You must make sure that your website aids your online reputation. Otherwise, this will only serve as a liability in solidifying your brand identity. It needs to look professional and up-to-date. An outdated website will make your target customers perceive you as a shady company. You should also have a bunch of tools at your disposal. For instance, you must have software that checks that all the links are working. This is the fundamental part of your website reputation management.
A Complete Guide to Website Reputation Management
Your website reputation affects your business in things you may not imagine. For instance, this can influence the public’s perception. This will also dictate your ranking on the search engine result. A reputable and credible website will foster trust between you and your customer.
When we mention website reputation, this relates to how the customers see your website and how the Google spiders see it. If you address both requirements, you can expect higher organic traffic and an increase in sales. Here’s how to do it.
Publishing Valuable Content
When you have a website for your business, understand that your customers must go through a journey before you can successfully transform them into paying customers. Before choosing your business as their provider, customers must first weigh the advantages and disadvantages. You can speed things up by introducing valuable content. It must be easy to read, educational, practical, and understandable.
How Do You Define a Valuable Content?
There are various ways to determine if your content is valuable, which will help in your website reputation lookup. Here are some of them.
- It must address your audience’s pain points- Valuable content offers solutions to the pain points of your target market. Start by determining the common issues of your audience and develop content that relieves their pain.
- It answers frequently asked questions- There are questions that you will often encounter. Creating content that tackles that subject will help your audience and make the lives of your customer support team easier.
- It should be relevant- The content needs to be updated. Understand that the market can change without warning. Things that worked yesterday may not necessarily be practical today. Your audience should also find it relevant.
- It must be relatable and entertaining- If your content sounds too serious, your audience will quickly get bored. Therefore, try to curate content that they will find informative, engaging, and relatable.
Updating Old Content for Website Reputation
If you have been managing your website reputation for a year now, there’s a chance that you have created a couple of pieces of content. Therefore, you should not simply focus on creating new content but also on updating and promoting your old content.
Perhaps you published unique content a year ago, but recently you noticed how the ranking is quickly slipping. This is a sign that your content is outdated. The statistics or information you added here is not newsworthy or relevant.
Make it a habit to check the freshness of your content. Doing so will help your website reputation management since you will appear prominently on Google search results. The audience will assume you are credible enough to discuss this subject.
How to Choose Which Content to Update to Boost Website Reputation?
We understand that it can be challenging to find content that you will update if you have hundreds of articles on your blog. Start by looking for the content that used to receive high engagement. Look for the data and information you’ve added here and replace them with the most recent information.
Before, long paragraphs were effective, but today, it is recommended to have around 2-3 sentences in each section. SEO practices that you applied here may also be outdated. You could be stuffing it with keywords that no longer work.
Remember that Google is constantly updating its algorithm; therefore, you must also update your web content.
Guest Posting Campaign
Another method you must add to your website reputation management is launching a guest posting campaign. Also known as guest blogging, this is creating content for another website. You are probably wondering why you should give them free content.
Well, this has various benefits, especially if you are starting. These websites were already in business long before you began yours. Therefore, they have collected a bunch of audiences; some could be interested in your brand.
In addition, you can also add a hyperlink that directs back to your website. This will serve as a healthy backlink that improves your website’s reputation.
What is the Secret to a Successful Guest Posting Campaign?
Developing content that does not sound too promotional is key to ensuring that your guest posting campaign will succeed. Focus more on making this informative and engaging. You can create content that focuses on your niche and discuss a problem and solutions to deal with it.
Remember that you should constantly develop web content that offers something with value. Various websites provide guest posting, which will boost your website reputation lookup. However, it would be best to choose a complementary website.
For instance, if you are into real estate, you can leave a guest post on a moving company website. Make sure that this website has a high page and domain authority. It should also appear prominently on specific keywords.
Choosing the Images to Use to Improve Website Reputation
The images you will add to your website are equally crucial for your website reputation treatment. Understand that most of your audience will heavily rely on visuals. Also, it serves as a break from the long and chunky text. It helps in adding life and substance to your content.
Images are also critical if your business heavily relies on visuals such as cars, photography, flower shops, travels, cakes and pastries, interior design, house remodeling, etc. Your website will improve its reputation when you choose high-quality images.
This means that you need a picture with the proper dimensions. You should also add images that are relevant to the content. It would be better if this is not a stock image, primarily if you use it for your branding strategy.
Remember, there’s a chance that other companies have already used it if you opt for a stock image.
What Other Things Should I Consider When Using an Image
Remember that a high-quality image is just a tiny fraction of the website reputation management strategy. Understand that Google spiders cannot interpret the images. Therefore, you will have to use alt tags for SEO purposes.
Alt tags are things that describe what the image is about. This will not only be helpful for Google. If the image fails to load, the audience can still determine what the image is about if it has an alt tag.
Loading Speed of Your Site
If you don’t know how quickly or slowly your website will load, it might be the best time to check it. There’s a chance that it could be hurting your website reputation. The research released by Kibo shows that customer satisfaction and conversion rates sharply decrease if the website loading takes too long. The ideal loading speed of the website would be within 2 seconds.
How Should I Improve the Loading Speed of my Website?
Some online tools will help you check the loading speed of your website. Additionally, they can help you determine the things hurting your loading speed. Find a way to reduce the response time of the server. You should also try to compress the image and remove all the redirects. It is imperative to keep the loading speed to a minimum on your website’s desktop and mobile versions.
Check the Reviews
Receiving positive reviews is just a fraction of the whole website reputation management strategy. Remember that collecting good reviews to hide the negative ones can harm your reputation. Consumers are slowly becoming more proficient in determining authentic and fake reviews.
It is easy for consumers to be turned off by fake and paid reviews. Therefore, it is always best to go for an organic way of boosting your website’s reputation. According to research, 85% of consumers trust online reviews like it is personal recommendations. Around 49% of the buyers will choose a business with at least a 4-star rating.
What Are Things to Remember in Online Reviews?
When receiving positive reviews, you should not only focus on your website. We understand that you want your website to improve its reputation. However, you should remember that the listing sites also have a website reputation. Investing all your efforts in Yelp will not help you if your target audience treats this website with skepticism. Aim to achieve diversity; remember that your target audience will use multiple sources to verify your company’s reputation.
- Authenticity Matters- People will likely create a positive impression about your website and company if you have an honest review. Remember that this is also necessary to provide them with manageable expectations and avoid disappointments. When collecting reviews, be sure to allow only those people who actually used your brand. Ask them what they particularly love about your service or product.
- Continue Collecting Reviews- Know that most reviews will only appear in the search result for a limited time frame. Therefore, it only makes sense to post frequently to maintain your website’s reputation.
The latest trend in web design is to create long pages wherein users can scroll down to cover everything the website can offer. Your home page will serve as your index to your website’s content. However, the infinite scrolling of your webpage will not always benefit you or your visitor.
Information overload can overwhelm your audience, and there will be different subjects that can harm your SEO efforts and your website reputation. Some of your audience will also not bother to scroll down to the bottom of your page.
Your web loading speed will be longer if you create a more extended home page. As mentioned above, your audience might consider leaving if it takes longer than 2 seconds to load.
If someone is looking for a specific subject and overlooks them, it will be difficult for them to find the information to look for it. If the contact information is located on the webpage’s footer, not many people will find it.
Nonetheless, there are also instances when infinite scrolling might work, such as on social media, product lists, or forum sites. However, for a standard business page, it works to have a brochure-type with several pages.
It Needs to Appear, Professional,
Your website will serve as the face of your company online. If you have a poor website reputation, then you will also suffer. Once your audience lands on your website, they need to see your website as professionally designed and intelligent.
It needs to list the information they need. You should also create an updated design. Understand that there will be trends in the creation of the website. It was customary to have a left-handed menu and a long copy during the early years.
Then web designers started making hamburger menus. The subtle changes to your website can make it look modern and stylish.
Create a Page that is Easy to Understand
It is also best to create a webpage that will be easy to understand. Your website is not a place where you must be cryptic. You need to give them a clear and powerful headline that will give them an idea of what they can get from your company.
Nowadays, the attention span of people is quickly reducing. You must guarantee that the message will promptly be delivered to your target audience. You should never assume that people will try to find the necessary information.
It must be served directly to them. They want to choose an option that will not strain their brain.
Your website reputation management is just a fraction of your whole online reputation, but this is where reputation repair starts. As mentioned above, this will serve as the face of your company. This is where your audience will gather information about your company. You want to ensure that the abovementioned thing is applied to your company design.
Tags: reputation management