We often work with clients who are very interested in how their company appears on the first page of Google search results. And rightly so. In today’s digital world, the first page of Google — and Google mobile search results especially in the retail and dining industries — is like gold.

Disciplines that claim a piece of the search engine results page (SERP) include online marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), public relations, website development and search engine optimization (SEO).

There are even companies who position their services as providing only reputation management, applying SEO and other tactics to help clients get the search engine results they want.

But beware.

We’ve all witnessed Google’s fondness for frequently changing its search algorithm, and the ambiguity and pure guesswork surrounding its secret sauce, as it were.

In our experience providing marketing services at Alexander’s, most SEO firms focus exclusively on one or two types of tactics to boost your first page search placement. The risk of putting all your eggs (and money) in one basket is that when Google changes its algorithm (and it will), you’ve got to then change gears — and there’s a chance what you’ve been doing will work against you.

So how do you win?

For many years, if we boil it down, we’ve seen Google search results based on a site’s page rank and quality, original content. The number of people who link to the content (think social media sharing) and the type of content that’s published, combined with the content’s timeliness (how recently it was published), has a great deal to do with what shows up on top.

Today, content that includes multimedia (like video, audio, images or graphics) typically has a leg-up on text-only content. Additionally, Google makes it easy to discover different types of content with its Web, Images, News, Shopping, Videos and other search tools in the sub-menu.

Google’s latest update gives some credence to local directory listings (check out HubSpot’s list of 50 local business directories) and appears to favor off-site hubs and portals that talk about your content, like BuzzFeed, Storify, Medium and Rebel Mouse. Maintaining content on those types of sites will help you expand your search results reach on page one and beyond.

We have also worked with clients to create keyword phrase specific websites or microsites — driven by WordPress, and where possible, located at a URL that includes your target keyword. For example, if our client were a divorce attorney in Salt Lake City, we’d look for a domain that included those keywords (‘divorce attorney salt lake city’) in the URL and ended in ‘.com,’ which continues to receive preferential treatment from Google, in part because it was first and remains most reputable.

However, the new gTLDs (generic top-level domains) that include options like .food, .nyc and .directory, will explode the possibilities online, and in the process, make search engines like Google that much more necessary, valuable and vital to locate exactly what you’re looking for.

The other thing you’ve got to pay attention to — especially given Google’s improved business platform, Google My Business — is Google Reviews. Get your advocates to sing your praises in a Google review, attached to their Google+ profile, and you’ll find those 5-star ratings showing up in every Google search result (mobile and map listings too). Studies show people purchase products and services from brands with more online reviews and higher marks. We recommend spelling out the online review options for your customers like we’ve done for ourselves here.

From our perspective, a reputation management strategy that includes securing good online reviews and focuses on producing quality original content in all its forms on multiple platforms — your own website, social media channels, bookmarking sites, and those off-site hubs and portals — is the best long-term approach to ensuring your place and reputation online.

If you’d like our help with reputation management or search engine optimization — and especially with developing and publishing quality original content (our forte) — we’d be happy to talk with you.