Maintaining a good reputation is essential to your business’s success. People trust online reviews almost as much as they do reviews from their friends and family. However, if you’re just getting started with your business or you’ve never paid much attention to your online reviews, it can be difficult to know where to start. Fortunately, Google provides input for how you can build your business’s reputation and trust. 

With these top tips from Google in hand and the Performance Driven Marketing online reputation management professionals on your side, you can show customers that you’re legitimate and provide quality work so that you can grow your business. Let’s get into it. 

#1. Maintain A Consistent Identity

If your business’s name and branding varies depending on the platform, this decreases customer trust. Even something like “The ‘Your Business Name’” versus “Your Business Name” can make people wonder which is legitimately you and question why there are discrepancies. 

As such, you want to ensure that your business name and branding is consistent across all platforms. If there are discrepancies, this can cause people to wonder if it’s really your account or to think that your business is neither legitimate nor trustworthy. A consistent identity is both easier to maintain and makes a better impression, improving your business’s online reputation and making you more trustworthy to potential customers. 

#2. Claim And Verify Your GMB

GMB stands for Google My Business. This is a free tool Google provides that lets you manage your business’s online presence, such as with search, maps, viewing and responding to customer reviews, and more. It allows you to keep your online information accurate and up-to-date. It provides you with insight about how many people are viewing your profile, asking for directions to your business, and more, giving you information about your online reputation and how it can be improved.

While many businesses focus on social media like Facebook and Instagram, Google My Business is more important than any of those to build your business’s reputation and increase potential customers’ trust. 

#3. Be Upfront With Your Customers

Be transparent with your customers about how you run your business, your services, your policies, and the like.

No one likes having to come through a website to try to find shipping information or pricing or the like. Being transparent with your customers is key to building your business’s credibility. There are many companies that don’t want to list the pricing of their services on their website. If this is you, make sure that you state customers should call for pricing information so that they know you’re not trying to hide this information and spring massive bills on them. 

Ensure that you know what is standard for your industry. If having prices on your site is industry standard for what you do, ensure that you keep these up to date, as customer opinion of your business will drop drastically if they think your prices are what they say on your site only to be told otherwise.

#4. Have Professional Designs

The look and feel of your website and social media platforms has a significant impact on what potential customers think about your business. The sleeker and more professional your designs, the better impression you make and the more likely it is that people will want to work with your business.

If your current website isn’t very professional looking, you can have it redone. Performance Driven Marketing can help you take your site to the next level with custom designs and content that can help attract business. They have beautiful pictures and layout, easy navigation, and content that suits your business, be that more casual or more professional.

#5. Manage Your Online Reputation

Encourage your customers to leave reviews. Most people are happy to provide reviews when asked, and many will freely give reviews if you wowed them with your service – or if they were horrified by it. Don’t buy reviews, as fake reviews lower customer trust. If you get bad reviews, don’t delete them, as this can also negatively affect your business’s reputation.

Rather, if you get a bad review, you should thank the person for leaving a review and politely address their concerns. If you need help with responding to bad reviews, having reputation management professionals in your corner can help immensely.

Performance Driven Marketing provides all sorts of online marketing services, including reputation management. Contact us today to learn more about our services and let us help you make your business shine.

The purpose of a website is to reach as many people as possible to get your message across. With 25% of adults in the U.S. experiencing a disability, be it auditory, visual, physical, or cognitive, that goal is only achieved when all of us make an effort to improve accessibility of our sites.

Web accessibility is about designing and developing sites, tools, and technologies that can be enjoyed by 100% of internet users, so the suggestions we make here will not only improve your site’s accessibility for those with disabilities but will also make visiting the site more enjoyable to all users. If you make an effort to apply them, you can increase your reach, improve user experience, express your commitment to inclusivity, and avoid legal snags.

As you optimize your website to improve accessibility, seek the counsel of those who live with disabilities to test your site. This can accurately inform your changes and improve overall user experience.

Make Your URLs Descriptions Descriptive

Before users even get to your website, they have to find it. Many users with visual impairments rely on screen readers to read out which sites have the answers to their questions or the products they are looking for. You can help your site to rank better by giving your content more descriptive URLs.

For example, https://www.performancedrivenmarketing.com/4-ways-to-spot-great-web-design/ is a more descriptive URL than https://www.performancedrivenmarketing.com/web-design/

Organize Your Content

No one wants to read an article that is full of big blocks of wordy text. This is the age of quick information retrieval, and the human attention span is shrinking to mirror the speed of search engines. You can improve accessibility and generally make your site easier to digest by keeping paragraphs and pages succinct. 

Use clear section headings to help users find the information they are looking for readily. It is also usually a good idea to leave off industry-specific jargon or colloquialisms if you are writing general web content. Keep the language simple and easily digestible.

Enable Adjustable Font Sizing

While large font sizes tend to clutter a site, some users need them to access the information presented. The solution to this dichotomy is to add a text-resizing tool that allows users to choose for themselves just how large text is displayed on their screens. In addition to this method to improve accessibility, make sure your website works at different browser zoom levels.

Optimize Contrast on the Page

The contrast between elements on your page enables users to receive the information you put out. This is why it is important to incorporate foreground and background elements with high contrast. Avoid using thin fonts or coding features such as JavaScript or CSS that prevent visually impaired users from increasing contrast levels.

Be mindful of the color palettes you employ. Black text on a white background offers the best contrast for those who suffer from visual impairments involving low color contrast sensitivity, conditions such as cataract, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, and retinitis pigmentosa. Avoid using combinations of red and green, which are indistinguishable for colorblind users.

Steer clear of bright colors that are too intense for those with high photosensitivity. It is also unwise to make the most important elements in your site too heavily color reliant. These principles apply to images as well as to text.

Incorporate Alt Text with Your Images

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but only if they can be clearly viewed. Digital elements like images prove problematic to users who have vision-based disabilities. Screen readers and online Braille readers help such users access text by using synthesizers or Braille displays. Unfortunately, these resources can do very little to elucidate online images. 

The Alt Text option for your website’s images is an excellent tool to improve image accessibility. Synthesized readers can pick up the descriptions included there as ordinary text. This ability makes it important for content creators to make their alt text as descriptive as possible to give visually impaired users the full experience. The “Longdesc Tag” function is even better for lengthy descriptions. Use tables appropriately.

Improve Accessibility of Video and Audio

If images are a challenge for visually-impaired users, video and audio content prove to be such for the hard of hearing. You can improve accessibility of video and audio in two ways: transcripts and closed captioning. 

A transcript captures all the audio of a media file into text description while closed captions appear on a video as it plays. Closed captioning can include things other than true speech, such as descriptions of laughter or sighs and scoffs. Be mindful of the contrast between text and the video behind, and remember that auto-generated closed captions are not always accurate. Add your own to properly convey your message.

To make your site accessible to those with visual impairments, consider adding audio descriptions as companions to videos. These shouldn’t be overly long, but they can be helpful in conveying gestures, visual aids, and changes in setting to those who cannot see them.

Utilize Keyboard Navigation

Navigating with a mouse is not a viable option for those who cannot see. These users rely on keyboard shortcuts to navigate websites. In order to improve accessibility, all interactive elements of your site (drop-down menus, forms, dialog boxes, widgets, URLs, etc.) should be accessible via the keyboard.

Anchor text or buttons like “Click Here” or “Read More are unhelpfully undescriptive and should be avoided. However, directional cues are helpful additions for those with cognitive impairments, new internet users, and those who are not very tech savvy. To further improve clickless navigation, enable text-to-speech navigation.

Social media is among the most popular and effective ways for people to stay connected. With its ever-growing popularity and ever-changing strategies, running an effective social media account can be difficult. One way to simplify social media is to know whether your primary goal with it is engagement or SEO.  

Why Does Your Business Need Social Media?

A strong social media profile can boost the rest of your digital marketing efforts. While social media isn’t a ranking factor, the benefits of social media can still reflect upon your SEO efforts. Social media accounts affect the reputation of your business. Not having them or not managing them well can cause your business’s reputation to fall, while managing them well can increase visibility and potentially business.

Regardless of whether you wish to use social media more for engagement or for SEO purposes, people look to your social media accounts for an idea of your business. 

If you do not have social media or you do not maintain the accounts you do have, this can give the impression that your business is not “with the times”. If you have social media accounts that you abandoned, this can cause people to speculate that something happened. 

However, if you have well-maintained social media accounts, this gives you the opportunity to establish your brand, manage your online reputation, and give your company more traffic.

What Is Using Social Media For Engagement?

When you use social media for engagement, your goal is to engage with people. Some people and businesses thrive in the social media realm here.

You likely have a few influencers or brands in mind – social media accounts focused on creating an experience for viewers, engaging with people who interact with their content, and building relationships- perhaps that one clothing brand that really knows its niche and goes all in or how popular fast-food chains have snappy online personalities and get into it with each other, to the delight of all.

Businesses focused on using social media for engagement tend to craft a specific voice and personality. Their content gives viewers the chance to contribute and be recognized, such as by asking questions in captions. It builds awareness and trust and engages with the customer in a way that leads them to use the brand’s services. 

What Is Using Social Media For SEO?

While some people and businesses fit right into the niche of using social media for engagement, it’s not for everyone. Other businesses prefer to use their social media more for SEO purposes. What this means is that they use their social media in order to bolster content from their website. Rather than focusing on customer engagement, they focus on content promotion. 

For example, if you wrote a blog, you could then link to your blog across your social media, adjusting to each platform accordingly. This spreads the distribution of the blog, gathering more interest. If people share and link to it, this can increase awareness and traffic and improve your SEO.

Many businesses prefer using social media for SEO as opposed to engagement. This is especially true for smaller businesses or for businesses that would rather have customers call them and schedule appointments rather than try to maintain an online personality.

Social media for SEO can help in a variety of ways, such as:

• Boosting your content
• Increased opportunities for backlinks
• Ranking for search terms
• Increased site traffic
• Building trust
• And more!

Social Media And Your Reputation As A Business

Depending on the type of business that you run, how you operate, and how you would like to be perceived, you may prefer using your social media for engagement or you may prefer to use your social media for SEO. Whatever you choose, it’s important to remember that social media plays a major role in your reputation as a business.

Professional Reputation Management

Performance Driven Marketing offers social media management along with our online reputation management services. We can help you manage your social media for SEO and ensure that your business is presented in a positive, trustworthy light online. We can also help you with other aspects of reputation management, such as responding to reviews.

In addition to reputation management, we provide a wide range of digital marketing services, from SEO to content writing to graphic design and more. Contact us today to schedule your free consultation and let us help you get the results you need.