With the digital world growing everyday, it’s vital that businesses make a good impression online. Having a strong online presence means you’re in a much better position in terms of visibility. There are many ways to boost your online presence, all of which can help you stand out from your competition.
We’ll outline the key elements of a strong online presence, and include tips about what you should be doing to make a good impression. But first, let’s look at what constitutes an online presence.
What is an online presence?
An online presence refers to your business’s online visibility, how credible you are and your reputation. Essentially, your online presence enables your customers to find you online, learn about your business and what you offer, as well as learning about your past performance.
The art of mastering your online presence isn’t just about creating a great website, but regularly working on your brand’s visibility across the web in order to maintain a strong and positive online reputation.
What are the benefits of having an online presence?
Probably the biggest benefit of having an online presence is the ability to be seen by your customers on search engines, which can help to increase your leads and conversions. But there are other benefits of having an online presence too including:
- Increased brand awareness
- Becoming an established and credible business in your industry
- Building and developing relationships with your customers across multiple digital channels
Tips to boost your online presence
1. Build your brand
With any business, your brand is vital. Not only does this make for a good impression online, but also offline and across various marketing materials. Many businesses want a beautiful website with an outdated logo. Updating your logo to position with your brand in a way your business is progressing can make a world of difference to your online presence. These updates don’t always have to be huge, it could be something small like updating the typeface or adding a small splash of colour.
2. Create an eye-catching website
Your website is the window to your business. It can showcase so many key features of your organisation including successes, products, services and case studies. It gives your potential customers the reference point that they need to validate that you are the right company for them. Having a modern, up to date and responsive website is key to having a great online presence and helps to increase those all-important conversions.
Designing a new website does take time, and there needs to be a number of people involved to make the new website a success. You also need to make sure you maintain it, and continue to work on and improve it over time. This not only means that your website will grow with the company, but it also looks fresh and up to date for your customers and users. Updating your website can include adding more pages, adding blogs and case studies and improving and expanding on content through the website. These are all contributing factors that will help improve your online presence.
3. Implement a SEO strategy
Search engine optimisation (SEO) comes in two stages. The first stage is all about initially optimising your website with the relevant meta and URL information in order to increase your visibility on search engines like Google.
The second stage is a full SEO campaign. This is where you’ll work on your organic search rankings, improve your page content and internal link structure, amend page meta information and work hard to gain important backlinks from relevant websites.
4. Invest in paid advertising
Paid advertising is a great way to get some quick wins online. It can really help boost your brand recognition by bidding on a range of keywords and direct a range of quality traffic to your website.
Pay-per-click (PPC) is a great way of targeting a range of people depending on the keywords they entered into your chosen search engine. It’s important to ensure that your PPC campaigns are tracked regularly through goal conversions to ensure you can tailor your campaigns if needed. By doing so, you can generate results that convert and help increase your business.
Remarketing is another paid tool that works really well for raising brand awareness. It specifically targets users who have already visited your website once before, and can therefore help you generate more qualified leads for your company and increase your returning visitor rate.
5. Maintain and adopt new social media channels
With the growing social trends and range of users increasing day-by-day, having an active social media presence is becoming one of the most important marketing tools available.
By implementing a well thought out strategy, and understanding target audiences, creating social campaigns (paid or organically) can really help generate conversions, and get your followers involved in the conversation. This in turn helps boost your online presence and shows your business is forward thinking and actively engaging with your customer base.
Need help with your online presence?
We hope we’ve given you more insight into the importance of building and maintaining your online presence, and we hope we’ve given you some ideas on how to boost your online presence too.
If you need further help with building and maintaining your online presence, why not give us a call today? Whether it’s a creative element, a web design and development project or digital marketing you need a hand with, get in touch with us today!