Related Content:

• Online Reputation Management
• Digital PR Services
• Custom Website Development Services
• Social Media Management Services

In the end, I knew that I would regret not pursuing a degree in the humanities. My humanities classes were the only classes I loved going to, and I always left the classroom feeling alive with ideas, my brain spinning and turning with what we had discussed in class. So, reluctantly, I called my mother to tell her my plan to declare a double major in Religious Studies and Humanistic Studies. Immediately after I told her the news, I was hit with the one question all humanities students know well: “Well, what are you going to do with that?”

It’s a good question! And one that plagued me for the next two years of my college experience—what was I going to do with my degree? As far as I knew, there weren’t many companies looking for people to write exegesis or analyze the historical significance of the lute. 

As my senior year came to a close, I ended up landing an entry-level web administration job in Washington, D.C. at an organization I really loved. And so, without really knowing much about working in digital marketing, I moved to D.C. and started my new career. What I didn’t know, and didn’t expect, was just how much my degree prepared me in these three ways for my future work in digital marketing, web development, and online reputation management:

1. Critical Thinking and Analysis
2. Intellectual Humility
3. Love of Learning

How the Humanities and Digital Marketing Go Hand-in-Hand

I use these three skills that I developed in my time in college daily in my job. They are “soft” skills—they aren’t the kind of thing you could list on a resume, but they are the foundation of good, thoughtful work in any field. 

Critical Thinking and Analysis

The first and most essential carry over from my classes to my career is the critical thinking mindset. I look at every project or problem a client brings me like I’m analyzing different texts for a paper: What is the project/problem? What is the client’s goal, and what is my goal? How do I bring together disparate pieces into a cohesive, workable whole? 

Asking yourself questions forces you to dig deeper into your work, allows you to see things from new perspectives, and enables you to creatively solve a problem. I spent time in my classes trying to knit together ideas from different eras and disciplines, and now I use that same skill to bring together ideas from my background in SEO, web development, and digital marketing to my role as an Online Reputation Management Associate. 

Intellectual Humility

Another thing my experience in humanities classrooms taught me is intellectual humility. We approached every topic with the same two questions: What do I already know, and what do I need to learn? 

Being able to admit what you do and don’t know is powerful. It builds trust—your coworkers and your clients know that when you say you know something or share an idea, they can believe you. It also allows you to set smart, achievable goals and avoid the trap of over-promising and under-delivering with clients.

Love of Learning

The other side of the coin with intellectual humility is a voracious appetite for learning. Admitting what you don’t know is the first step, and seeking out that knowledge is the second. In college, that meant hours in the library, but now it means collaborating with my coworkers, exploring industry blogs, attending conferences, and paying close attention to new trends. In a fast-paced industry like digital marketing, where things change daily, you have to constantly be learning and adapting. 

I am grateful that I chose the humanities, and even though I still haven’t found that mythical job where I get to write exegesis or analyze the historical significance of the lute, I know that my studies prepared me well for this career that I love. 

How My Humanities Degree Prepared Me for a Career in Digital Marketing is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Related Content:

• Online Reputation Management
• Online Reviews Management
• Search Suppression Services
• Yelp Review Management

Most people only seek out online reputation help when that cohesive picture is negative. Whether it’s bad reviews, negative press, or unflattering personal information, if something negative is tarnishing your online reputation, it makes sense to reach out to a firm like Go Fish Digital to help mitigate the damage.

However, online reputation management (ORM) is not only reactionary—it can be proactive too. There are concrete steps you can take now to protect and secure the positive reputation you have worked hard to build online. That way, if something negative happens in the future, your online reputation is as protected from the impact as it can be.

Preventive online reputation management is simpler than you think. Effectively, you want to make sure these three things are true:

1. All (or the majority) of the links that show up on the first page of your search results are positive
2. Any positive links that you own or control are optimized to continue ranking well
3. Any positive links that you do not own or control have a high Domain Authority and are linked-to from your owned sites

Now, let’s get into each of those three things individually:

1. All (or the majority) of the links that show up on the first page of your search results are positive

For most people doing preventative ORM, this will already be the case. Ideally, you want to be able to type your brand’s name, company’s name, or your name into the Google search bar and come back with only positive results on that first page—your website, your social media, positive press, and/or positive reviews. However, if you’re seeing irrelevant or negative content show up in your first page of results, that might be worrisome.

If you’re seeing many negative results, or a few particularly high ranking negatives (in the first 4 or 5 spots on Google), then it might be worth getting digital reputation management to help remove negative search results. If you’re only seeing one or two negative or irrelevant results, and they’re close to the bottom of the page, then you don’t need to worry as much. The next two steps will help.

2. Any positive links that you own or control are optimized to continue ranking well

Like I said in the first point, ideally, the majority of the positive links on the first page of your search results will be links to sites you own or control, like your website or social media accounts. If your owned sites do rank well, you want to make sure they stay that way. If they don’t, you’re going to want to move them up in the search results. The best way to do that is to optimize them for your targeted search terms using some basic SEO tactics.

For example, if your restaurant is called Carrot, and you want the Carrot social media accounts to rank well for searches of “carrot restaurant DC”, you’d want to optimize those accounts for the term “carrot restaurant DC”.

There are some basic SEO tactics that anyone can use to optimize their social media and websites to rank for their targeted search term:

• Make sure you use the whole targeted search term on the page as much as is reasonable. Using the same example from before, that could mean changing your Instagram handle from @CarrotRestaurant to @CarrotRestaurantDC or adding “Carrot Restaurant DC” into the “About Us” text on your Facebook page. On a website, that could mean adding the term into the alt-text tags for images or into your site’s metadata.
• Make sure that your usernames are the same on all social media. For example, if your handle is @CarrotRestaurant on Twitter and @CarrotDC on Instagram, pick one and use it across the board. Consistency is key for SEO.
• Keep social media accounts fresh. The fresher the content is, the better it’ll rank.
• Link to all your other accounts and websites on each one of your owned sites. Anywhere you can put a link to your other owned sites, you should. More backlinks will send strong trust signals to Google and help link your accounts together.

If you implement each of these techniques on all of your owned sites and social media accounts, it will help move them up the search results and help cement their positions high on the page.

3. Any positive links ranking that you do not own or control have a high Domain Authority and are linked to from your owned sites

If there are positive press pieces or positive review sites ranking in your search results and you want them to continue ranking, there are a few things you can do to make sure that happens.

The first thing to do is to check the site’s Domain Authority (DA) using a tool like Moz. If the site has a high DA, that means it’s trusted by Google and has a high likelihood of continuing to rank. In that case, there isn’t much you need to do. If the site has a low DA, that means it’s less trusted and at a higher risk for being pushed off the page by a potential future negative piece of content. To bolster a low-DA site and help keep it ranking, try to link to it from your owned sites. Creating more links to it might help increase the site’s DA, and it shows Google that it’s relevant to you.

If you’re worried about low-DA positives falling out of the search results, you could also try moving high-DA positives up to take their place. Adding links to those high-DA positives on your owned sites would help with that too.

Conclusion

If you can make sure these three things are true of your search results then you will have positioned yourself and your company or brand as best you can to withstand online reputation challenges. What did you think of my pointers? Did I miss any? Let me know in the comments below!

Preventative Online Reputation Management is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.