It doesn’t matter whether your business is retail-based or online-based—a great online presence can give you stronger sales. But staying visible online can be a challenge because there are billions of different websites, and it’s safe to assume that hundreds or thousands of them may be in competition against you.
But it doesn’t take a digital marketing genius to help make your business’s presence known on the web. There are a few relatively simple and cost-effective strategies you can employ to help expose your business to huge swaths of people who are looking for your product or service. Here’s what you can do to boost your company’s online presence.
Build a Great Website
If you’re going to drive web traffic and sales, you must have a fantastic website. You don’t need to pay an expensive web developer to build a website for you. You can construct a great website for your business by using a simple web design app, like SquareSpace.
On SquareSpace, you can work off an existing website template, or create your own. It’s easy to create a gorgeous website with beautiful visuals that’s both fast and secure (both of which are important if you’re going to get people to stay on your site and keep coming back).
When designing or redesigning your site, remember to use the pyramid structure: the home page should be simple, and every page that branches off of it should have an increasingly larger selection of content. The pyramid structure makes for a great user experience, and it’ll also help you boost your SEO.
Use SEO On Your Website
SEO is one of the most important digital marketing strategies you can employ. SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” The goal of SEO is to make your website rank highly on a search query, so when someone searches for “local restaurants,” on Google, your local restaurant will be one of the first results that pops up (assuming you own a restaurant, of course). If your website is search engine optimized, you’ll get more web traffic and higher sales.
How do you incorporate SEO on your website? It all starts with the keywords: you want to have keywords on your website that your prospective customers are using on their searches. But there are other aspects to SEO, too, including linking, domain authority, and site structure. For more information on the topic, read through these small business SEO tips by Housecall Pro.
SEO is a tough field to master, but if you take the time to teach yourself the basics, you can significantly improve the visibility of your website at zero cost.
Social Media
Social media is one of the most prominent ways in which people use the Internet these days, so it’s important for your business to post frequently on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even Snapchat. There are lots of other social media platforms, but those are the most popular ones.
If you need some ideas about what to post on your social feed, just take a peek at the most followed brands on Instagram or Facebook. You’ll see that those pages post enticing content, combined with user interaction and giveaways (which require users to tag the brand’s account—a smart promotional scheme). But the real advantage to social media is that happy customers will tag your business if they want to share their experience or your product with their friends and followers.
Another social media strategy is to reach out to social media influencers. Influencers are people who have thousands or millions of followers on their social media account. You can offer your service or product to an influencer for free in exchange for them posting about it. If you can get a popular influencer to post about your business, then your company may get exposure to thousands or millions of potential customers.
Make Videos
Nowadays, it seems as if all of the most popular websites have videos. People love videos, and many Internet users think videos are preferable to reading a blog post. If your website has low traffic, you might want to start posting videos rather than blogs (and you can always post transcriptions of your videos).
You don’t need to hire a professional video creation team to make high-quality videos. Just get a:
- Medium-tier DSLR
- Two or three umbrella lights (for three-point lighting)
- A high-quality sound system
You can edit your videos together using the Adobe Creative Suite programs. In no time, you’ll have professional-quality videos on your site that can help drive web traffic.
If you want to boost your business’s web traffic, just remember to build a great website, incorporate SEO, be active on social media, and include videos on your site. Both your web traffic and your conversion rate are bound to be higher.