What is the main difference between SEO and ORM?
SEO gets your website found for the things customers search when they do not yet know you, such as emergency plumber Bromley. ORM controls what they find when they search for you by name. They use the same tools, but SEO is about winning new customers and ORM is about not losing the ones who have already heard of you.
The overlap confuses people because both disciplines involve ranking pages on Google. The difference is the search. SEO targets queries about a service or a problem, where you are competing against every other business that does what you do. ORM targets queries that contain your name, where you are competing against every page that mentions you, including the ones you would rather nobody read.
That changes the tactics. In SEO the aim is to rank one great page as high as possible. In ORM the aim is often to rank many pages you control, your site, your profiles, your reviews, your listings, so that together they fill the first page for your name and leave no room for the result you are worried about.
They feed each other. Strong SEO builds exactly the kind of authoritative, well-linked site that also dominates a brand search. And a clean reputation lifts SEO, because customers who see good reviews click more often, and clicks and calls are signals Google notices.
For most small businesses the practical answer is to do the SEO work first and treat the brand search as a report card you check monthly. If something bad appears there, that is when reputation work starts in earnest.
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