The Internet presents endless and great opportunities for businesses of any size or stage of growth. The Internet allows you to precisely target customers and enables you to seek feedback on your campaigns and improve or change them in real time. We’ll go through four strategies to help you boost your business’s online visibility and generate traffic to your website.
You could have a beautiful website, great campaigns, and a stellar product or service to offer, but if potential customers don’t see your business, none of that matters. No visibility, no customers, no business growth. What steps can you take so that your target audience will see your business? How can you pop up in search engine results, social media and more?
Increasing your online visibility doesn’t mean making constant, excessive social posts or using the maximum number of hashtags possible on your social posts. It also doesn’t mean spamming potential customers with unwarranted messages and emails. You still need to implement a strategy, not just attempt to insert yourself everywhere on the Internet.
What’s your strategy? Take a look at these four points below to help your business get seen more by the right audience.
1. Learn SEO
Search Engine Optimisation helps your business rank on search engine pages. The more optimized your content, the more likely you will end up on the first page of results, and towards the top of the page, for searches relevant to your business.
While SEO is usually a term that scares business owners because it seems like a complex process, there are very basic SEO techniques that are easy to learn and implement that can make a huge difference. These include adding internal links to your content, making sure that your website is mobile-friendly, fixing any broken links on you website, and consistently updating your website with fresh, relevant content.
The more you understand SEO, you will be able to subconsciously make decisions that will help your website and business’s visibility.
2. Develop a social media strategy
If you’re business isn’t already on social media, you’re missing out on a great opportunity. Social media is the most direct connection between you and your customers. Not sure how to navigate the platforms? Check out our recent post that guides you through setting up your business’s Facebook, Instagram and Twitter profiles.
Choose two or three social media networks that you know your audience is active on, this way you can focus on those platforms and perform well on them.
Just like any other part of your marketing strategy, you need an actual strategy for your social media accounts. Excessive posts, hashtags, or sales-focused content is ineffective and can actually come off as annoying or spam to potential customers. Develop your strategy and a list of best practices to ensure that your social media efforts get you seen and help drive leads.
3. Encourage online reviews from customers
Reviews help your business increases your online presence and boosts your reputability. If your business has 50 reviews and your competitor only has a few, a potential customer or client will choose you over your competitor. Businesses with the most reviews and highest average rating will generate the most traffic. This becomes a self-feeding cycle as your reviews bring traffic to your site, leading to more customers and reviews, and so on. Reviews affect your search rankings on search engines, and can affect which results actually show up in searches and get clicked on.
Ask your customers to leave you reviews after they check out, via email blast, in pop-ups on your site, etc. Remember to respond to negative reviews as well to make sure issues get resolved and so that your customers and clients know that you care.
4. Create and maintain a consistent blog
Blogs are a very productive business tool that demonstrates your expertise of your industry or field and helps boost your SEO.
By writing consistent blog posts, you generate fresh content every few days for your website, all of which contains relevant information and keywords for your business. Websites that stay up-to-date rank better on search engines.
These blog posts are also great opportunities for long-form keywords, and keywords that are relevant to your business, but might be difficult to incorporate on regular web pages. Additionally, this content will help you win backlinks from other sites who find your information valuable and lets you internally link to other blogs or pages on your own site as well. These basic SEO concepts are almost no-brainers when it comes to creating an effective blog.
Now that we have gone a little in-depth on what steps will help your business’s online presence grow, here are some points to remember:
Do:
- Teach yourself basic SEO
- Create and optimise 2-3 social media accounts
- Encourage reviews for your business
- Build a blog to generate fresh content
- Do track analytics and visitor behavior and adjust your strategy
Do Not:
- Spam your customers
- Get too hung up on certain methods – search engines change their algorithms
- Approach social media without a strategy
- Lose sight of the most important aspect of your business – your customers
Not sure where to start? We’re here to help. Solutionise Group can assist you with web design, Google business listings, and online and social media marketing. Contact us today to help your business thrive.