Five tips to grow your online presence – and get noticed by more customers

Business

Does it sometimes feel as if no one is listening to you online? Discover five ways you can grow your online presence, and get noticed by new customers. 

When you run your own business, you don’t just need to ensure that you deliver excellent service, and ensure that customers are happy to buy from you again and recommend you to others. You need to manage your online reputation too.

A great online reputation will lead to more opportunities, and make it easier to convert fans into paying customers. However, whatever industry you’re in you face tough competition, with new business springing up almost daily (it can seem) and an endless list of social media platforms to try to make an impact on.

So it’s important you invest time and thought into your online strategy and ensure you have a strong presence.

Five ways you can grow your online presence

While no two businesses are exactly the same, there are a number of basic actions you can take to ensure you maximise your online presence. Here are five of the most important.

1) Keep posting

It’s easy to think that writing your website content is a one-off job. Something you can tick off your to-do list and move on from. But you’re wrong.

If you want to give your website the best possible chance of getting found by Google, you need to have a ready supply of fresh, up to date content.

At the most basic, you need to check that your core site content (your homepage, about us, services and contact pages) are written properly with the right SEO keywords.

Once you’re happy with these, turn your attention to your blog. A blog page is the easiest way to fulfil Google’s requirement for fresh content. It’s also a perfect opportunity to showcase your expertise and success, and is great for social sharing, breathing life into your social media accounts.

Ideally, you should blog at least two days a week. However if you don’t have the time for blogging or aren’t confident in your writing skills, you can limit it to once a week or fortnight. Or you can pay someone to write your blogs for you.

The most important thing is to publish new blogs regularly. To make sure you stick to a consistent schedule you can use tools like CoSchedule or Google Calendar.

2) Keep your information up to date

Once a month or so, browse through your website and make sure all your information is up to date and relevant.

Are all the products and services you list still available? Are your prices correct? Is your delivery information accurate? And just as importantly, is this information easy to find?

Nothing is more off-putting for potential customers than websites that are difficult to navigate, or have inaccurate or missing information. If they can’t immediately find what they’re looking for, they could easily buy from a competitor. So make it as easy as possible for your website visitors to buy from and recommend you.

3) Use photography and video

You can also use photography and video to help customers get to know your business better. Showing behind the scenes glimpses of your business, product demonstrations and customer reviews are all fantastic ways to build trust and emotion with your customers.

So make sure you share them regularly on your website (for example on your blog page) and across social media. If you are stuck for ideas on how to use video, watch our free video class here.

(Always keep your business’ brand front of mind, and ensure that everything you create and share is consistent with it.)

4) Be active on social media

Few businesses today can afford to completely ignore social media. And if you want to increase your online presence, it’s essential you are active on at least one channel.

So if you haven’t done so already, choose one or two social media channels and start building a presence there. Share your blogs, photography and videos and connect with customers and industry influencers.

Many customers today also use social media as a customer service tool, so make sure you check your accounts daily and are responsive. And if customers reach out to you with a compliment, question or complaint ensure you respond promptly and appropriately.

You can even reward and encourage followers with special offers and previous of new products via social media.

Need more social media tips? You can read them here:

5) Ask for reviews

Social proof is an essential part of building a positive online reputation. And the quickest way to achieve this is by asking happy customers for reviews and testimonials.

If you can, build in a request for feedback into your sales/follow up process (for example by sending out an automated email after the purchase). And create a review page on your website, and section on your Facebook page, if you have done.

Don’t be shy about great reviews, either. Screen grab glowing tweets or Facebook reviews and share on social media. And ask happy customers if you can turn their experience into a case study.

Again, like web content, this isn’t a job-done-tick-box task. If all your reviews are old, new customers may assume that your levels of service have dropped recently, or maybe your business isn’t trading any more.

So make collecting reviews and feedback (and sharing it) a regular task. Set yourself a target of X new positive reviews a month and ensure you stay on target.

Growing your online presence is a never-ending task

As you may have gathered by now, growing your online presence is something you need to be working on every week, if not day.

If you want to grow a successful, competitive business you can’t afford to get complacent. Instead you need to prioritise tasks that can help you get noticed by Google and social media followers, and encourage current happy customers to spread the word about what you do.

And it’s worth putting the effort in – with consistent work in the right areas, you should soon see results.

Lisa Wheatly writes for website content specialists TopAussieWriters.