Your website is one of the most powerful tools your business has at its disposal. Attracting new clients, supporting your current clients, and building your brand are just a few of the things your website can do for your business. However, arguably the most important thing your website can do for your business is build and develop your reputation. Here are a few ideas on how to use your website to better build and maintain a positive reputation for your business. 

Create a Clean Design

The look and feel of your website will be attributed, whether fairly or unfairly, your business directly. This means that having a sloppily designed or poorly designed website will not be brushed off by potential customers and clients, but rather will appear to be a direct reflection of your values as a business. By ensuring that your website is well-designed and sleek, you will have anyone visiting your website associating those qualities with your business – which will make clients and customers happy. Care in your website design indicates that your business takes care of details and cares about presentation. 

Add Relevant Information

Everyone has run into issues with a company or business that doesn’t make relevant information easy to access. Things that should be simple and easily located like business hours or address information can be hidden or missing from poorly built business websites. Make sure that your website makes this kind of information readily available to viewers and easy to locate. You should also have contact info readily available to website viewers, with a phone number and email address for people to direct questions and inquiries towards. Having this information on your website helps viewers build trust and confidence in your business. 

Make it Easy to Contact You

There are few things as frustrating as being completely unable to reach out to a business through their website because they don’t include any sort of contact information. When a business tries to hide its contact info from the public, people take notice, and know that it is for a reason. If people don’t want to be contacted, they must know that people will want to contact them, usually about a problem, and they don’t want to be bothered by it. This is not the kind of reputation you want for your business; you want to be known as a business that puts customers first and values their satisfaction. So please, put your contact info on there, and make it easy to find. 

Secure Your Website

The last thing you want is to be the target of a cyberattack and have a leak of sensitive data from your customers. Cybersecurity is an essential for your website to avoid building a reputation as a business that doesn’t protect private data. This often happens because business owners who don’t know IT try to take on online tasks that they do not have the expertise to take care of. Outsourcing IT services can help you focus on what you know how to do best at your business. It can also keep your IT services in the hands of professionals who can protect and secure your website in the best possible way to instill confidence in your clients and customers. 

Start a Business Blog

You want to develop a relationship with the people who visit your website. And an essential part of building that relationship is offering a wealth of information and advice to your website visitors. And a great way to get this information to your website in a conversational and friendly way is starting a business blog on your website. You can publish articles written by yourself on topics related to your business endeavors to share your expertise and build a relationship with the people who visit your website. Developing a relationship as a business that shares their expertise and wants to see their customers and clients get the most out of your business is an essential advantage of a business blog on your website. 

Get Active on Social Media

This is another extension of the last tip, but social media is a great way to get involved in conversations with people who have an interest in your business. Staying active on social media, sharing business updates, engaging with customer and client questions and comments, and offering business related thoughts and pictures helps viewers see your business as a positive force. People want to engage with businesses that care about the consumer and stay involved in the world of their supporters. So, get on social media and see what kind of buzz you can create. 

Link Your Online Accounts

When it comes to your website, you are likely not just dealing with the website, but blogs, websites, social media accounts, Wikipedia pages, outsourced articles, news articles, press releases, etc. The worst thing you can do is not take full advantage of those online sources by not linking them together. Make sure you link to these different online sources for business with each other. Your blogs should link to your social media which should link to press releases which should link to your website which should link to your blog etc. etc. There is no such thing as too much linking. This will help viewers see that you have a wide network online which builds trust. 

Keep it Simple

While there may seem like a lot of new things to take on when you read this list, the last piece of advice should help you stay calm – just keep things simple. While there may be a lot of avenues that should be pursued, you only need to focus on what your business does across all platforms. Don’t try to extend yourself to topics or areas that have nothing or little to do with your business. Stick to what you know, and your reputation will benefit. 

Developing a strong reputation for your business is essential to growing business and sales. And your website can be a key player in guiding your reputation towards a trustworthy and positive light. Follow these eight tips and you are setting your website up to be a useful tool to develop a good public reputation.

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