Using Third Party Sites to Help Your Online Reputation

Updated on May 4, 2021

Maintaining your online reputation is an important part of any good digital marketing plan. In today’s world, your customers are almost always googling you before they make a purchase, so it’s critical to ensure that what they find in search engine results pages (SERPs) will incentivize them to continue down the sales funnel.

Read more about how to help your online reputation:

• 5 Reputation Management Tips For Multiple Locations
• How to Choose an Online Reputation Management Company

One great way to establish your online reputation and build trust with your audience is to utilize third-party sites like Medium and Quora and review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor. These sites give you access to an entirely new readership, earn you high-quality backlinks, and allow you to position yourself as an authority in your space.

So which 3rd party sites can actually help build your reputation and how do you know if they’re the best fit for your business?

Why You Should Use Medium to Boost Your Reputation

1. Pure size. Medium is a blogging platform that attracts more than 90 million unique visitors every month. 

2. Medium’s built-in distribution channel ensures that your content will find the right eyeballs. And because Medium’s algorithm is designed to serve up popular content again and again to new readers, if your piece makes it to the home page, you’re almost guaranteed virality. This is especially true in the case of “evergreen content,” or content that is always relevant to your audience and doesn’t become obsolete after a certain length of time.

3. Medium’s Domain Authority is a whopping 95. Domain Authority (DA) is measured on a 0-100 scale and tells the search engine how trustworthy a website is. DA plays a major role in how highly a domain ranks in SERPs. Because Medium’s DA is so high, your content is much more likely to rank well rather than if you were to publish a piece on your business’s website that does not have as much clout with search engines. In addition, by piggybacking off Medium’s high online reputation, you can compete for better keywords and actually have a chance at ranking for them.

4. Once you begin publishing on Medium and earning followers, those followers automatically receive a notification every time you publish a post. 

5. The site also tends to have very high user engagement because of its many easy engagement options, consistent user experience, and fast loading times.

6. Medium already has all of the standard SEO and responsive display considerations on lock, meaning you can spend less time worrying about the backend of your content and more time creating useful, high-quality content that your audience will love.

Medium might be a good 3rd party publishing option for your small business if:

• You are just beginning to publish content and want to get access to a large viewership
• Have several writers who will be contributing to your content library
• You write a lot of long-form content (generally 1500 words or more)
• Your audience is very active on social media, and most especially on Twitter
• You are committed to creating content for quality rather than quantity
• You create a lot of “evergreen” content

If your editorial strategy fits these criteria, publishing on Medium might be a great option for building your website authority. Most business blogs take many months, sometimes years, to gain traction and a reliable audience. By using Medium, skip that hard growth phase and go straight to high performance.

How to use Quora to quickly boost your online reputation

Quora is a rapidly expanding question and answer site similar to Yahoo Answers. Users ask questions about nearly anything you can imagine and get a response from a qualified expert. The main difference between a site like Yahoo Answers and Quora is that the only people who are allowed to respond to questions are those that can prove they are subject matter experts in the topic they are writing about. This allows those asking to receive higher quality, more detailed responses that they can trust in a fast and efficient manner. It’s also a good way to position oneself as an expert in a particular field, as well as a great way to build Domain Authority.

When a user clicks on your Quora profile, they can see all of the questions you’ve ever answered. This means that the more questions you respond to in your subject area, the more answers will appear on your profile, and the more trust you build among users. And because Quora’s Domain Authority is so high, your responses can gain traction in SERPs for the keywords you’re attempting to rank for.

Why you should be utilizing third-party review sites to boost your reputation

Using third-party review sites allows your customers and potential customers to get a positive impression of you before they even walk through your doors. Think of these sites as social clout – like earning a recommendation from a friend. Consider your average experience with looking for a bakery for your niece’s birthday party, or even a restaurant for that dinner with your in-laws – you would never make a reservation or order a cake without first checking that business’s reviews online. The same goes for your business.

Maintaining an active, up-to-date page on third-party review sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google My Business can be a huge asset for your business. According to a Harvard Business School study, increasing your rating on Yelp by just one star can increase business revenue by five to nine percent.

Ready to start raking in that extra cash? Ensure that your page is updated with your current address and contact information, high-quality photos, and recent reviews. Having a frequently updated page also shows Google that your business is active, which means rankings bump for you in SERPs and more clicks, leading to even more business. Another benefit of these third-party review sites is that because sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor have high DA, their data is often displayed in rich snippets, which can help users get an idea of what your business is about without even having to click the link.

Additionally, there are a plethora of third-party review sites that you can utilize to improve your online reputation. Register your business (or “claim your business” for those that automatically generate a page for you) with as many platforms as you want. However, like with social media, it’s best to choose one or two to focus on so you can really engage with your customers and garner good reviews on those platforms. 

A few of the review sites you can choose from include:

• Google My Business
• Yelp
• TripAdvisor
• Foursquare
• Zomato

Once you narrow down the review site you want to focus on, add your contact information, upload photos, and ensure that your branding is consistent with your website. Create a plan for how you will keep up with your pages so you can ensure that they remain assets for your business. Below are a few rules of thumb to follow as you venture into the world of third-party review sites:

• Actively ask customers to write reviews.
• Check your reviews regularly but don’t obsess over it – have a regularly scheduled time when you will check for new updates.
• Respond to positive and negative criticism without getting defensive.
• Take the time to thank each customer for posting a review, even if the feedback they gave wasn’t positive.

 Get more help with managing your online reputation

Maintaining your online reputation should be a critical piece of your digital marketing strategy. But keeping up with all your marketing tasks can be daunting.

You’re in luck! Big Leap helps businesses grow their revenue with smart marketing and consistent monitoring. Get a free reputation management consultation with a Big Leap expert? Let us help you! Book today.