Building an online presence has become a top priority for business owners in the last few years. With almost every business rushing to become digital as soon as possible, the market is now even more competitive and challenging to newcomers. It is absolutely crucial for businesses to connect with their customers and stay relevant.
If you’ve just started your new business or are fairly new to the entrepreneurial world, then building your online presence can be time-consuming and frustrating. But it is a vital parameter for marketers because it represents your brand and what you offer to your target market. It’s also important for inbound marketing because your quality online content will help attract users even if they don’t know what your brand is.
Most consumers conduct research before they make a purchase online through websites or social media pages. Accordingly, businesses must have an effective online strategy to increase brand awareness. In this article, I’ll show you some practical ways to establish a robust online presence in this digital era.
Build a Professional Website
Start by creating your business website. With all the competition online, it is not enough to just have a website. Your website should be attractive and easy for prospective customers to find and use. Create customer-driven content, and review it periodically to ensure that your website information is accurate and error-free.
Websites have evolved into something more than just text and information on a page. Everything from the heading of your site to the placement of your CTAs can impact how long visitors stay on your page. Follow these tips and make your website more user-friendly.
Improve Page Speed
When it comes to your site’s performance, page speed is an important factor. To increase user engagement and reduce your bounce rate, it’s essential that your web pages load quickly and seamlessly.
Google PageSpeed Insights is an easy-to-use tool that tests the speed of your web pages on both desktop and mobile devices.
Make Your Site Responsive
Does your site look good on both mobile and desktop? If potential users land on your site but find it difficult to read or navigate on a mobile device, they may probably leave your site.
Responsive design is vital for the best user experience across a broad range of platforms, whether you are browsing from your PC, your laptop, your tablet, or your smartphone. Make your website responsive and mobile-friendly to improve the overall look, feel, and functionality.
Make Navigation Intuitive
Navigation can make or break your website’s performance. You should have offered a clear way to get back to the homepage no matter where your users land.
Strong site navigation makes it easy for users to quickly find the information they’re looking for. To ensure that you don’t drive your users away, make your navigational bars and web design accessible and consistent.
Create An Easy-To-Navigate Website using,
- Navigation Menu
- Search bar
- Breadcrumbs
- Sitemap
Include Social Media Icons
Social media icons give site visitors a path to a place where they can interact with your business on social media platforms. Embed social networking icons as images on your website and link them to the addresses of your channels. Adding social media links to your website is a way to increase the spread of your content.
Strong Call to Action
Adding a call-to-action (CTA) to your website can create a better user experience, keep your visitor engaged with your brand, and boost conversions. Each page on your website should encourage the user to take some action.
It typically takes the form of an instruction or directive using action verbs (“buy”, “subscribe”, “sign up”, “register”, “download”, etc.) and leading the user to the next step of a process. Give them a noticeable invitation to take the action using attractive CTAs.
Implement Best SEO Practices
Whether you’re trying to improve your online visibility through search engines or you want to improve your organic social campaign reach, there are some SEO practices you can use to improve your search rankings.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing relevant search terms (words and phrases) that people use in search engines. It is usually the first step of any SEO campaign because it impacts every other SEO task that you perform. This process gives you insight into what customers are searching for and helps you to better understand your target audience.
Quality of Content
Align your content with specific keywords. Your website content should be helpful, relevant, accurate, easy to understand, and engaging. You can add your target keywords to your website content (URL, Title, Meta description, Headings, Image alt text) and make your website more SEO-friendly.
Competitor Analysis
SEO competitive analysis involves researching the keywords, backlinks, and content of your competitors. This will give you insights into why your competitors are performing well on search engines.
Technical Audit
A technical SEO audit is a process that checks various technical parts of a website like broken links, HTTPS status codes, sitemaps, robots.txt files, crawling reports, etc. The Site Audit Tools scan your website and provide data about all web pages.
Focus on Link Building
Link building is the practice of acquiring links from other websites to your website. Links are one of the important ranking factors of Google. High-quality backlinks indicate trust and credibility. The more quality backlinks you have, the higher you are likely to rank on search engines.
Create a Social Media Strategy
Your social media presence serves as a way to communicate with your customers. It allows you to reach, nurture, and engage with your target audience. It increases awareness of your brand and boosts your leads and sales. Creating an effective social media marketing strategy is the best approach when it comes to working toward marketing goals. Here are the steps to develop an effective social media marketing strategy.
- Audit Your Current Social Media Presence
- Set Your Social Media Goals
- Research Your Target Audience
- Choose the Right Social Media Channels
- Create an Engaging Social Media Content Strategy
- Select Success Metrics
- Use Social Media Management Tools
- Monitor & Track Your Social Media Marketing Efforts
Boost Your Traffic with Search Ads
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is an online advertising technique where advertisers bid to participate in real-time auctions in order to show their ads on top of the SERPs. If you’re ready to invest in search ads, you have to implement an effective ad campaign to drive results.
Decide on which keywords you want to appear on SERPs, create your ad campaign and write an engaging ad copy to generate leads, and set your daily budget. The higher your budget the more times you’ll show up in search queries, but even a smaller budget can be effective when you use the right keywords—optimize your landing pages with persuasive content and clear call-to-action.
Claim Your Profile on Local Directories
Your next client will find your business online, that’s why all industries are always looking for ways to improve their online presence. Creating a profile on local directories is all about improving your online presence to increase traffic, leads, and brand awareness from local searches. People can easily access information about your business without visiting your website.
Any business that has a physical location or serves a geographic area can create a profile on Google My Business and be more visible in local search results on Google. Claiming free listings on local directories is a great way to get more visibility for your business. There are many directories for all types of business and all these directories have their own guidelines, but there are some key elements you should add to all your directories.
After claiming your profile, you can regularly check your profile activities, update your information according to your new offers, discounts, and events, and respond to your comments, reviews, and queries.
Increase Online Presence with Guest Posting
If your goal is to boost your online presence or improve your backlink profile, writing guest posts may be incredibly valuable to achieve this. Blogging content on different sites is a magnificent way of attracting huge followers for your site and social media accounts. Choose the right topic to pitch, add catchy headlines and write fresh and quality content. You can also add your targeted keywords to your blog content. An effective guest post will help you gain more traffic and drive sales.
Implement Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective and conversion-rich Digital Marketing methods. It can be used to promote services or products while developing relationships with potential customers or clients. With email marketing, you can sell products, share product announcements, inform about new offers and events, engage your customers, and get helpful feedback.
First, build your email list, select the email campaign and build your email. Then optimize it for all devices, send it, and measure your campaign results.
Wrap up
With the world getting more digital, most every business needs a strong online presence for brand awareness. Building an online presence is not just creating a platform that consumers can visit. If you want to grow your business, you need to do things right. Try out the different things mentioned above, track your results, and figure out what works best for you and your business.
