As millions of businesses compete to attract visibility, website clicks and sales, most brands are nowhere to be found, even after spending so much effort and resources because their owners are yet to build a strong online presence that will lead to conversions.
You may have tried without success to improve your brand visibility so your business can attract more sales. Or you might be making progress but you’re not sure how best to double up your outcomes but, there are actual strategies you could use.
There are some ideas you could use to boost visibility and double up sales from your online channels. These strategies have worked for my brand and brands I’ve worked with over the years, and I’ll be sharing these insights with you in the following paragraphs.
Get a Goal
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Most businesses do not have a single goal. We didn’t have one when we started because we did not know better. I have also seen a number of clients who started without a specific goal.
But that’s not the best way to get started. You need a goal.
A clear concise goal gives you an idea on what you want to achieve. When you’re sure about the outcomes you want in terms of visibility for your brand, it gets easier to achieve it.
So, to build a strong online presence, identify clearly, the things you want to achieve for your business over a defined period of time.
What this means is that you don’t just need a goal, you also need clear timelines. Let’s say three months, half a year and yearly visibility goals etc.
Putting this in place gives you something to work with and timelines to deliver on. With your goals in place, you can track your progress. And you can finally get to create a plan that will get you to deliver on expected timelines.
Expecting to build a strong online visibility without getting your goal sorted out could lead to unexpected outcomes. You need a goal to identify what you want to achieve, create a timeline and then build a plan that will get you to actually achieve it.
Build a Website
A website is like your office on the net. Considering that more than 80 percent of potential clients will search out a business on the web before buying, you need an actual website to build a strong online presence.
Even if you’re already making a lot of sales offline, getting a website can get you a lot more customers and results, directly from the web.
To get started with building a website, you’ll need to buy a domain name and web hosting account.
If you already have an existing brand, you want to get a domain name that reflects that brand. So, if your business name is called marketing business LLC., you can get a domain name like marketingbusiness.com. You can also use a domain extension that fits more with your business goals, depending on your industry.
After getting this in place, go ahead and build your website, using your preferred platform. This could be a CMS, website builder or you can also write your code from scratch.
Where you don’t have the skills to set up a website, hire experts to create your website from scratch.
PS: While building your website, you need to create web pages that best describes what your business is all about in a way that appeals to your potential customers.
Optimize for Visibility
Now that your website is all set up, its time to get it all optimized for enhance positioning on the web so it can be visible for your target audience.
Remember that owning a website will not automatically get you a strong online presence. That’s what most businesses assume and it is a very mistaken assumption.
You can own the best website out there in terms of features without having any traffic coming over to the website.
So, you want to take extra measure to prepare your business for extra visibility. And one of the best ways to do this is by getting it all optimized for search visibility.
Start with identifying your major keywords – the top search terms relevant to your business.
Dig into your business details to find out about your product and services. Furthermore, look into your business goals for the year to understand the products and services you want to prioritize.
As soon as this has been sorted, you can then head over to identify the search terms that are very relevant for the target products and services.
You can use search keywords tools like Ubersuggest, Wordstream, Keywords.io etc. to streamline your search for a more accurate results.
When you’re able to sort out the keywords, you can then use them across your website to optimize the website and your web pages for overall visibility.
As a none expert, you can always hire professional search engine optimization experts to get this done for you for a better outcome.
Post Content
Content marketing is a great way to create and share valuable content with a clearly identified audience in order to create a specific outcome.
It is one of the most realistic strategies used by small businesses with low budget to build a strong online presence, especially in those early years.
As a small business entrepreneur, you can use content marketing to create value for your audience, improve your digital footprints and also position your brand as a thought leader in your niche.
But, all of this comes with a lot of effort.
For example, before you can create content that will deliver great results for your audience, you also have to understand the specific needs of your audience.
You’ll have to find out the things they are searching for on the internet and then find ways to create the kind of content that will fix these things.
Doing content marketing correctly has improved the brand visibility for a lot of small businesses. But, before getting started, understand the need to create content that’s valuable to your audience.
Outside that, take steps to use the right keywords and of course, optimize your content for visibility otherwise it might get lost with millions of other content on the web.
Get on Social Media
Social media provides a great platforms to engage, connect and grow your audience outside your website and personal platforms.
It also serves as an option to build traffic, share content and build links over to your website, outside serving as credibility signals.
Building a strong online presence of your social media will need a lot of calculated strategy, effort and consistency in terms of sharing content and engaging with your audience.
Before you get started, keep in mind there are a lot of social media platforms out there and you don’t have to be on all the top social media platforms at the same time.
Pick out the top social media platforms with the largest number of your target audience, create a profile on those platforms, optimize your handles and then start sharing content with your audience on the platforms.
To get the most out of social media marketing, create and share valuable content consistently, engage with your audience, pay attention to your user metrics to understand what content your audience prefers.
Implement Link Building
Backlinks are links from other websites to your own websites.
They are important in search engine optimization and online visibility because a good number of relevant back links can lead to an improved search engine ranking for a website.
Backlinks are credibility signals. And in an era where most websites are increasingly taking steps to build a strong online presence, you want to make plans to build links over to your website.
There are many ways to build back links. This can include things like guest blogging, creating and sharing infographics, white papers, research data that are easily linkable and finding link building opportunities from other websites.
While engaging in building links to your website, you want to pay attention to build links from relevant websites alone.
Avoid websites that are spammy and irrelevant to your audience.
Beyond building backlinks also, make efforts to build internal links to relevant pages on your website, using the right anchor text.
While building inbound link will improve your authority on the web, internal link building can lead to improved indexing and better visibility for your website.
Promote your Website
Taking all of these steps can lead to improved visibility for your website but you can also take steps to promote your website directly if you want to truly build a stronger online presence.
There are many ways to do this.
For example if you’re building on a budget, you can use free promotional strategies like social media marketing, guest posting, email marketing etc.
With these strategies, you can get to promote your website directly without having to pay a dime unless you want to.
Where you have a promotional budget in place, you can try out cost effective promotions using social media advertising.
You can also use sponsored posting on other websites, banner ads, Google PPC adverting etc. using these strategies can get you direct visibility, traffic and even new customers based on how it’s all set up.
Final words
It doesn’t matter whether you’re building somewhere in a third world or first world country, you can build a strong online presence and get to reach a global audience with your brand, if you take the steps listed out in this guide.
But most importantly, while doing all of this, you want to pay attention to building up your experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness(EEAT) as these are some of the key credibility indicators that Google will also factor in while trying to gauge the value of your content.
Also, avoid sharing spammy, low value, auto generated or copied content from other websites. Engaging in this will not lead to any positive outcomes for your brand visibility.
And finally, you don’t have to build alone. Work with our experts to build the visibility that will lead to sales for your business by reaching out here.
Now it’s your turn. What is your biggest challenge, when it comes to building a strong online visibility for your brand? Drop your comments below.
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