A well-reputed domain name is the best asset for a website, and today’s post will teach you how to make your domain more credible and authoritative. So grab a coffee and read on.
Having a domain with a poor reputation is as much a challenge as having a brand new website – you’re going to have to deal with numerous problems and obstacles. Regardless of whether your domain is new, or has been around for years, your domain’s reputation can make or break it.
Therefore, improving your domain’s reputation is vital for your business if you want it to grow online. The problem is, unless you know how to do this, the whole process can be overwhelming.
Luckily, you can find out how to improve your domain’s name reputation and stack the odds in your favor online by following these steps:
Understand the concept of Domain Reputation
What is Domain Reputation?
Domain reputation is the sum of all things that contribute to your website’s online reputation. Search engines, such as Google and Bing, use a combination of factors including web spam complaints, number of links pointing to your domain, load time, and more to consider a domain’s reputation.
Why is a good domain reputation important?
Reputation is everything to a domain and must be nurtured and protected.
A domain with a good reputation is more likely to be trusted by other websites, readers, and organisations that come across it. Reputation causes visitors to register, buy products and sign up for services. Reputation also impacts the results pages of the search engines. And it also prevents your website from being banned by filters.
Additionally, low domain reputation will scuttle your marketing efforts such as email marketing campaigns mainly by negatively impacting your email deliverability.
The bottom line: A poor domain reputation will affect your chances of finding success online. Whether that be making money, building authority, or passing out information.
Figure out what might be hurting your domain’s reputation
This should be the easiest step in improving your domain’s reputation.
A domain reputation score that considers technical configurations and security parameters is an easy way to determine a website’s domain reputation and if such domain can be trusted.
Even so, there are no clear indications about how it’s calculated. We do know, however, that major Search Engines like Google consider domain reputation when evaluating the quality of a website or when deciding which website or page should rank in search results.
Brand Monitoring and Management
If you’ve built up your domain’s reputation then you may be the target of someone with an “axe to grind” who’s simply trying to get back at you. How you handle their negative comments can have lasting effects on your domain.
A negative mention is something that takes a stab at your reputation, whether it is in the form of a blog post, bad review, or a tweet. So, you need to respond quickly to such negative mentions to counter any malicious intent and turn the situation into a positive outcome. As a website owner, employ your marketing skills to respond in a way that defuses it and propels your domain to new heights.
In all of these you need a good brand monitoring tool to alert you in real time whenever your domain name or its variants are mentioned online thus giving you the opportunity to respond quickly.
Know that the online world is filled with hoaxes, fakes, misinformation and rumors. Your brand can get trolled in the blink of an eye and a fake post or negative comment about your domain can even go viral. This is why it is important to be strategic in improving your domain’s reputation and eliminate all the negative stereotypes or destructive conversations out there through effective brand management.
Create trustworthy content
The importance of creating trustworthy content to improve domain reputation cannot be stressed enough. Content creation can help build domain reputation and authority, but only if the content is produced with extreme care and attention to detail.
A large part of creating a trustworthy business is establishing yourself as an authority in your industry. Content plays a significant role in your business credibility and online authority which adds up to enhancing your domain’s reputation.
So, avoid deceptive messaging, false or misleading information.
Get backlinks to your site from Authoritative domains
A common issue for website owners is a poor domain reputation which prevents them from building and gaining momentum with their marketing. This can be because of numerous reasons but one way to tackle this is by having content on authority sites in your industry containing links back to your website.
Here is why it works:
Authoritative sites have two important characteristics: high level of trust and high ranking, which equals a very good reputation. The same goes for backlinks from authoritative sites. They build a linking domain’s trust, which can be beneficial to any marketer who is trying to build the reputation of their website.
Be Consistent
Finally, in improving your domain reputation, accept that, in most cases, it’s a challenge that will take some time. However, just like anything else, the more work you put into it, the more results you see.
You don’t want to fix your domain reputation and then have it backfire on you later because of bad reviews and other issues – so the point is not to cut corners, rush the process nor ignore it. Instead, be diligent in your work and try to get help wherever possible.
Hopefully this guide will help you with some insight on how to start improving your domain reputation again. If you have any questions whatsoever, please feel free to ask in the comment section below.
