera. And Patagonia was using their platform for one of the kind of take a stance campaign that they did. That was I guess, 2016 or 2017. And I think that's where a lot of the lessons can be learned, which is they understand one, of course where their audience is coming from. But two, they understand that it's not really a time to be wishy washy and today's culture. So being able to take a stand and identify, you know, these positions that we're going to take and then take them very forcefully. So, you know, they stood up against, you know, what you saw with the administration trying to close down Parkland and starting to build a lot of PR head and an SEO title on with that. Speaker 2: (06:14)So when I think about building a company is brand, the first thing I think of is, you know, what is something that's going to be able to establish the brand to be a sustainable business. And it seems like at times, focusing on the things beyond profit at times puts your business at risk. When you're working on an SEO strategy, you know, let's take Patagonia as an example, you writing content that is about sustainability, as opposed to writing content about outdoor activities, right? One is more profit driving, one, talk more to their mission, but one also has probably a bigger business impact. How do you reconcile the two and figure it out from a content perspective, how much you should be focusing on the blocking and tackling of your business as opposed to this overall mission? Speaker 3: (07:04)Yeah. So it's definitely an, and then proposition not an either or I kind of consider it, the alignment stand purpose piece is kind of like Maslow's hierarchy applies to brands. Well, you've got to do that blocking and tackling for the wrong things. Somebody is looking for Patagonia is not covering any of their basics in terms of apparel and sports gear, et cetera. They're not showing up and the stuff around realizing a purpose and alignment starts to really fade away or become kind of irrelevant because they're not driving any traffic. So these are the things that you do to establish your brand and differentiate your brand. Once you're already covering, you know, the basic, basic blocking and tackling Speaker 2: (07:42)For anybody, who's not familiar, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is basically a pyramid. That's like, you need to have shelter and protection. And then above that, you're getting into security. And, you know, the, the peak of it is kind of like self worth and realization you when you're a brand, what Chris is saying is you need to think about the basic blocking and tackling of getting your products and services in front of the customers who are trying to buy them and work your way up towards being known for things outside of just great fitting and looking jackets, but also a brand that supports saving the planet as well. So there's multiple different ways to manage your brand's reputation using SEO producing content that talks about your mission is one of them. Talk to me about other ways that you can establish and build credibility for your brand's reputation using content and SEO strategies. Speaker 3: (08:41)Yes. I think one of the unsung heroes of content strategy is the way that it can either promote an advance, the experience a customer's going to have or poor experience a customer might have. And so it really comes back to I, these are some topics you've covered in previous episodes, but reputation management in the more traditional sense of reviews and being able to work that into your content place. So setting up a process where you're soliciting and then making sure you make the ask after it has been a good experience and we're possible making it something sexier than as up, Hey, here's an automated survey. Please tell us how we did some things that really lean into the experience that are going to be people excited to leave a review, and then not just letting them live on the platform they live on, incorporating them in your other marketing, incorporating them in other things that you do and linking back to them and making it a part of that. Living, breathing search ecosystem tends to have a pretty positive effect when done right. Speaker 2: (09:38)You mentioned reviews are one of the ways to manage your brand's reputation. This has been something that's kind of changed in Google's view of how important they are and where you can use reviews. Talk to me about how you think of the importance of reviews as it stands today for managing your rep. Speaker 3: (09:54)Yeah, so, I mean, it's definitely nice diesel. It used to be, I mean, there were a lot of times where, especially in the past few years, you can just hop on fiber and try to buy a bunch of reviews and that would significantly impact the search rankings. That was the kind of way you want it to work. What I see it now is more of a validation of brand authority and longevity. So people have a long history and a track record of positive impacts and reviews are trickling in over a long period of time. And there's not this sudden sometimes obviously games spike. We've seen that work really, really well for clients in terms of helping to establish better rank and promote rank, especially with more meaningfully with local search, as opposed to national that we've seen uptake in traffic for more national search priests as well. When there's been a longer term, I'll really play with this and incorporating it and other components of content. Speaker 2: (10:44)So building content, talking about your brand product, talking about the services, but also building in mission focused content. When you have the ability to do that, reviews are another way to manage your reputation. There's also managing the negative side of your reputation, and that's something that Chris and I are going to talk about in tomorrow's episode. So that wraps up this episode of the voices of search podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Chris Yoko, CEO of Yoko co we'd love to continue the conversation with you. So if you're interested in contacting Chris, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile on our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter. His handle is Chris Yoko, C H R I S Y O K O. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Yoko code.com Y O K O C o.com. Just one more link in our show notes. Speaker 2: (11:33)I'd like to tell you about, if you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voices of search.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also send us your topic suggestions or your SEO questions. You can even apply to be a guest speaker on the voices of search podcast. Of course you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voices of search on Twitter. And my personal handle is Ben J Shap, B E N J S H a P. And if you haven't subscribed yet, and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish episodes every day during the workweek. So hit the subscribe button in your podcast app, and we'll be back into your feed tomorrow morning. All right. That's it for today. But until next time, remember the answers are always in there. Speaker 4: (12:17)[inaudible].
About the speaker

Chris Yoko

Yoko Co

 - Yoko Co

Chris focuses on helping people, and the heroic organizations they belong to, pave the road to a more Utopian world by empowering them to build and champion themselves using their most powerful asset, their web presence. His goal for himself and those he aids is to be driven by a purpose beyond profit.

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