By Tamara Stavljanin
When talking about online presence, nobody can deny its importance. But, while everyone agrees that efforts must be made, many businesses out there are still without a solid guidance when it comes to improving online visibility. More often all the endeavors result in just having a website and possibly a Facebook page. If you are on a tight budget, you may feel frustrated with all the information and advice you’re offered because in most cases it requires spending large sums of money. Although it can be overwhelming to keep up with every trend, you need to take a deep breath and focus on what’s important for your business. Keep in mind the following 5 essential components that should shape up your online strategy:
1. Keep Your Website Fresh
Nowadays it isn’t enough just to have a website. Information must be up to date and design needs to keep up with latest trends. If you don’t have resources to hire a professional, there are alternative ways to upgrade your website. Remember that your potential customers will form their opinion just after a few seconds on your website so you must put in some work in order to grab their attention. Don’t let your web presentation look outdated and messy, find out how can you improve it, while still on a budget. If you have any coding experience, then WordPress is the right choice for you. It is a comprehensive solution that is relatively easy to use when you get a hang of it. For all non-coders out there, don’t despair, you can still significantly improve your online visibility by choosing an online website builder. The key thing here is to find out which one is right for your unique purposes. There is wide array of website builders and they all offer different templates, so first figure out what functionalities you need and then choose the one that suits your business.
2. Be Google Friendly
Your online visibility will heavily depend both on the on-page and off-page SEO. A lot of business owners don’t pay enough attention to SEO, so if you implement a good strategy you will be in a great advantage compared to your competition. When choosing a template or designing a website from scratch, make sure it’s responsive and mobile friendly because that will affect your Google ranking. Optimize all website content, so it’s up to date, well written and contains relevant keywords. When choosing your keywords, try to find those that are at the same time relevant to your business and have medium or low competition. Remember to include your keywords in meta, title and alt tags, this is really an easy trick that will surely improve your online visibility.
3. Work on Your Content
The cheapest and the most creative way to enhance your online reach is by creating interesting and informative content. Depending on the industry you are in you can find different topics that you can cover to keep people interested. Offer knowledge, entertainment or whatever is correlative to your industry and people will surely respond. If you aren’t a skillful writer there are still options to enrich your content. You can always accept guest posts from other talented and relevant writers. Advantages of quality content on your website is multiple. First, it has a positive effect on your SEO strategy and second it gives you material that you can post on your social media accounts.
4. Socialize with Your Audience
Be where your customers are. It’s that simple, and yet many companies still struggle with their social media presence. You don’t have to be on every social network and publish posts all the time, because you risk to be flagged as spam or just ignored. Don’t automatize everything and post the same piece of content on every social media account. Take a more human approach, try to think like a user and adjust your content with that in mind. This means to tone down your sales voice and be more educative.
Also, don’t forget to manage your online reviews. You should encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews, but you also need to respond to criticism. Don’t just ignore negative reviews, but try to resolve an issue and offer more information. This way your customers will see that you care.
5. Forge Marketing Partnerships
This isn’t a new concept, but it’s often underrated. Not everybody will be your competition. Find companies that you respect and if they offer complementary services to your core business you can both benefit from partnership. By joining forces, you will reach larger audience with less effort.
Tamara Stavljanin is a professional content and copywriter and a part of ucraft.com team. She is passionate about digital marketing and technology trends, and she is always looking for ways to improve her content marketing and SEO skills.
