Let us kick off this piece with a quote. “It takes more than a beautiful website to butter up the growth of your business using an online presence.” – Yours Truly, if I may quote myself.
Online presence, in its basic form, represents all digital properties and media representing a business or an individual. With a simple online search, customers, prospects and interested parties can easily find you.
Let’s get down to business.
Kick It Up a Notch
Professionalism and user experience should be your major concern. Invest in them.
Having a website with broken links is in no way professional and neither is clutter. What makes up clutter? Excessive use of pop up forms or/and adverts, too much animation, badges and anything else that is not important is clutter. Get rid of everything that gets in the way of visitors.
Try to keep everything simple as does wonders for your user experience. As we all know, great user experience plays a big role in the overall success of your website. Users want an easy to use website that provides the information they need.
Additionally, ensure your website design is responsive as there are so many devices in use nowadays. Moreover, create smooth navigation that makes finding and assimilating your content as easy as A, B, C.
Do some web design recon. Look around and find out what inspires you on other websites. Then, figure out how you can incorporate the idea in your website. Borrowing ideas is not stealing, so don’t hold back.
Search Engine Optimization
In 2016, Google changed its ranking algorithm to prioritize websites that are device friendly. We are talking about responsive websites that can adapt to any screen size or resolution gracefully. If you have a rigid website that runs off the screen on smaller devices, you’re doing SEO wrong.
With that preamble, it is important to invest in search engine optimization. Failure to which, your website won’t show up in search engine results when someone makes an online search. And you know what they say: search engine traffic is one of the best types of relevant traffic.
And to get the most out of a search engine you need to have nicely written content that is not packed with keywords. In other words, write for your audience (human beings) instead of trying to win over search engines.
Make Use of Social Media
Each social media platform has a different set of strengths. These strengths are vital in building your online presence. For instance:
- Facebook – Posting to Facebook doesn’t need to end with how your day went and what you ate for lunch and whatnot. You can effectively promote your business website using Facebook because, let’s face it, virtually everybody you know has an account on the social media giant.
- Twitter – Posts on Twitter are limited to 160 characters, but who said you need an entire book to win big this marketing season? Furthermore, you can add live links and hash tags to the bio section.
- LinkedIn – This is a professional platform for anyone willing to build a detailed profile. The platform makes it incredibly easy to add your best credentials i.e. awards, skills, experience et cetera. Other LinkedIn users can even endorse your skills, which is just sweet.
- Instagram – With millions of users, Instagram offers you a platform to interact with your users via media we all so love – images and short videos. If you post the right images, consumers will love your marketing message. Businesses all over the place are creating quite a following on Instagram without trying hard.
These are a few of the available social media platforms. You can take advantage of many other social media networks out there.
Visitor Engagement
How many times have you taken it upon yourself to interact with your web visitors? Interacting with visitors communicates you are available when they need you. And, do you know of a better way of building trust than showing your visitors you’re ready to help, especially when they aren’t paying anything?
So, get back to them when they leave comments or ask questions. Engage with your readers whenever you get a chance. Other than building trust, you will also understand their needs and be in a better position to help them.
Blogging
There are two ways you can go about this. Either blog on your own (eats at your precious time) or hire bloggers to help you with the workload. One thing is sure though, blogging offers you a traffic boost you won’t get anywhere else.
Here are reasons why you should consider blogging:
- Blogging drives more traffic to your website. Every post you author becomes another page Google (and other search engines) can index, which means better SEO, which equals more traffic.
- Blogging eventually means more revenue. Using any one technique at your disposal, you can convert visitors into ready to pay customers at the drop of a cap.
- You can establish authority via blogging. How? If you create one of those amazing posts that answers a user’s question. In other words, a user will consider you an expert if you help them out with a pressing problem.
Become a consistent and relevant blogger; don’t just fill your blog with useless junk in the name of creating content.
Promotion
This goes without saying. You can’t just build it and expect the people come. Come on, that never works. You have to promote your work or nobody will ever see it, and you need only just one more person to like what you’re doing.
Want to supercharge your online visibility? Promote your work! Why do you think Google and other big sites such as Facebook dominate the internet? Marketing baby, and millions of advertising dollars. It’s all in the promotion, and you needn’t even spend a dime.
What?
Free advertising works just fine but it might take longer to achieve the targeted numbers. You can also use email marketing to create brand awareness. Heck, just get creative and you won’t have to spend a fortune on promotion, what with social media and so much more.
Sell Services Directly
Whether you are selling a product or service, build and offer it in one place. What do that even mean?
Don’t bombard users with link after link, to different websites just to finally deliver them to a page where you are offering the services in question. Make the process simple by building the services within your website.
Seriously, there is no single user who likes redirection from one page to another. It is a simple recipe to losing users.
Authenticity
Being authentic does not only build a trust-based relationship with your network, it also plays a role in garnering better rankings for your website. Google search engine results have a lot to do with the credibility of information you offer.
Parting Shot
That’s it for today. Do have fun harnessing the power of the internet.
