Want to improve your online visibility? Consider these 6 key points

Any kind of business can benefit from marketing online. It can be overwhelming determining what should be adopted to increase the visibility of the power of online marketing in today’s world. Most companies really have no idea where to start. Sure, you’ve got an awesome website (and we’ve built most of them for you) but we want to give you a bit more food-for-thought when considering how you can step up your online marketing and, ultimately, become much more visible.

Here are six beginner-friendly ways to improve your online visibility:

1. Publish regular blog content.

Publishing regular content on your blog is a great way to increase your online visibility and attract traffic to your website. Content that is written for lower competition industries and smaller local markets will tend to rank higher in the search results. It also gives you an opportunity to provide your website visitors with informative content that can help build a relationship that results in sales and promotion. Delight your visitors, and they will be more likely to share your content on social media, which can introduce additional consumers to your business.

2. Get active on two to three social media outlets.

There are a lot of social media networks, which makes it very difficult to effectively participate on all of them. Select two to three that you know, without a doubt, that your target audience is active on. For example, if you are a local flower shop, Instagram is a great choice because it allows you to post images and highlight your product. You might also want to be active on Pinterest, which is another visual social network. An insurance broker or financial management company, on the other hand, wouldn’t experience the same results on Instagram, making that effort a waste. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are three social networks that work for the majority of businesses.

3. Educate yourself about on-page optimization.

SEO (search engine optimization) is a term that scares many business owners, because they are under the impression that it’s a complex process that will be impossible for them to understand. There are basic on-page optimization techniques that are easy to understand and implement, provided you have the correct resources. Apis handles this for most of our clients but it’s good to educate yourself on the basics just so you’re clear. This guide explains the basics, if your website is built using WordPress, (which is what we use to build your websites).

4. Run targeted LinkedIn or Facebook ads.

LinkedIn and Facebook ads allow you to create very specific, targeted, content that will allow you to place them in front of a custom audience that you select. For example, a local florist could create an ad for wedding flowers and select a local audience located within driving distance to the flower shop and target women who like specific wedding-related pages on Facebook. With these types of ads, you can attract the perfect audience with buyer-intent to your website.

5. Encourage your clients or customers to leave online reviews or testimonials.

Testimonials help to improve your presence by increasing your footprint online. If your business is listed next to a competitor in the search results and you have 50 positive reviews and the competitor doesn’t have any, what listing is the average consumer going to click on? The majority of consumers research a business before doing business with them, so make it easy for them to access your reviews by creating a dedicated page or app on your website that features all of those links (which is what Apis does, too). Here’s a great example of online reviews/testimonials built on one of the sites we’ve created.

6. Guest blog on relevant websites.

Guest blogging provides you with two great benefits. First, you are exposed to a very targeted audience, one that will have a high likelihood of being interested in your business. Second, you benefit from the links in your author bio, which helps your search engine optimization and can also drive very targeted traffic back to your website.

We hope you find these tips helpful in increasing your online presence.