What is online presence? Online presence is the summary of your interactions and actions that affect how clients find and evaluate you online. In a simple language, it’s the weight of your online visibility. Whoa! Sounds like quantum physics, right?
Whether you run a small business, a giant corporation or nursing a startup, a relevant online presence is an essential part of your business. As you already know, you are probably not the only one offering these kind of services or goods. There are others in your line of business, which means your competitive edge needs to be top notch.
Therefore, investing your energy and time in improving your online visibility will help you cultivate users and clients who are satisfied with the services that you are offering.
Below are 8 tips that will help improve your online presence. Each tip is as important as the former or the latter.
1. Create a Professional Website
I know what you are thinking. What will happen to the current website that I already have? A new website would translate to wasted time and resources developing the current website!
This, however, should not be the case. Invest in improving and redesigning the current website if you already have one. How?
- Visuals – First impression counts. Colours, images and videos largely affect your users’ impression. Make their visual experience worthwhile to encourage them to explore your website further.
- Content – Each and every word should be inclined to speaking to users’ problems and how you will solve it. Any extra information is irrelevant to potential clients and are certainly not going to read it.
- Multiplatform – Over the past few years, there has been an astronomical increase in the number of devices used to access information online. Laptops and desktops are longer the major players when it comes to online interaction. With these in mind, ensure your website is mobile friendly. For more information on this, read make your website mobile friendly.
At the same time, if you are developing your website, keep the above tips in mind. You can also checkout tips for a responsive website. This will help you acquire more insight on what needs to be done.
2. Invest in SEO
Search engine optimization plays a crucial part in whether or not your website is displayed when someone makes a search. In the event that it does, how is it displayed?
The major goal is to make sure that your website is seen and ranked by search engines. This will ensure that your website appears higher up in search results in the event that someone searches for it or something related to it.
Search engine optimization is built on keywords. Long-tail and short-tail are keywords used when making a search. Long-tail are keywords closer to the search results (they target a smaller group), while short-tail are keywords that target a larger group. To make SEO fruitful, make use of both long-tail and short-tail keywords and ensure they are related to your brand of service. This way, the search results will always lead them to your site.
The challenge now might be finding the right keywords. Nevertheless, you should not sweat it. Search engines and web creation sites equally offer tools to aid the discovery, modification and monitoring of keywords and their performance. You can also make use of SEO experts to help analyze top performing keywords.
3. Use Social Media
Social media is with no doubt the easiest and fastest way to build an online presence. With over 2.1 billion social media users worldwide, it is evident how potent it is to use social media to improve your online presence.
Make use of Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube and even the less common such as Tumblr, and Flickr. Apart from the low cost advertising in social media, these platforms offer real time communication with your users and are also social proof.
A nugget of wisdom. While using social media, talk about your customers and not yourself.
4. Visitor Engagement
When setting up a website you definitely have an idea of what you want, how you want it look like and its layout. The question that you, however, need to ask yourself is, what do my users want?
Your ideas and views are important but the best way to offer a platform that your users’ can rely on, is by listening to them. Have a section where your users can comment or review a service. When they do, make an effort to reply to those comments quickly. This way, you will be able to engage with potential customers, educate them and offer customer service where necessary.
Additionally, you can make use of the email service to grow your audience, obtain referrals, offer advertisement and also to interact with your users’.
5. Credibility
Can I trust this website? This is the leading question amongst many users that visit your website. Trust is the key to building consumer confidence. With consumer confidence, you are able to generate leads and sales.
How do I make my website credible?
First impression matters. A website that shouts professionalism is much more credible than a website that is confusing. Strive for a professional look. Also repair broken links in your website as they are confusing to users. You can also include reviews and testimonies in your website as they encourage a bond of trust to be built between you and your users.
Lastly, include your phone number. Including an option for your users to reach you, shows that you would like to hear from them.
6. Blog
You can either blog from your site or work with bloggers to create genuine content and promote your website.
The two major benefits of blogging are; google will index more of your pages if you regularly blog and secondly research shows that websites with a blog increase their traffic by 55 percent.
7. Promotion
Use Email marketing and advertisement to reach out to a larger number of people. Promotions play the role of brand awareness as potential customers are bound to come across the advert. Consequently, this will increase the traffic to your website.
8. Sell Services Directly
Many a times, customers come across a link which they click hoping for particular results but instead they end up on another page. No user wants to keep on being redirected from one page to another and as if that is not enough, end up empty handed.
Make sure your users can be able to access services and goods directly from the website. Not only will this grow your presence online, it will also save you from incurring extra costs when you post your goods in third party online stores.
Need a good e-commerce platform? Our two favorites are Shopify (which works great with many web platforms) and WooCommerce for WordPress
Parting Shot
Whether you have been using crude methods or not, with the hope of improving online presence, the above tips will take care of that. They will help you harness the power of the internet.
