Spring is the season associated with deep cleaning and home renewal. If we credit the warmer weather and the longer days for this motivation, then perhaps it's wise to leverage these spring cleaning habits and tend to much-needed business management tasks. Online presence management requires some year-round attention, but certain tasks only need to be done once or twice a year.
If you've neglected your digital presence and it's affecting your bottom line, now is the time to audit this profile and make changes where necessary. By regularly keeping up on this maintenance, you can make your online reputation work for you, instead of against you.
Claim an Online Business Presence
One of the most important steps in online presence management is claiming available real estate. According to The Balance, this starts with claiming your Google My Business listing, which plays a critical role as one of the centerpieces of your online reputation. Beyond that, you need to own the domain names and social media handles for your brand. Otherwise, other competitors could claim them, eroding your ability to build a strong online brand.
Even if you haven't delved into emerging social platforms such as Snapchat or Instagram, it might be worth creating a business profile just so you have it for the future.
Update Directories
Business directories remain integral to how online consumers find businesses. These also impact your search engine optimization, and therefore your page rank in related online searches. Unfortunately, the information contained in these directories can change without notice, and for no apparent reason. In other cases, businesses that change their physical location or adjust their open hours may not have these changes reflected in directories.
You should routinely go through influential business directories to make sure recent changes have been updated. Even if nothing has changed of late, it's still wise to check your listings periodically to make sure information is accurate. Errors will alienate consumers and drive them to your competition, in addition to impacting your SEO.
Fine-Tune SEO
In addition to maintaining your presence in online directories, other SEO tweaks might be on tap. Because the rules of search engine algorithms are constantly changing, the best practices are different from one year to the next. Keywords should be updated, and you should add structured data tags to your site so Google can quickly identify and excerpt essential business information. Read up on recent changes to see how smaller features of your site, including mobile optimization, might affect SEO.
Publish New Content
One of the benefits of creating your own content is it influences your online reputation. It may not be logical, but many consumers are swayed by content even when they know it comes from a biased source. This means that your own created content can improve your reputation while drowning out potential negative influences. Once you've updated your SEO, consistent content creation can help elevate your brand in spring and beyond.
This housework isn't easy, but it's important to keep your company running on all cylinders, and make the most of online opportunities.
