Website reputation is crucial. When customers are evaluating a business, they generally look at three things: your website, your Google reviews, and what other businesses have to say about you. If you don’t have a good reputation online, you won’t get many customers. That’s why it’s important to monitor your website reputation. Here are some quick steps you can follow to check the reputation of your domain and improve it if needed.
Domain Reputation
A domain’s reputation is a crucial part of the brand’s identity. It has a direct impact on your brand’s online credibility and also affects the quality of website traffic you can get to your site.
If a website has a poor reputation, that doesn’t necessarily mean Google won’t index it. But that poor reputation will likely result in lower search engine rankings, making it less likely you’ll find the site when searching for something relevant to your search term.
When you have a good reputation, your readers are more likely to trust you. A great reputation can also lead to increased traffic and greater exposure for your brand.
Factors that can hurt your domain reputation
Your domain reputation is affected by several factors. These factors include the number of backlinks to your website, the number of good and bad reviews you have, the number of bad comments that are posted about you, and how many security flaws you have.
Additionally, especially if you are into email marketing, the following can negatively impact your domain’s reputation: when huge number of recipients of emails from your domain marking your email as SPAM, poor engagement rate, high bounce rate, if your IP or domain is blacklisted, and high numbers of unsubscribes.
Sometimes you might think you’re doing everything right and still not getting the results you want. If that’s the case, then you should consider checking your domain reputation.
Here is how to check your domain reputation
Checking your domain reputation is crucial to making sure that you’re not on a spam blacklist. If you have a spammy domain attached to your business, you will be negatively affected by that. You can’t control what other people say about you but you can control what you say about yourself by keeping your domain reputation squeaky clean.
If you don’t know what’s going on with the technical configurations and security aspects of your domain reputation, you could be losing a lot of business.
How to improve your domain reputation
Having a good domain reputation is more important than you might expect. Having a bad domain name, for example, can have an adverse effect on your online business and even lead to a decline in sales. If you want to avoid this, the first thing to do is check your domain reputation.
Things you can do to improve your Domain Reputation today
It’s no secret that ISPs, search engines, and ESPs are influenced by trust signals. In fact, it’s one of the most important ranking factors according to Google. So how do you improve your domain reputation? Below are some useful things you can do to improve your domain reputation in 2021:
Remove links from questionable sites
The first thing you should do if you’re having problems with your domain reputation is to check for bad links.
If you have a bad link on a website, that website could be penalised and your website will also be penalised. So if you want to improve your domain reputation, you will have to remove bad links.
After identifying websites with questionable reputation, go to Google Search Console and look under the disavow section. If there are any bad links to your domain, you should disavow them.
Provide really great content
If you want to improve your domain reputation, the best thing you can do is create really great content on your website. The more useful content you create, the better your site will be for search engines, and the more likely people will be to link to your content.
Secondly, your website is your online identity so it’s essential that you make a great first impression when someone lands on your website. They’re going to judge you on the quality of your content so make sure that your content is always up-to-date and relevant.
This should apply if you send out emails too.
If you’re running an email campaign and you want your customers to actually read your emails, then you need to make sure they’re really interesting and compelling. You need to be upfront and honest, and avoid being pushy or over-promotional.
The problem with most email copy is that it’s dull and boring. That’s why it’s so important to pay attention to the language you use in your emails. Always keep your copy short, punchy, and engaging. Keep your sentences short and to the point.
Take the time to make sure they are well-written and helpful. Your copy needs to be free of spelling and grammatical errors, and they should always be polite and respectful.
Whether emails or your website, no matter the means of communication, ensure your content is relevant and as personalized as can be to your audience.
Use Catchy Subject Lines (Emails) and Headlines (Website Content)
The goal here is to increase your click through rate (CTR).
One of the most popular ways to improve domain reputation is by increasing your click through rate. Click through rate is a metric used by search engines, and email service providers, to determine how relevant a website or email is to a user’s search query or recipient.
Track your mentions online
If you are a business and domain owner, it’s important to keep track of what people are saying about you online. For example, you need to know if people are saying positive things about you or if they are being critical. You need to respond to both by thanking customers for their positive feedback and engaging with them if they are critical. Use a brand monitoring tool to track any time your company, domain name, or name is mentioned online. You can receive alerts in your inbox or even have them sent to your mobile device.
Send email less frequently
Email marketing is arguably one of the most effective ways to reach your target audience. However, you need to know how to do it properly. And that’s where emailing frequency comes in. The problem is that many brands are sending too many emails to their subscribers. And that’s not good!
Sending too many emails is a sure-fire way to get your domain blacklisted. In fact, most email deliverability experts recommend sending no more than one email per day, and that’s for established brands. For a new business, sending even one email per day could be too much. The solution is to send less.
Clean up your email lists
If you’re trying to make sure you have a good domain reputation, you should clean up your email lists if your emails are going to all sorts of inactive addresses.
Furthermore, a poorly maintained email list leads to a lot of spam complaints. When there are a lot of spam complaints, it reflects poorly on you in the eyes of ISPs, ESPs and Google (Search Engines). If you don’t properly clean up your email lists, your domain’s reputation will suffer.
If you have purchased email lists, or have been sending emails to people who have not requested them, you’re going to have a bad time. If you have been sending emails to people who have not requested them, then you are spamming, and that is a very bad thing for your domain reputation.
Cleaning up your email lists means that you’ll be able to send out emails to people who actually want to hear from you, which will ultimately improve your domain reputation.
Add an unsubscribe option to your emails
If you give people the option to unsubscribe, they’ll be less likely to mark your email as spam, which will improve your domain reputation.
Equally important, provide an opt-out mechanism for each marketing email you send. It must be clear and easy to use, and it must be provided in every email you send. It also must allow the recipient to opt-out at any time, immediately, and on an ongoing basis.
This can be a simple checkbox at the bottom of an email that says “Unsubscribe me from this list”. In doing so, you won’t build up negative feedback or reviews from people who don’t want to be on your mailing list.
Final Words:
If you want to improve your domain reputation, then you need to be proactive, do your research, and have a plan to start working on your domain’s reputation as soon as possible. Don’t wait until it’s too late.
