How to Improve The Website Reputation of Your Ecommerce Store

Your ecommerce website reputation is everything. A professional, reputable online store not only helps you build credibility with your customers, but it also ranks better with Google. This indicates that high-quality content will please the search engine and your customers.

When we talk about an ecommerce website’s reputation, we’re referring to how your customers view it and how Google views it. If you can please both, your website will perform strongly in the SERPs (search engine results page), drive more traffic and land more sales. All of that are a major foundations when it comes to scaling your ecommerce store.

In this article we’ll take a look at 5 ways you can improve your website’s reputation.

• 5 Tips For Improving The Website Reputation of Your ecommerce Store
  • Publish Valuable Content
  • Update Your Content
  • Launch a Guest Post Campaign
  • Use High-Quality Images
  • Improve Your Site Speed Load Time
• How to Improve Your Online Store’s Reputation: Final Thoughts

5 Tips For Improving The Website Reputation of Your ecommerce Store

1. Publish Valuable Content

User intent largely dictates your content calendar. What questions are your customers asking? What problems do they need to solve? What solution-oriented content as an ecommerce store can you offer?

It’s important to remember that your customers are on a journey. While they may be looking to make a purchase eventually, they’ll spend some time weighing up the pros and cons of buying from you and other brands. This is why you should sweeten things up with insanely valuable content that answers their questions in-depth. Valuable content is educational, easy-to-read, understandable, practical, and more than anything, helpful. It’s better than what your competitors are doing.

You can also share personal stories and experiences on your blog. One great example is the online cookware store GreatJones:

If a customer arrives on your website looking for help and all you’ve got for them is a sales pitch, they may head elsewhere.

What’s more, Google ranks valuable content highly. People are hungry for the kind of genuine content that can help them out. Plus, it significantly reduces your bounce rate. This is an essential ecommerce SEO practice, as it signals to Google that your website is helping people, and is therefore worthy of a higher ranking spot.

2. Update Your Content

Let’s imagine you published a piece of content a year ago. It performed quite well and you were pleased with it.

Now, it’s slipping down the rankings. How come?

Your content may now be out-of-date. In other words, you’re using outdated statistics, or maybe a claim that you made has since been proven wrong. Your content could also be no longer relevant or newsworthy, or it could be related to a product you no longer sell.

It’s a good idea to keep things fresh by reviewing and updating old content pieces. This will boost your reputation because you’ll be showing to both Google and your audience that you’re professional enough to stay up-to-date with things.

3. Launch a Guest Post Campaign

Guest posting (or guest blogging) is a content marketing tactic where you post content for other websites in order to get a backlink to your website. It works like this: you come up with a topic idea for a piece of content and then pitch it to websites in your niche that share the same audience as you. These websites must be authoritative and have a strong domain.

If a website accepts your pitch, you then write the article and they publish it under your name. As a reward for your work, you also include a backlink to your website in the content.

The purpose here is twofold. For one thing, the backlink drives more natural traffic to your site. And because it’s coming from an authoritative website, it’s passing on lots of link juice to you. This is good in the eyes of Google and will help to reinforce your ranking position.

Secondly, you’ll be promoting your brand to a wider audience who get to access your content from a website they already trust. If a customer trusts the referral website, there’s a chance they’ll trust yours.

The key to successful guest posting is writing high-quality content that’s not overly promotional. You can discuss things related to your niche and products and demonstrate how people can solve problems. You can also link back to your website. But you should always put value first and sell last.

There are numerous websites that accept ecommerce guest blogs including Web Retailer. You just need to pop over to their website and look for a “write for us” section (or something similar):

4. Use High-Quality Images

Humans are visual people who like to see images on websites. Images break up the text and they bring your words to life.

To improve your website’s reputation, it’s essential you only use high-quality images to advertise your products. This means using images:

• With the correct dimensions
• That are relevant to your content
• That are not stock images

Using high-quality images is, however, just one part of the puzzle. For SEO reasons and to improve your reputation with Google, you should optimize your images with alt tags.

What are alt tags? Alt tags briefly describe what an image is about. This is really helpful for Google, as well as any site visitors for whom an image has failed to load.  For example, the image below might have the alt tag “men’s black faux leather jacket.”

5. Improve Your Site Speed Load Time

Do you know how quickly (or slowly) your ecommerce website loads? If you don’t, this is something you need to check ASAP.

Research shows that metrics like conversion rates and customer satisfaction plummet if a website takes too long to load. “Too long” is generally considered to be anything over 3 seconds. But if you can get your site load speed to load faster than 2 seconds, that would be excellent.

To test your site speed, you can use free site speed testers.

Here are some tips to improve your site speed load time:

• Compress your images
• Eliminate redirects
• Reduce server response time

It’s also important that you improve site speed load time for both the desktop version of your website and the mobile version.

How to Improve Your Online Store’s Reputation: Final Thoughts

These are 5 essential ways to improve your ecommerce website’s reputation. By implementing these strategies, you will improve the customer experience, which can lead to an increased presence on Google, as well as an increase in sales.

Consistency is the key to everything. By regularly posting valuable content, monitoring your site speed, adding high-quality images and launching a strong guest post campaign, you can improve your online reputation, cement it and position yourself as the go-to online store that ranks highly on Google.