Possibly the greatest irony of cyberspace is that it offers huge potential for visibility while also being extremely crowded. The good news is that it is still possible to make your mark in the online world, it just takes strategy and effort.
Here are five tips to help you on your way:
Sort out your search engine optimisation
To be absolutely blunt, SEO is now mandatory rather than optional. If you don’t know how to do it, then you need to make it a priority to hire someone who does.
Having effective SEO practices in place will help to ensure that your site shows up in the search engine results for the search terms that matter to you. It requires a combination of approaches, including work on your website and work getting others to reference you from their sites.
Pay for clicks to your website
Pay-per-click advertising is a quick and useful way to drive views and traffic to your website, increasing your brand’s visibility and encouraging sales. You can show up against the most sought-after search terms, or focus your attention on social media advertising and, with a bit of careful optimisation, your brand and products or services can be seen by your target audience within minutes.
If you’re already using PPC ads and want to go a step further, consider remarketing / retargeting, where people who have come to your website without making a purchase are targeted with images and reminders of the products they were looking at. Many brands find this highly effective.
Claim your place in the listings that matter
If you have any sort of business address, you can claim a place in the two business directories which really matter namely Google My Business and Bing Places for Business.
If you’re feeling nostalgic, you can fill in your details for Yell.com for free and, if you really want to be thorough, there are plenty of other directories to which you can subscribe (for free). Having said that, avoid creating listings on any old site with questionable value; these days, links from poor quality websites can actually have a negative result on your search engine rankings.
Get busy blogging
Blogs might seem a bit “old school” in these days of video and image-based content, but in fact they are thriving and a great way to attract attention to your website. If you’re serious about being seen online then you need to have one to demonstrate your expertise, have great content to share and attract backlinks from sites that appreciate what you’ve written.
Be social on social media
It seems extraordinary that, after all this time and so much advice on the topic, some brands still do not seem to grasp that fact that social media is essentially about engaging with people rather than actively selling to them. You can sell on social media, in fact it can be a really good sales tool, but there’s an art and science to it, and posting sales pitches without listening to feedback or reacting to others is a very poor idea.
For the most part, you should be listening to your community and chatting with them. Social media is the place to put a human face on your company and can really help to boost your overall visibility – if you use it properly.