Author: Naomi Skye – Founder, Level Up Professional Services.

You’ve spent years building your reputation.

Doing good work.

Turning up when you said you would.

Fixing the problem when something went wrong.

Building relationships with customers, contractors and suppliers.

Delivering jobs you’re proud to put your name against.

And slowly, one project and one customer at a time, people started telling other people:

“Call her. She’s good.”

For a long time, that referral might have been enough to make the phone ring.

Today, something often happens in between.

They look you up.

And you may never know.

You’re being judged before you know you’re in the running

Someone recommends your business.

The prospective customer pulls out their phone.

They Google your name.

They look at your website.

Your Google profile.

Your reviews.

Your projects.

Your LinkedIn. Your socials.

They’re looking for evidence that supports what they’ve just been told.

And increasingly, they’re making judgements about whether they trust you before you ever get the opportunity to speak to them.

Current Google research found 73% of Australian consumers agree that brands appearing on Google are more trustworthy. Two in three say Google gives them confidence to purchase without doing further research.

That matters.

A referral may earn you the search. It doesn’t automatically earn you the call anymore.

What does she find when she searches?

This is where I want you to do something slightly uncomfortable.

Google your own business.

Not as the founder.

As someone who has never met you.

Forget everything you know about the business behind the screen.

Would you know you’ve been doing this for 15 years?

Would you see the calibre of projects you’ve delivered?

Would you know why customers trust you?

Would you see the experience of the people behind the business?

Would you find recent reviews?

Current photos of our best work?

A website that reflects where the business is today, rather than where it was five years ago?

Or would you find a very good business with a very ordinary digital footprint?

I see this disconnect all the time.

The business has grown up. Its online presence hasn’t grown with it.

And that’s not really a social media problem.

It goes beyond this, it actually becomes a trust problem.

You don’t need to become an influencer

I want to make this very clear.

I’m not suggesting you need to spend your evenings dancing on Instagram or suddenly become a full-time content creator.

For most business owners, that’s not the objective.

The objective is much simpler:

Help someone who doesn’t know you yet understand why the people who do, trust you.

That’s social proof.

Your completed projects.

Customer reviews.

Case studies.

Testimonials.

Your team.

Your experience.

Your accreditations.

Problems you’ve solved.

The way you work.

The knowledge sitting inside your head that demonstrates you actually understand

what you do.

We don’t tell people we’re good. We show them, and let them reach that conclusion themselves.

Do the 10-minute Digital Trust Check

Open an incognito/private browser and search for your business.

Then ask yourself:

01 Can I immediately understand what this business does?

02 Does what I see reflect the quality of the business we’ve actually built?

03 Is there recent evidence of good work?

04 Can I see what customers say about us?

05 Can I see the people and experience behind the business?

06 Is it obvious what I should do next if I want to work with us?

Then do one more thing.

Search the way a potential customer might search if nobody had referred you by name.

What appears?

Perhaps it’s location driven. Your service “near me”, or your service “[your location]”.

Do you come up?

Because there are two questions here:

Can they find you?

And once they do:

Do they trust what they find?

They’re different problems, and both matter. More than you realise, and way more today than they ever did.

Your reputation now exists in two places

There’s the reputation you’ve built in the real world.

And there’s the version of your business someone discovers online.

Those two things should match.

Because you can have the best team, brilliant work, loyal customers and years of

experience, but a prospective customer sitting at home at 9pm doesn’t know any of

that unless you’ve given them a way to see it.

That’s the opportunity.

Not posting for the sake of posting.

Not chasing followers.

Building digital evidence of the reputation you’ve already earned.

You’ve done the hard part.

You’ve built the business.

Now make sure that when someone goes looking, they find the business you actually built.

Does your online presence need to catch up with your business?

Level Up helps founders strengthen the foundations behind growing businesses, including how they’re positioned, how customers experience them and where opportunities may be falling through the gaps. If this editorial has made you wonder what a prospective customer sees when they find your business, let’s look at it together.

Explore Level Up at letslevelup.com.au or book a conversation with Naomi.