5 Simple Ways to Improve your Small Business Online Presence with Advertising

A strong online presence means a strong small business online. Advertising helps small businesses to improve their online presence in many respects. Through advertising whether free ads or paid ads, businesses manage to show up prominently on search engines, social media feeds, and websites that your ideal customers frequent. If you rely on SEO for free ads, you can only target your audience with just keywords. But with paid-per-click, PPC ads, you can segment your audience and market directly to them with special ads. The effects these types of ads have on your online presence are varied but they all work all the same.

Here are some select 5 of many different ad options you can use to increase your online presence.

1. Display ads

Display ads may not have high engagement rates like search ads but they still earn your business a lot of impressions and exposure. This they effectively do by putting your business in front of custom audiences based on their interests, behaviors, types of websites and apps they frequent, and even places they’ve visited. Just like social media ads, display ads allow you to have more options for branding, color, and creativity.

2. Search Ads

Search ads depend on the creative use of keywords for effectiveness. When they are paid ads, they can even be more effective. Paid search ads do not only help your business to land at the top of the SERPs of search engines, they also manage to reach your target customers when they have the highest intent. That increases their effectiveness to grow your online presence. It is a win, win, situation for your business if the business benefits from search ads and paid ads. These ads serve to get your site to rank in both organic and paid results for a keyword. By doing so, the chances of getting a click on one or the other are higher and your business benefits immensely from the exposure.

3. Retargeting Ads

Retargeting ads work to appear in front of users who have previously expressed interest in your business. Such interest derives from interacting with any of your previous ads or an earlier visit to your website. This is a great and hugely effective way to maintain a presence with prospects as they engage elsewhere on the web. You can repackage ads/info based on their previous interests and use it to get them back to your business.

4. Google Local Service Ads

Most small businesses are local and Google capitalizes on this fact to target ads. Google Local Service Ads are very effective ads. This is because they manage to show up at the top of Google SERPs in card form. If Google rates your business highly, it can label the business “Google Guaranteed.” You will notice this when you go through the application process. Your ads will appear with a green “Google Guaranteed” badge under your name. That kind of helps your business to make for a stronger presence in that section of the results.

5. Social Media Ads

No question about it social media ads are great ads you can use to improve your online presence. This is because social media ads have higher reach and engagement rates than organic posts. They can be better targeted too. While social media users have less intent than on search engines, social ads come with stronger targeting capabilities and more creative freedom. In addition, you can easily leverage the power of video ads on social media particularly if you are marketing out of the very popular social media platforms, like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, Instagram and the likes.