Whether you’ve owned your business for a while and are now looking to occupy the virtual space as well as the physical, or whether you’re about to launch your business for the first time and are going right for the virtual pull, it pays to know about the varying aspects of a businesses online presence.
There is a lot to think about these days for business owners. Tonnes of rules and regulations.
The constant pressure to make your business more environmentally conscious. With all of these pressures it can sometimes be hard to focus on the core aspects regarding what can make your business actually successful.
A lot of people just look at the basics of the website but your online presence ranges far wider than that alone. These tips can give you an insight into online business and how you can make things a little better for your business.
However, every business and industry is completely unique in terms of how their online presence works, so use this as your starting point. Good luck!
A Snapshot
You want to be visible across all ranges of the online sphere, if at all possible. As a snapshot, your business needs to be findable. If no one knows about your business online, they aren’t going to sling your website in the address bar and navigate straight to it.
You need to be searchable by people looking for the products or services you offer. You can consider hiring a technical seo consultant or, if you’ve got time do it yourself by looking into the how. The key to take away is that if no one knows about your business they aren’t going to buy anything from you.
Website
Think about your website’s landing page as you would a store front. It needs to be appealing and draw people in. You don’t want to slap walls of text onto the front page. It also needs to be easy to navigate.
You don’t want customers jumping through hoops to get to your product page or to their basket. If you’re just about to set up your website, or have one and are wondering what’s wrong, one of the best things you can do is check on your competitors’ website or websites of businesses in your own industry. Make sure they’re the relatively successful ones.
Check out what they’re doing well, and where they differ to what you’re doing. There might be an industry standard you’ve missed seeing or a clinical mistake you can see you’ve made. This isn’t about copying either, that’s something you want to avoid. Instead, look at what you can improve.
Social Media
Most people in the world are using social media these days. You need to ensure you have a presence. Everyone seems to be using them, especially when looking for local businesses. Potential customers will search for their wants on Facebook or Twitter, bypassing Google altogether.
Take Facebook for example. You need to set up your own business page. Here, you can tell people exactly what it is you do. Working hours. Price list. Vital details about your company. To keep things interesting and fresh you need to work on content. As time passes you’ll build up a following.
Now imagine this was spread over the myriad of social networking sites out there. Don’t forget some of the specific ones like LinkedIn too. You can of course link these business pages to your website to help your traffic flow too.
Blog
Like social media, having a blog on your website will help pull traffic through. You need to ensure the blog is of quality though. If it isn’t, people might start reading and then leave. You want them to stay and to purchase items too.
You can create the content yourself. It has to be relevant of course. But more importantly it needs to be professional. You can have these articles written for you if you don’t feel up to writing them yourself.
Online Directory
If you are a tradesman or something similar which caters for the local area, like being a landscape gardener or even an architect you’ll want an online presence, but sometimes you might not want your own website.
In these cases you need to ensure you’re on the right online directories. There are usually tradesman sites for you to consider but there are also other niche directories. The trick is to find the ones that get the most traffic and are the most popular and ensure your add on the directory stands out about the rest.
