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In this digital day and age, online brand reputation is absolutely everything. Not only does your digital footprint attract new audiences and traffic to your site, but the right online reputation will help you convert this traffic into paying customers.
Some brands have spent hundreds and thousands on building their online brand, and years refining it. Others, on the other hand, have just put a few, affordable measures in place and developed an outstanding reputation among visitors and customers alike.
So, with this in mind, we thought we would take a look at some of the more achievable and affordable ways of refining your online brand. A few of them might take concerted effort and work, while some are simple adjustments that can make a significant difference.
A few years ago, your levels of social media success were highly dependent on the number of followers you had, or how many likes and comments you were getting on posts.
Nowadays, those metrics have fallen away, and brands are more concerned with the actual quality of the people behind the numbers. The cold facts are that likes do not translate into sales. You can have thousands of followers, but if they are not qualified, potential customers, they might as well not be there.
So, how do you rectify this? First, start creating content that you want paying customers to see. What will be of interest to them? What will educate and entertain them? Once you start posting and targeting with that kind of content, you will see real, interested people start following you and actually coming through to your site to make purchases.
Next, don’t be afraid to ask for help. If you are mostly using Instagram, for example, there are a number of useful tools that can help you to organically grow Instagram followers and ensure that these followers actually fall within your targeted customer profiles.
With the right audience, high levels of engagement, and high-quality content going out, you should be able to create an engaged and active community on your social platforms.
Know Everything About Your Webpage and Name Before Launching Your Brand
Some companies might be launching a brand new website with a brand new name. Some might be buying over another company with an existing domain and website, while others might be launching a new site and purchasing an old, unused domain.
Before you take anything further, it is somewhat critical to your brand to have an understanding of what it was before you bought the domain. Do some due diligence into the domain name if you are buying that. If you are buying a full website, make sure you do a deep dive into it to understand what went on before you bought it. The previous owners could have built up a bad reputation with the name, and you will not want your brand associated with that before even getting started.
Luckily, there are some great tools that allow you to do some research into domain histories and sites. One such tool is the WhoIs History API which allows you to explore domain ownership records in a simple and easy way. With this, you will be able to obtain every record for a domain name that you’re investigating, ever since the first time it was registered.
Refine Your Link Building Strategies
Link-building is a vital component of SEO. You will notice when you are going through your SEO exercises that you are requested to include various internal and external links. Including these links can be quite easy, what gets trickier is other sites linking back to you.
So, essentially, Google will crawl your site to pick up the relevant keywords and links that appear on your site. They need to know where to categorize you and how to rank you compared to your competitors on search results.
The quality of your keywords is one thing, but the quality of the sites that you are linking to and that are linking back to you is another. If you are associating with non-authoritative sites, Google will immediately place you on the same level as them.
So, how do you build up these relationships with other sites for link building? The best solution is content, and in particular, well-written and educational blog posts. These can be shared to various other sites, like industry news sites, partners, and even competitors, in some cases, as a content-sharing partnership.
Ask Your Customers for Reviews
The last piece of advice, which can be somewhat easy to achieve is by asking your customers to review your products. Whether they are reviewing them on a site like Amazon, or on your product pages, positive reviews do wonders for your brand and reputation.
Once other visitors see that you are gaining positive feedback from paying customers and that they are satisfied with the products, they are more likely to convert.
You can try incentivizing customers to provide feedback if you are struggling, but a lot does happen organically.
Last Thoughts
In conclusion, be as organic as you can. Spend time on audiences who are actually likely to convert and spend money to market to an audience who fits your target market. Your online reputation can easily be damaged, so spend time building relationships with your affiliates, your community, and potential customers.
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