6 Ways to Improve Your Business’s Online Reputation

In the digital world of the internet, every business is struggling to get noticed. Your own business cannot be the different. The level of success your online business gets is directly proportional to its online reputation. With millions of players out there in the digital marketing world, it is really very important for the success of your business if you can deliberately do some things online to enhance its reputation. These things are not just related to your website alone but also to review sites and directories as well. Online, any site that has some basic information about your business no matter how little has some kind of influence on your online reputation. This is why when it comes to the internet, business details are key to your reputation. Your business cannot afford to have even one bad review or inconsistent/inaccurate directory information which can negatively influence customers’ impression about the business.



These here 6 ways are highly recommended by expert marketers as potent ways to enhance your business reputation online.

1. Identify and Fix Major Errors

If you’ve been in business for a while, because of human frailties and activities, it is fairly common to have a few changes here and there leading to some information inaccuracies. You can periodically go over your website to fix errors relating to changes in contact addresses, emails, phone numbers or any obvious misspelling of any vital information you provided earlier. This is necessary to avoid hurting your Google Local listing. In addition, you can take a bit of time to check all links to your website with a view to confirming if they’re all functional and directing visitors to the right pages as expected. This is very important because broken or lost links automatically translates to lost traffic, lost opportunities and lost revenue.

2. Periodically Audit Your Online Business Info

Time changes, so are things particularly information relating to your business. Nothing in the digital marketing world remains static for too long. Things change with time and circumstances and your business must be fully prepared for it. To test if your business is visible online, you can on your own search your business name on Google. The results you get can be highly informative for you to know what to rejig, correct, redirect or place better to enhance better search results. From this internal audit, it is easy for you to discern how easily your potential customers can find information about you and your business online. The easier it is to find your business online, the higher its online reputation and visibility.

3. Get Your Business Listed on Directories

Getting your business listed in online business directories is one great way to improve visibility for the business. These directories are very effective ways/places to spread the word and to connect with prospective customers who habitually use these directories to find what they want online. For many customers seeking to do business online, directories are favorite spots where they commence their searches. Having your business listed on these directories helps to confirm your professionalism in online business. That helps your business reputation in no small measure.

4. Create a Unique Digital Brand

A unique digital brand online is not just about your business name, address and contact information. It is much more than that. It involves everything that tends to stand your business out among the whole lot to make it easily recognizable by your customers and potential customers. It takes very deliberate efforts to design your website to make it unique and easily recognizable. With the use of your web designer Style Guide, you can on your own tinker with font sizes, colors, background and general appearance which help its uniqueness. Your business online reputation is greatly enhanced when it manages to stand out uniquely online for easy identification and recognition. Make sure your brand logo and brand colors match your website design and are used consistently anywhere your business is listed or merely mentioned in all industry directories and social media. All ads banners must be carefully selected to match the design and styling of your website with the same branding colors. Any changes you make after this unique design must be well aligned with the design you’ve chosen for the business and this must be done across all boards/platforms where your business information can be found.



5. Encourage Customers’ Online Reviews

Experienced marketers never cease to emphasize the huge importance of customer feedback in online business. Apart from the huge influence of reviews on referrals, they also help to influence search ratings. Online marketers have since discovered that reviews on Google can directly improve your SEO listings. In addition, responding to customers’ reviews help to boost your trust factor and online reputation. Asking for reviews from customers is about the best way to get them. Making it seamlessly easy for customers to provide reviews is one great way to enhance the process.

6. Promote your Business on Social Media

These days, social media is practically where everyone is at 24/7 around the world. Because of the huge popularity of social media, getting your business on the platforms greatly helps its online reputation. It is easy and free to create accounts in the most popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram and you start to immediately promote your business to a very huge audience around the world. With the ease of use and sharing of information on social media, important business information can easily go viral. That helps to quickly build brand awareness for your business. It is also one very good and dependable way to drive organic traffic to your business. In fact, anything you manage to get social media to do for your business is a win-win situation for attracting inbound traffic to the business.

 

Digital Marketers' Most Popular Digital Marketing Formats

Marketers who have unfettered access to the internet from a computer, smartphone, or any other connected device can easily get involved with digital marketing. They need digital marketing for their advertising and other business promotional activities on the internet. The concept of digital marketing has grown over time to include a wide variety of activities, platforms, and methods that can help marketers succeed in their online businesses in our increasingly connected world of the internet. Digital marketers depend on various content formats to get out their promotional messages on the internet. Before deciding on which of the popular formats to adopt for your own marketing efforts, there is a need to research your audience and determine what they are most likely to favorably respond to.



The most popular of these formats are:

Graphic/Display Ads

Graphic ads are carefully designed and attention-grabbing visual ads popular among digital marketers because of their effectiveness in advertising. The graphics in them are purposefully designed to effectively capture viewers’ attention even when they convey only some small amount of information. They are effective at arousing curiosity and encouraging viewers to click on the ads to get more information. That way, they greatly help to boost brand recognition and reputation online. They can be interspersed with video clips and other online content for better effects. Even if used directly on a website or used on social media platforms, the effects of the graphics help capture readers’ attention for the benefit of the promotional efforts.

Video Content

Now that major search engines have found a way to index videos online, they have become very effective promotional materials for online marketers.  When used on extreme popular online video platforms like YouTube, video content has become increasing popular with digital marketers. With the increasing popularity and prevalence of sharing videos on social media platforms and other places online, video content is now a significant and dependable marketing ally for major players in the Internet marketing world. Irrespective of the type of internet business you are involved with, you can deliberately shoot short marketing videos, teaching videos, fun videos and introductory how-to videos about any particular task or product of your choice. Such videos help to promote in no small measure, such businesses effectively.

Textual Content

This is about the most popular promotional format popular with digital marketers. Anyone who knows how to write a message or a description can promote with textual content. That is the real reason textual content now accounts for a majority of the digital marketing efforts used around the world today. When crafted professionally, textual content can be very effective as website page content, blog posts, social media posts, PPC ads, email marketing and much more. The effect of textual content is more and better if it is optimized for search engines. What that means is that, for every piece of text you use in your overall promotion strategy, it should include proper SEO and valuable information or solutions your reading audience really needs. These actions somehow have the effect of acting as some sort of cold actions which help to draw the attention of your reading audience closer to the end goal which in this case is a click, a lead and or purchase.