Why growing your online business reputation is critical for sales & overall growth

This post has been written by Ryan Haidinger from Trustspot. Trustspot is a Rocketspark add-on for ecommerce website owners where you can set up an exit survey for your customers after they make a purchase from your ecommerce website.

When it comes to growing your business, sometimes the easiest ways to increase sales are often overlooked by more cumbersome solutions – which end up costing you a lot of time and money, which can better be spent elsewhere. Simply by googling “ways to grow my business”, you’ll no doubt find a treasure trove of topics ranging from cold calling to social media and just about everything else in between. So how do you differentiate what is best for your business situation, and how do you prioritise what you should start working on?

Let’s start with the basics, where are you currently achieving the most traffic for your store? For example, if many of your customers are finding you from social media, consider launching a giveaway, or communicating on a more routine basis with your fans. At the same time you can do some test social ads to see if you can increase traffic and conversion rates while focusing purely on a social audience.

What if your traffic is coming from Google? More than likely customers are finding you either by searching for a specific product, or perhaps even typing in a competitor name and looking for alternatives. If this is the case, consider reviewing your store and looking at alternative methods to draw in more traffic – one good example would be to start a blog. With a blog you can write good content for your audience, which not only shows you to be an expert in your space but also helps with general site SEO which can help your site appear more often and higher in search results.

Finally, what if customers are searching for reviews of your company in order to help them make the decision to purchase an item from you, and they can’t find any reputable information online? This is one of the reasons why growing your online reputation is critical to business growth and the long-term stability of your sales going forward.

When new customers search for you online, more often using the term “company name reviews”, they want to see other users experienced purchasing from your shop, what your customer service is like, and more importantly if you are trustworthy place to do business. If you don’t already collect reviews for your business you could be missing out on potential sales, which would be a shame since you worked so hard to push your business in front of your customers on a daily basis.

Collecting reviews on your own website is fine; however customers might perceive these as being “fake” because the information can easily be altered by the business owner – which unfortunately is one of the ugly truths of ecommerce reputation. However, by collecting reviews by a 3^rd party – such as TrustSpot, you’re allowing customers to be open and honest to voice their feedback for your company. When prospective customers look at your TrustSpot profile it gives them a 360 view of your business, how customers love shopping with you, and more importantly that you are taking the steps towards building your online reputation – all important marks of a real & verified company.

With TrustSpot, when customers search for your “company name reviews” into Google, they’ll be treated with a great looking profile page and more importantly you’ll see your star ratings directly in Organic Search – thereby allowing prospective customers to see your total reviews at a glance without even clicking in.