Your online presence is your entire digital footprint, what others see about you and your company online. If you are impossible to find online, your customers are unlikely to find out about you or your business. This is why it is essential as a business owner to take all the steps necessary to increase their online presence. Here are five easy to use tactics that any business or brand can use to improve their presence online.
Find Out Where You Stand
The first step to improving your online presence is finding out where you stand. Run a search of your name, business name and brand name. Make a list of the top ten search results and note whether each is positive or negative. If the top hits are negative, you’ll need to develop a plan to create new content to push up to the top search results for each query and decrease the rankings of the negative search results. If your rivals come up in the top search results instead of you, you’ll need to expand and improve your online presence. If you aren’t sure how to get a clear image of how you look online, a free business audit can do this for you. An online presence audit will give you a more thorough understanding of your online footprint, too, than just Googling yourself.
Coordinate Your Different Digital Personas
You can improve your online presence by using a consistent brand across all platforms. The impact is enhanced by using the same username on various platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Crosslink your various social media accounts with your website’s home page and each other.
You should apply brand based SEO to all of your online accounts, such as referencing the company name and major brands or products in all social media account descriptions. Don’t forget to include hashtags for the company brand in social media posts and Tweets.
Keep Your Various Profiles Active
What is worse than not having a blog where you share information about the company? It is worse to have a blog that hasn’t been updated in a year that turns off visitors who see it. When you create social media profiles for your company or yourself as a business owner, you need to keep the profile active. This doesn’t require writing a unique article per week. Simply posting press releases from the company on your social media accounts or sharing industry reports with a short unique commentary is enough to keep them active and ranking well on social media.
Share Your Content across All Platforms
When you post new content, share it across all of your platforms to increase the social media outreach of the content. Don’t forget to include a call to action in the content itself like asking readers to share it and having social media sharing buttons at the bottom of all content.
You can also share links to your home page periodically on social media when talking about the company. When it is relevant, post links to the company’s self-help knowledge database when someone is having problems or the correct page to visit to schedule service. This type of link sharing increases the search engine ranking of your website as a whole, shows that your company is trying to help those users who asked the questions, and builds backlinks to the company site.
Have Key Employees Build the Company Brand into Their Online Profiles
Every C-level team member should reference the company name in their social media profiles and link back to the company website. If that executive maintains a corporate blog or manages a social media account for the company, that should be referenced on their professional social media accounts. It goes without saying that they should have separate social media accounts for their role with the company from the ones where they post personal opinions and share pictures of the family.
Conclusion
To improve your visibility online, first run an audit to understand the current state of your online presence. An audit may be necessary to determine whether it is positive or negative, so you can develop a plan to improve it. Create a coordinated network of social media accounts and then keep them active. Share content marketing and press releases through your social media accounts as well as any other content that is beneficial to the customer base. Apply branding SEO to your social media profiles and have key employees reference the company in their professional social media accounts.
