Let’s first understand what an online presence is. Suppose, you searched for a certain brand product to purchase and found that the site focused on providing the top three search results, which included the website itself, the product webpage, and the product review page. Doing further research of that brand, you found its Wikipedia page, social media pages, as well as its presence on other e-commerce sites. This shows that the brand has got a wider online presence on every possible digital platform.
On the other hand, as per Adaptive Marketing, about 97% of buyers depend on the internet to find their needs. This fact is, however, further intensified by the current pandemic.
So, be it an offline business or online store, an active internet presence not only pertains to increasing e-commerce growth but also the local businesses alike.
However, as the internet advances with time, the definition of online presence also evolves. In this information-dense guide, you will get a vivid idea of:
- the definition of an online presence and its importance
- 5 proven strategies to accelerate your online presence
By the time you finish reading, you will be all set to fix the nooks and crannies of your online business.
What defines an online presence?
First of all, understand that online existence and online presence, both are different things. Having an online existence is not enough to determine an active online presence.
While your existence may bring you on the map, an online presence brings more visibility, value, and increases your business awareness.
So, it is your online presence that goes a layer deeper into showcasing your entire business scenario, according to:
- You: The measures you take to produce your business’ internet content
- The internet: Where your website stands in social media algorithms and search engine results
- The public: How people consider your online business, what they are say about it, how often they are get engaged with it
An online presence is an ultimate desideratum for your eCommerce plan.
But, before heading to the tactics of how to boost online presence, let’s justify the bold stated above.
Why is online presence so important in 2021?
The better the visibility of your business to your online target audience, the greater success in increasing awareness and building your brand reputation. But, other than that, here are some more benefits that online presence brings you:
- Get Recognized: An active online presence eases the task for the potential traffic, who didn’t know your business existed, to discover and explore you, both when they aren’t and are looking for services/products you offer.
- Be found as an authentic and authorized business: Consumers greatly depend on a number of data sources of a dedicated website before buying their product. If your business site lacks in providing its necessary information across these sources, you will be overlooked both by consumers and search engines.
- Round-the-clock Business Marketing: Having a strong online presence helps people find, learn, and get engaged with, contacting you whenever they want, regardless of what device they use or where they stand in the buyer journey.
- Reduce Expense: All the online marketing platforms bring you data about what’s working well and what went wrong, so that you accordingly spend only on the necessities.
- Close More Deals: It takes time for any business to go through several encounters before it can finally convert leads into customers. Being a prominent business on multiple digital channels creates more scopes to expedite those lead conversions.
- Earn Google’s Loyalty: Google considers more than your website to determine its ranking in search results. In essence, Google checks out all your assets (social media channels, webpages, etc.) across the internet database and how steady or dependable those are.
- Make Buyer’s Journey A Cakewalk: Around 63% of buying journeys begin online. Through online presence, you can make your business compatible with cross-device paths for the consumers in their customership journey.
Each of your online business identities act as an asset, giving more value to one another when in concert than on its own.
Ways to Boost Online Presence in 2021
We will directly move to the factors that can influence your business’ online presence in 2021.
- How to boost online presence through a website?
Regardless of whether or not people discover your business on social media, via direct email, friend, ad, or through listings, etc., their primary interest will be checking your website.
Making a direct call to the business seems less appealing than quick browsing of the website on their terms to gather his/her desired information.
That’s the reason why 56% of consumers didn’t consider businesses that don’t have their website. Well, that’s the statistical survey from 2017. The percentage has increased exponentially, especially considering this pandemic.
That being said, here is how to make substantial online presence through a website:
- Create a modern and engaging website
Consumers these days come with greater expectations to check a website. So, if your business site doesn’t fulfill this point, you are already losing the race. About 75% of consumers determine a brand’s credibility by checking its website design, its loading time, multiple-device interface accessibility, and more.
And, truly speaking, it is better to hire a digital marketing expert to help set up your website. It will save you time, plus the risks of experiencing frequent glitches will subside when dealt by a professional.
Building a lead-generating business site that both looks and functions just how you wanted, without losing hours behind it, is worth spending on a website expert.
- How can SEO accelerate your online presence?
Only a small percentage of not more than 49% of SMEs invest in SEO. In fact, about 18% of these businesses don’t target SEO in their marketing plan.
But, if done right, SEO is the best and free strategy to bring your website on the first page of the search engine results.
Here’s how to do that:
- Conduct SEO including all the latest updates
Pursue the tried and proven ways that include quality content development based on targeted keywords, image optimization, and backlink creations. Improvise the core web vitals, keeping those aligned with the update of your webpage experience.
Google uses mobile-first indexing to index and rank every website accordingly. So, make sure to keep your site content above all possible mobile errors.
Apply schema markup to come up with rich snippets appearing below your website header in the SERP, such as your site’s home page or main navigation page, ratings, etc.
Rank your local business at the top in organic listings by prioritizing local SEO. The pandemic has already strengthened the support for local businesses, which can be further reinforced with local seo.
Though SEO is a time-taking process to get increased online presence, in the end, it is the gift that continues giving.
- How content and video creation through targeted terms and topics can boost online presence?
Developing consumer’s search-specific business blogs and video contents can increase your online presence to a notable extent. For that, the first thing you have to do is optimize the core content pages of your business site for keywords. Your goal is to keep the content highly search-relevant, containing the essentials the consumers are looking for.
Here is how:
- Focus on a keyword theme per blog post and include it in the content title, image name, subheadings, alt text, and meta description
Your every blog posting should adhere to the relevant terms and topics that can be individually optimized to rank for that particular keyword. Include more H2s in your content to increase appearances in “People also ask“.
That way, your site gets multiple opportunities to show up in search results of your targeted audiences, at any stage of their customership journey.
However, remember that frequent appearance in the first-page doesn’t only mean stronger online presence. It also influences the chances of attracting more leads to your conversion-optimized website and increases credibility. In fact, a web-business with blogs receives 55% more traffic than the businesses without blogs.
Use precise sentences and frequent bullets to be featured in snippets. Appearance of your business blog in featured snippets also increases your online presence.
Plus, blogging is the best way to demonstrate your expertise and create your brand personality in front of its visitors, which alongside act as a reputation component of your web presence.
Now coming to video content creation, almost every video marketing stat considers it a value-driven medium to accelerate business growth through online presence.
So, here are the two things to focus on:
- Leverage the benefits of video contents to effectuate more shares and views
(i) Create an account on YouTube to upload your business videos, which you can also embed into your website’s business blogs to drive traffic to your YouTube channel.
(ii) You can follow the same strategy for your other social media channels, like Instagram. Facebook, etc. Social media video posts get more shares and attention than the text and image contents.
Moreover, people remember 95% of the facts that they learn through videos than through text reading. So, video contents contribute a major part in increasing your online presence.
- How can social media presence benefit your online presence?
Social media is a necessary part of web marketing in this generation. In fact, as per 2021 stat, about 50.64% of the global population are actively using social media platforms. So, undoubtedly, it is a key tool to find and reach your intended customer target at a quicker pace.
- Build your business page on social media to showcase your company services and products
Your posts should contain value that could drive followers to your page. The post content should relate to what visitors like or are looking for.
For example, if you have an online medicine website, then build your brand awareness targeting those people who are following your competitors’ pages. Post discounts, free delivery, and more that you have to offer which others don’t.
Nowadays, having Twitter and Facebook pages has become quite common for any website. So, failing to maintain the same for your website might build a sense of doubt among the visitors, no matter how cool your website looks or how truly genuine it is.
Potential customers look for the social media presence while researching any website to judge its genuineness and know how it served others earlier.
- How can online advertising intensify your online presence?
PPC advertising on search engines and social media advertising are what most businesses use to grab their intended traffic within a short span. Plus, if your product/service ad appears at the top in SERP, it will spread your brand awareness, increasing your web visibility.
Here is how to improve your online visibility through ads:
(i) Target multiple search engines PPC ads like Google ads, Bing ads, and Yahoo ads.
(ii) Similarly, you can run ad campaigns on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. which are popular for their effective advertising options.
Decide what content you want to promote through online ads. Also, check which platform would bring better results to that ad (i.e. which platform has the right audience for your ad).
Looking for assistance to maximize online visibility of your maiden business website? Sun Media Marketing offers the above range of services and more to keep your business ahead through increased web presence.
Contact us India: +91-9898-630-296, USA: +1-917-267-8626. Or, email info@sunmediamarketing.com to know more.