When running a business, your online presence is key to building your brand, gaining more exposure, and increasing your customer base. With an ever-increasing number of customers looking for new brands, products and services online, it can be easy to get left behind if your company does not have a strong online presence. However, there is more to having a good online presence than simply setting up a business website and appearing on popular social networks. We’ve put together some top tips to help you seriously improve your brand’s online presence to see the best results.

 

Tip #1. Hire a Reputable Company:

Often, the best way to gain a good online presence is to hire a reputable company to put in the hard work for you. Today, SEO agencies are adept at improving the online presence of their clients in several ways, including working to improve search ranking, which can make a massive difference in the amount of traffic that your site welcomes. For many business owners, it’s simply impossible to find all the time in the day needed to dedicate to building an online presence, whilst hiring an in-house team to help can be a significant business cost. Outsourcing the work to a good company can help to take some of the pressure off, allowing you to focus on the other important parts of running your company whilst having peace of mind about your online presence. For more information, see these reviews of the HOTH.

Tip #2. Start A Business Blog:

When it comes to building your company’s online presence, high-quality content is essential. You should not just be aiming to increase the amount of content that you have published online, but rather, you should also ensure that the type of content that you produce is valuable to your customers and will help them to find solutions to any industry-related problems that they may have. The key to building a successful online presence is to present yourself as an industry expert; one of the best methods of doing this is through a business blog. Not only will you improve your online presence each time you publish a new blog post, you will also be able to provide your customers with interesting information, tips, ideas, advice, and more.

Tip #3. Be Active on Social Media:

Your brand’s social media presence is a highly important factor when it comes to your online presence. With millions of users on Facebook alone, it’s no surprise that an increasing number of people are turning to social media when it comes to finding more information about brands and products that they are interested in. With social media sites such as Facebook becoming more business-focused, it’s never been so important to have a strong presence here.

The more you share on social media, the more people you will be able to reach. Make sure that everything you share is going to be of interest to your followers; rather than simply sharing information about your products and services, make sure that you offer a mixture of different information, which could even include sharing links from other sites and blogs that you think may interest your followers. It’s also a good idea to use social media for market research; this way you can find out more information about what makes your followers tick and the type of content that they enjoy the most.

Tip #4. Turn on Reviews:

The number of online reviews left by customers for your brand will also have a significant impact on your online presence. Today, more and more customers are turning to third-party review sites before they decide whether to purchase a product or service from a brand; in general, these are some of the best ways of getting an honest idea of what to expect. Whilst reviews can sometimes work against you, for example if somebody leaves a bad review, companies who strive to provide the best customer experience needn’t worry too much about this. Not only do online reviews provide potential customers with more information about your brand, they will also boost the amount of times that you appear online, especially if you use third-party review sites, for example TripAdvisor for hotels and restaurants.

Tip #5. Guest Post:

When it comes to getting the word out there about your brand, don’t forget that it’s not just your own business blog that counts. Guest posting on authority blogs in your niche can help you to expose your brand to a wider target audience and attract more customers, whilst increasing the number of online places where your brand name shows up. To guest post successfully, it’s important to first research the blogs that you are considering posting on to get a better idea of their readership. Once you have done this, you will be able to put together a blog post that appeals to them, but is also consistent with your brand and the type of products and services that you offer. Wherever possible, it’s a good idea to ask the blog owner if you can write under your own author bio, which will give you the opportunity to include information about your company and brand accompanied by a link directly to your website or social media profiles.

Tip #6. Improve Your SEO:

Last but not least, your online presence is always going to suffer without good SEO. Even if you are doing everything that you can to ensure that your brand appears in as many places as possible online, are highly active on social media and guest post regularly, simple SEO mistakes can quickly bring your efforts to a standstill. For example, if your website is not yet mobile-friendly, this could earn you penalty points from Google. Don’t forget that search engines today are looking for user-friendly sites that provide the best possible experience, which means having a responsive design that works perfectly on any device that your users may be using.

Did these tips help? We’d love your feedback in the comments.

By Kar

Dr. Kar works in the interface of digital transformation and data science. Professionally a professor in one of the top B-Schools of Asia and an alumni of XLRI, he has extensive experience in teaching, training, consultancy and research in reputed institutes. He is a regular contributor of Business Fundas and a frequent author in research platforms. He is widely cited as a researcher. Note: The articles authored in this blog are his personal views and does not reflect that of his affiliations.