How your website can boost your authority

How your website can boost your business authority

Websites

Your business website is a super powerful tool, when used correctly and to its full potential. One of the best things your website can do for your business is to boost your authority. When you have a highly established authority, this increases visitor trust and therefore increases the chances they will buy your products of services. Put simply, higher authority = more $ Below are 4 ways your website can boost your business authority

1. Visually impress

The visuals are the first thing visitors see. In order to impress visitors visually, it’s not just about your site being bold and bright. Here are the key elements to visually impressing your visitors.

  • Modern design – nothing says irrelevant quicker than an outdated design
  • High quality images – they should be sharp and not pixelated, clear and professional, and should appeal to your target audience
  • Consistent use of branding across the site – including colours, fonts, styles and images
  • Legible and modern fonts – the wrong font can blast your website back to the past quicker than you can say “Flux Capacitor!”

2. Use the right words and language

Once a visitor has noticed the visuals, the next thing they’ll do is start reading. So this is where having the right headlines and calls-to-action are super important. They need to appeal to the visitor on an emotional level and use language and terms they understand. Website copy is different to other forms of text. It needs to:

  • Be short and punchy – no long paragraphs
  • Quickly tell visitors what they need
  • Tell visitors what to do next
  • Clear and directive
  • Easy to read – an 8th grader should be able to understand it (some even say a 6th grader)

Not only that, it needs to do double duty: website copy must also help your website get found by your target audience. This brings me to the next point.

3. Rank highly on Google and other search engines

Authority is quickly boosted when your website ranks in the top 3 search results. There are a number of pieces at play when it comes to getting your website to rank highly. These include:

  • Using the right words and phrases in your headlines and website copy
  • How much text is on your site
  • Using alt tags on images
  • Having a fast loading website
  • How much traffic your site receives
  • The rating of your website on reviews
  • How many reputable websites link or refer to your website

We offer a Website Health Check that will tell you exactly what you need to change or add to your site to help with your search engine rankings (SEO).

4. Display social proof

Once a visitor has found your site, like what they see and hear, the next thing they’ll want to know is – do other people trust you? This is where testimonials and reviews are so important. Reviews should be scattered through your site in relevant places. You should also have a page dedicated to reviews that can be found easily. A review widget on the bottom of your site is also a great idea – you can see ours on our site. Gathering reviews is an important business activity, and it’s an ongoing activity. Unfortunately you can’t go on a review gathering spree, rack up a bunch of 5-star reviews and then put your feet up. 50% of consumers believe reviews need to be as recent as 2 weeks in order to impact their decision making. That means if you have reviews older than 2 weeks, they’re not going to have much effect on 50% of visitors. Another way to put it is: if your competitors have more recent reviews, they’re already ahead of you in the game. If you need help gathering reviews, we offer an amazing service that will increase the likelihood of your customers giving feedback, and displays them on your site so that people can view them. And it will also help your search engine rankings!

4. Get your blog on

No, blogs are not out of fashion. They are not just for “bloggers”. They are just as important, if not more important, for businesses. If you’re on the fence about blogging, here are some stats that might – should – change your mind.

  • Blogs can increase a website’s indexed pages by 434% (source)
  • Companies with blogs produce an average of 67% more leads per month than those without blogs (source)

What this basically boils down to is that the more content you have on your site, the more pages the search engines have to index, the easier it is for people to find you. But don’t just blog about anything. Your blogs – or articles, or whatever you want to call them, should be:

  • Relevant to your products and services
  • Written strategically to incorporate your keywords to help with search rankings
  • Informative and helpful to readers

You don’t have to get it perfect, but get started. The more you build up a repository of content on your site, the more it will bring benefits and opportunities to your business. One of our clients, The Herald of Hope, have more than 200 articles on their site built up over the years. This healthy library ensures they have a steady flow of traffic, and several of their posts rank number one for searches on Google. (Read more about how we helped them reach their goals.) If you’re not sure where to start with blogs, check out our helpful article, 8 Blog Topics You Can Easily Write About. You don’t have to call it a blog. You could call it “Articles” or “Posts”.

Is your website helping to boost your authority? Would you like it to? Book a free discovery call with Helen today!

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