Online presence is the comprehensive set of places an individual or business can be found by an online search. Try searching your business on google. What shows up? Is it your company website? Social media pages? A business review or update on a third party site? Or nothing at all? The stronger your online presence, the more visible your business will be in Google searches, and the easier you’ll be to find.
For increasing customers and sales, your audience first needs to know that your business exists! Otherwise they will never find you. To a high number of organic leads, you need to maximize your online presence to make your business visibility and desirability stronger.
There are many things you can do to increase your online presence. Below we have listed the three things that are necessary for any business to have an online presence.
- Website.
Your business, at the bare minimum, should have a website. Your website should contain core information about your business for your customers. Core information could be your business’ mission and vision, team member bios, product or service descriptions, recent news or events, a company blog, or your business’ contact information.
For example, if you are a restaurant it is necessary to have your menu, opening hours, location, and contact information on your website. Without these components, your audience will have a hard time obtaining key information about you and your business, and as a result pick a competitor over you.
We have seen so many businesses forget key information and make other simple mistakes that cost them customers, time, and money. To learn what common mistakes to avoid when building a business website, and how to avoid them, feel free to read our blog article: 15 Common Mistakes to Avoid when Creating Your Business Website.
How to Create a Website from Nothing
There are several great applications and website builder tools to help you get started. One of the most famous is WordPress which according to VentureBeat, powers 30% of the websites you see on the Internet.There are tons of guides to help businesses create a website using WordPress, however WordPress has a very high entry barrier and steep learning curve. We find that it is hard for small business owners to learn to code to make a beautiful and responsive website with WordPress.
There is a better option for creating a website for your business. We have developed a simple, beautiful website builder that does not require coding or prior knowledge to use. We will automatically give you a ready-made template based on your business category which you can fully customize at no cost.
Our website builder is 100% free, easy-to-use, and has an extensive toolbox of widgets and other features you can use on your website. By using our website builder, you will also have access professional, high-quality photos that you can use and easily add SEO to make your website more visible (we will talk more about SEO below).
The most important feature is that your website will automatically be connected to our all-in-one platform so you can fully manage your entire web and online presence in one place. To learn more, you can click here to be brought to the main page of our website or here to learn more about all our features.
- Search Engine Optimzation (SEO).
Once you have published your website, it’s crucial that your site can be found by your customers and by search engines. A study done by Burke, found that 80% of respondents used a search engine to find a local product or service in the week prior to the study and 87% in the thirty days!
To beat your competition and increase visibility to your customers, you need to optimize your website for search engines. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) does just that to help search engines like Google find your website and rank your website in their organic results as opposed to paid advertising.
You want your business to rank highly on search engines, so your business organically appears high up in the search results to maximize the number of times customers click on your website. Multiple studies were done to show how quickly engagement rate falls from just the first few rankings on Google. Here’s a graph given by InternetMarketingNinjas that shows the click through rate for Google searches for each website depending on where it is ranked.
But how can you actually improve your SEO?
There are hundreds of guides, blogs, and tutorial websites to walk you through the basic and advanced techniques of SEO. One of our favorites is a beginner’s SEO guide created by Moz. It is easy to understand and goes into great detail explaining what SEO is and how to use it to your advantage.The biggest, and most important ways to improve your website’s SEO is by adding keywords, phrases, and other tags to each individual webpage. A keyword or phrase is a word or short phrase that is commonly searched for by customers on Google. These keywords help search engines like Google know how relevant your business is to a search and what your business is about.
For example, if you owned a Chinese food restaurant, your keywords might be “chinese food,” “restaurant,” “asian restaurant,” “chinese food restaurant,” “chinese restaurant,” and “family restaurant.”
You also want to add different keywords to different pages on your website since each webpage contains different information. You can easily add keywords and other tags to all your website pages by using our all-in-one platform.
- Social Media.
The last necessary place to be to strengthen your business’ online presence is social media. Social media platforms are a powerful force in the business world. We have talked about the importance of social media platforms and how to increase your revenue by using them in this article: Be Smart: Increase Your Revenue Using Social Media Today.
We highly recommend checking it out!
Social media is an important part of many people’s lives, including your customers! Many people are daily users and experience almost everything on these sites. Some platforms like Facebook and Twitter can be a place for any business. Those sites are great for publishing posts, blog articles, sharing news, tips, photos, videos, and engaging with your customers.
There are a bunch of other social media platforms that you can use including Instagram and Pinterest if you are more image based, YouTube if you want to share videos, and Google+ or Medium if you want to share your business’ blog posts or updates. Sites like LinkedIn are also good for sharing blog articles, company updates, and reaching out to potential employees and partners.
It’s important to remember to make sure you master one or two social networks at a time to increase the amount of success you have on each site. This is true because each social network takes time to master and has a different style or type of content that would be shared. If you tried to be present on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube all at once you would be overwhelmed with everything your need to do just for social media! Your engagement will drop and your business brand will suffer from the negative online presence.
Even with one or two social media platforms, it is easy to get overwhelmed with what needs to be done to create consistent high-quality content. To stay on track and effectively manage your social media accounts and activity, we included several easy-to-use tools in our Solomoto subscription.
Some of these tools include 1) a post scheduler to help you organize, manage, and automatically post your content to relevant social media pages, 2) a content library containing thousands of professional, high-quality articles and images that you can post to social media for free, 3) thousands of free, professionally designed templates for social media posts tailored to your business, and 4) an advertisement creator and campaign manager for paid advertisements on search engines and social media platforms.
Learn more about all our features in our all-in-one platform here!
To recap, your business’ website, social media pages, and SEO are the three necessary things to strengthen your online presence. But how can you manage or gauge how strong your online presence is? We know!
If you didn’t realize by now, our platform is a simple, all-in-one platform to help small and medium sized businesses like you manage your online presence in a quick and efficient way. All of the features we offer from our website builder to advertisement campaign manager to our ecommerce feature, were created to help your business increase its online visibility.
We also have an online presence tool to help you discover what platforms your business is present on and where your business should be located. Learn what Solomoto can do for your business by clicking this link here!
Best of luck,
The Solomoto Team
P.S. What are the biggest struggles you are having with your current marketing strategy right now? Share them with us in *the comments below* or get in touch with one of our team members over Facebook or Twitter, and we will do our best to help!
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