How to Increase Online Presence with your Small Business website

Your online presence derives from your small business website. This website is your main contact window on the internet. That is where consumers first make contact with your business. No matter how someone finds out about your business, either through social media, an ad, a listing, direct mail, or through a friend, their first instinct is naturally to check out your website. A considerable percentage of consumers won’t consider doing business online without a credible website. This is because consumers consider it more convenient and appealing to browse for information on a website at their own time and location. Engaging with the business, getting more information and actually making a purchase, is also very convenient through a website. This is more so in times of severe restrictions the world is experiencing at the moment because of Covid-19 pandemic. If your website is well-designed, well-hosted, easy-loading, user-friendly, mobile-friendly and optimized well enough, it helps to increase its online presence.

To enhance that, you must opt for a very modern and attractive website for your business. Because consumer expectations are increasingly getting higher these days, having a good website helps to make your online presence stronger. That is if consumers can easily search for it, interact with it and do business with it. A tidy majority of consumers admit to judging the credibility of a business through its website design. This is further reinforced if they can seamlessly interact with the website and not experience distracting glitches. All these help to increase the online presence of a website, making it the type of website that helps a small business to generate leads, customers and sales.

Search engines are the strongest online agents that help to enhance the online presence of a business website. This is why marketers always strive to make their websites search engine-friendly. This they do by way of Search Engine Optimization, SEO. It is recommended to always perform SEO on your website with the latest updates in mind. That is what helps it with good search engine rankings and a strong online presence eventually. SEO is a free way to get on the first page of major search engines SERPs particularly Google’s. Doing so is the hallmark of a strong online presence. To get SEO right on your website, you must embark on deliberately targeted SEO efforts like link building, content creation, keyword research, selection and deployment on the content of your website. This may take time, considerable efforts and patience but when done right, it becomes a lasting asset that can help to increase online presence for your business over a considerable period of time.

Why Your Small Business Needs a Strong Online Presence

Every small business needs a strong online presence to do well on the internet. Online presence is one credible and effective way to place your business in front of your target audience. The more avenues available to you to place your business in front of your target audience, the more opportunities you have to build awareness for your brand and to improve your business reputation. Aside that, there are some other ways a strong online presence benefits your small business. Such as:

Marketing Round-The-Clock: A strong online presence gives your small business the opportunity for 24/7 marketing around the globe. If your business has a strong online presence, it is easy for people to discover you, learn about you, engage with you, and reach out to you anytime of the day convenient for them and from wherever they are. They can do business with you round-the-clock on the internet no matter what device they are using to access the internet.

Get Discovered: As experienced marketers like to say, establish your business firmly on the internet and get discovered easily. This is because a strong online presence makes it easy for ideal customers who don’t yet know you exist to discover you. They can do this even when they are not directly searching for what you are offering at any point in time.

Earn Google’s Trust: If you want to get organic traffic to your business, you’ve got to build the trust of major search engines particularly Google.  This is because Google takes more than just your website into account when ranking. Its algorithms are programmed to take a holistic look at your assets across the web and how consistent they are. That affects your ranking in Google SERPs.

Present as Legitimate Business: Most online shoppers/consumers always rely on multiple sources of information before making their buy decisions. If their search results show your business as a legitimate business, you can earn their purchases. If however you fail or neglect to provide enough information about your business across credible online sources, consumers and search engines may ignore your business completely.

Get More Conversions: Experienced marketers very well know that it takes several encounters with a business before a lead becomes an actual customer. A strong online presence for your business makes it prominent and available for such encounters. Being prominent on multiple channels creates the right opportunities for such encounters to happen much more quickly. You get more conversions as a result.

Key into Consumer Buyer Journey: There is research evidence that over 60% of consumers buyer journeys start online. A strong online presence makes your business available to be found by these consumers. That engagement can take place at different points in their buyer journey towards becoming customers, irrespective of whatever devices they are accessing the internet with.

Herd Mentality: All your online assets are relative and interdependent on one another. Each of your online assets and identities gives power to one another. That is why each channel performs better in concert with the others than it would on its own. These assets thus help your small business better when they work in concert like a herd.

Save Time and Money: Every small business owner always operates very tight ads budgets. Whatever saves costs is always great for the business. Digital marketing helps to save costs. Digital marketing platforms all come with data/metrics to let you know what’s working and what’s not. That vital info helps you to allocate your ads budget judiciously and to use it efficiently in your marketing activities. That is in addition to the fact that most digital ads are hugely cost-effective.