We live in a digital age, where a strong online presence is a must-have for businesses of all sizes. Get it right and even a small business can compete with the giants, but competition is fierce and in such a vast ocean it takes a lot of work to keep your head above the surface. Fortunately, some of that work is very simple, and you can get started without a huge budget or vast amounts of technical knowledge. This blog contains ten easy tips to get your business’s online visibility growing, helping you to reach new audiences and increase traffic to your website.
1. Make Your Website SEO Friendly
Search Engine Optimisation is the process of helping your website appear higher in web search results for particular words and phrases, only without paying for a premium position. It is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies and can have long-lasting results when done well. There are a number of different ways to do SEO, but some of it involves making some straightforward adjustments to your website to make it easier for the search companies to index.
These changes include using relevant keywords (the words that people interested in your products or services might search) in your website’s content, adding alt tags (descriptions for the visually impaired) to images, making sure your site loads quickly and works well on mobile devices, and placing links in your content to other related parts of your site.
2. Claim and Complete Your Google Business Profile
This one is a must for local businesses with a physical location. This is how you get your business to appear on Google Maps, but it also means that Google Search can trust your website a lot more too, which will help it earn a higher ranking. Keep it up to date with your latest contact information, opening hours, and some photos. It also helps to get customers to leave reviews.
3. Leverage Social Media Platforms
After search engines, social media is the next most powerful platform that businesses can use to increase their exposure online. While there are paid ways to do this, you can actually do it yourself for free by creating accounts on the most popular platforms and finding the communities (Facebook groups, forums etc.) that your target audience participates in. Then you can start engaging with them directly, answering questions and sharing helpful content.
4. Create High-Quality Content
On the topic of helpful content, it is important to create a lot of it. Blogs, YouTube videos, presentations, and podcasts are all ways that you can help provide value for your customers, who in turn will share these with others who might be interested or will link back to your content on their own websites. As Sabri Suby from King Kong marketing agency put it in his book, ‘Sell Like Crazy,’ you want to “offer your prospects incredible value, typically in the form of the solution to a problem they’re struggling with, without asking them to purchase anything in return.”
5. Build a Mailing List
Social media and search engines are incredibly powerful tools, but they can also be fickle. A change to the search algorithm or a social media policy could undo some of your SEO efforts or get your accounts banned. It is important to have a backup, and one form of digital marketing that plays this role well and has stood the test of time is email marketing. Email newsletters remain a highly effective way to get your content in front of interested parties, so make sure you provide ways for people to sign up on your website.
6. Reach Out to Influencers or Other Popular Sites
If you are just starting out building an online presence for your business, then it is unlikely that people will be searching specifically for you or that you will rank highly in the results for relevant search terms. However, they can help them find you by getting others to send them your way, either in the form of a recommendation from an influencer or a link directing people from their content to yours. There are a number of ways to do this, ranging from giving freebies to influencers in return for a review or shoutout to guest posting on other, more popular blogs. Don’t be afraid to get in touch, but focus on how featuring you can help them. The worst they can do is say no.
Conclusion
Complicated tactics are not necessary if you are just getting started with building an online presence for your brand. You do not have to spend a fortune either. With just these simple tips, you can markedly improve your online presence. The key is to be consistent with them. The effect of one influencer recommendation will not last forever, just like no comment you make on social media will stop you from being forgotten if you let weeks go by without engaging. Make sure you keep on doing these things, and your online presence will grow with time.
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Sameer Seo 
Eamon