Guest article provided by: reputableimage.com
We are more connected than we think
When you’re a small business just getting started building your online brand, it can be a common mistake to not give it enough importance. Just like you wouldn’t enter a store that looked like it hadn’t gotten maintenance in months, your online presence can hurt your business just as much if you aren’t taking the right steps.
So how to know whether your online presence is hurting or benefiting your business?
In my experience as a web developer, I’ve come to learn that though it may seem daunting, building an online brand isn’t as complicated as it may sound at first.
Allow me to share some of the indicators to signal when you should pay more attention to your online presence and how to get on the right path to making your brand stand out online.
1. When your most recent reviews online aren’t recent at all.
Have you checked your online reviews recently?
We’ve all been there — our day to day activities can get hectic at times when you have to manage a business: staff, providers, local or federal regulations — it’s tough work. In the midst of all of this, happy customers do business with you regularly but every once in a while somebody might have a negative experience while interacting with your business. Sadly for you, this one customer is much more likely to post about their experience online, where everyone can see. When this happens, do not panic! The first thing to do is to make sure you reply to that review in a way that will benefit your business. Owning up to a mistake, apologizing and offering compensation can be a great way to respond to negative reviews.
Now that the bad reviews have been taken care of, why not get in the habit of asking your satisfied customers to rate you on Yelp, or on Google? Surveys have found that your happy clients are WILLING to review you online if you just ask! Plus, they will feel even more connected to your business, since their personal experience will benefit others! Youtubers ask for likes all the time, and it works for them. Why not just ask?
2. When your social media accounts aren’t active
Great news! Experts agree that it doesn’t take much to achieve social media engagement — depending on the social media platform, around 1 to 2 posts a day is enough to keep your audience’s attention and traffic flowing.
This means you don’t have to bombard your followers with promotion after promotion, as quality will have a greater impact on them than quantity of posts. A though-provoking quote, a visually appealing image, or a creative video will work wonders for your social media presence.
3. When your website isn’t attracting new customers to your business.
Whether we like to admit it or not, everyone judges a book by its cover. This is especially true when it comes to judging a brand.
While your store might be your business’s physical presentation card, your website is the online one. One isn’t more important than the other, so working on one means working on the other. Consistency! Can you imagine Target’s website not being white and red?
But more than just making your website aesthetically match your physical store, it’s important to use professional design to ensure you’re looking as sharp as possible, so that people won’t get turned off by the book’s cover.
So now that you’re managing your online reviews, your social media presence and your website’s design has been polished, what else can you do to ensure customers’ trust online? A very important thing would be to bring your website to the front of searches made online.
To do this, you:
Implement SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Having an active SSL certificate, having a site map, making sure to add important keywords to your website’s description — all of these things optimize your website to appear on the first pages of search engines. After all, people do trust the first results on a search more than the rest.
Though SEO is a relatively extensive topic that would require a couple of articles to explain fully, the key takeaway is that if you are a small business website owner, the difference between having a successful website may very well lie in whether you’re implementing SEO or not.
Though it might seem daunting at first, following these guidelines isn’t complicated. Choose one aspect to tackle today and take it one step at a time. Your business wasn’t built in a day, so why should your online brand be?