With the overwhelming majority of people relying on the internet to make purchasing decisions, it’s not enough to simply have a website. You need to have a strong web presence and good online visibility. Otherwise, it will be virtually impossible to reach your target audience and grow your business.
Whether you’re a service-based, ecommerce or brick-and-mortar business, strong online visibility is critical to your ability to build your brand awareness, engage with your audience, differentiate yourself from your competitors and generate quality leads. If your business has poor online visibility, it will be extremely challenging to achieve your marketing goals.
Fortunately, there are a variety of strategies you can implement to grow your online presence and improve your visibility. While these efforts take a lot of work and require persistence, you’ll find that your improved online visibility will significantly elevate the success of your business.
A Strong Online Presence Is Critical to Improve Your Visibility
Your presence refers to a comprehensive picture of your business that encompasses:
- The actions you take online, including the content you produce and the posts you share with your audience
- The way search engine and social media algorithms view your business in relation to others in your industry
- How the public perceives your business, including what they say about you online and the ways in which they engage with you
Another way to look at your online presence relates to the quality of experiences you create for your audience. Simply publishing content and making social media posts won’t make a positive impact on your credibility and reputation unless they provide your audience with value. Therefore, in order to develop a strong online presence, your website, content and social media activity needs to provide enough value that your audience will have a great experience engaging with your business online. When you’re able to accomplish this, you’ll typically experience an improvement in your visibility since the information you provide will be highly sought after.
Benefits of Strong Online Visibility
By far, the greatest benefit associated with improved online visibility is that your business will be discovered by more people. With 97% of consumers researching products and services online, improving your visibility is critical to your ability to get on the radar of individuals who are likely to become a customer. When your online visibility is strong, your audience will have a much easier time discovering you when they’re searching for the solutions you offer.
Additional benefits include:
- Improved credibility – Most individuals will consult multiple online resources when gathering information about a purchase. When you show up on searches across a variety of platforms, it increases your credibility in the eyes of these consumers and improves the likelihood that they’ll choose you over your competitors. For a reputable PR agency, we highly advise you contact Pure PR in Melbourne.
- Optimized buyer’s journey – Digital marketing allows you to target individuals at every stage of the buyer’s journey. When you have strong visibility at each point in this process, you’re more likely to reach your audience regardless of where they are in their purchasing decision. Once they discover your business, you can guide them through the rest of your journey to convert them into a customer.
- Increased conversions – The average person has seven interactions with a business before becoming a customer. When you’re highly visible on a variety of digital channels, you’ll have more opportunities for these interactions to happen, increasing the likelihood of converting these leads into paying customers.
- Improved brand awareness – Online channels are some of the most powerful tools you have to grow your brand. The greater your online visibility, the more effectively you’ll be able to convey your brand messaging to your audience.
- More effective marketing performance – Each of your online assets plays a complementary role with one another, helping you achieve your marketing goals. When your visibility on each online channel is better, it will result in better results for your overall marketing strategy.
Your Comprehensive Guide to Improving Your Online Visibility
An effective digital marketing strategy requires you to have a strong online presence across a variety of channels. For this reason, it’s important to take steps to improve your online visibility in several places. Focusing on any one channel to the exclusion of others will make it harder to reach the sector of your audience that isn’t searching for your offering on the channel you’ve chosen.
Therefore, it’s best to invest time in improving your visibility on several digital channels. Make sure you choose the ones that are most heavily used by your audience to maximize the benefit of your efforts. The following methods will help you improve your online visibility on the most commonly leveraged components of a digital marketing strategy.
3 Ways to Improve Your Website Visibility
Therefore, improving your website visibility should always be a high priority. You can accomplish this in several ways:
- Redesign your website
- Implement the latest SEO best practices
- Publish high quality content
Redesign Your Website
An old, outdated website is problematic for several reasons. Your website plays an integral role in your ability to make a good impression on your audience. In fact, 75% of people evaluate the credibility of a business based on their website design. When you have an outdated website, it will often make it harder to convert visitors into leads. But an outdated website may also negatively impact its visibility.
Outdated websites that use old, bloated code often take longer to load, are hard to navigate and provide a poor user experience. This will negatively impact your search engine rankings in several ways:
- Most search engines prioritize site speed as part of their algorithms, and a long website load time will often hurt your rankings
- A convoluted navigation structure and poor user experience will often cause visitors to leave your website right away and over time, this will cause your search rankings to drop
A website redesign can often be an effective way to improve your visibility. Building a custom website that uses the latest coding best practices, has a navigation structure that is easy to follow and provides a good user experience will often have a dramatic impact on your search rankings, making it easier for your audience to find your website when they search for your products and services.
Implement the Latest SEO Best Practices
Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a critical role in your website visibility. When your website is optimized using the latest SEO best practices, it will improve your ability to rank well for the keywords that your audience is most likely to use when searching for your products or services.
Some of the SEO tactics that will help improve your website visibility include:
- Creating high quality content for your target keywords
- Optimizing images on your pages and blogs
- Building backlinks to your website from high domain authority sites
- Creating a mobile-friendly (responsive) website design
- Using schema markups and meta data that allow rich snippets to appear below your page title in the search engine result pages (SERPs)
- Utilizing local SEO tactics that will help you show up in Google’s local pack at the top of the SERP
Publish High Quality Content
A strong content marketing strategy is one of the most effective ways to improve your website visibility. Your core website pages help your audience learn about your company and the products/services you provide. But they are limited in their ability to help improve your visibility for other keywords that your audience may be searching for. To capture the website traffic for many of the keyword searches associated with your offerings, you’ll need to regularly publish content on your blog.
Your blog is where you can create high quality, in-depth content about many of the questions, problems and topics associated with the solutions you provide. You have the ability to rank for long-tail keyword search terms that will often generate high quality traffic from website visitors who are more likely to convert. This is an effective way to increase your first page search rankings and improve your website visibility.
Approximately 77% of internet users regularly read blog posts, making blogging one of the most effective ways to reach your target audience and increase your website traffic. When creating your blog content strategy, make sure to:
- Address topics that your target audience is regularly searching for
- Provide detailed information that offers value to your audience
- Write in a manner that aligns with your brand voice
- Focus on one target keyword or keyword theme per blog post
- Include relevant questions in your H2 subheads that may increase your chances of showing up in Google’s “People Also Ask” box (this will help improve your website visibility for these questions and drive traffic to your website)
- Promote your blog posts throughout your other marketing channels to further increase their visibility among your target audience
3 Ways to Improve Your Social Media Visibility
In addition, social media provides a powerful tool to grow your brand. According to Sprout Social, when individuals follow a company on social media:
- 91% of them will visit the company’s website
- 89% will buy from the company
- 85% will recommend the company to their friends and family
The following tactics will help you leverage social media to improve your online visibility:
- Focus on the right platforms
- Concentrate on growing your audience, not your followers
- Emphasize shareability when creating posts
Focus on the Right Platforms
When it comes to choosing social media platforms to include in your marketing strategy, always take a “less is more” approach. If you try to target every platform, you’ll spread your resources too thin, and you won’t have the bandwidth to achieve your desired results. Instead, focus on creating quality content on a smaller number of platforms.
So which social media platforms are the best to include in your social media strategy? The answer depends on the preferences of your target audience.
You should always focus your marketing efforts on the platforms your audience uses most often to maximize the ROI of your efforts. Limiting your social media activity to two or three platforms where your target audience spends their time and devoting the resources to deeply engage with your audience on these platforms will yield better results than having a weak presence on a large number of social media sites that aren’t regularly used by your audience.
Concentrate on Growing Your Audience, Not Your Followers
This tip is a bit of a “chicken-and-egg” scenario since growing your number of followers will ultimately help you generate higher quality leads. Your followers are more likely to engage with your brand on a deeper level, view you as a trusted expert and turn to you when they’re ready to buy. But in order to increase your followers, you need to grow your audience.
To grow your audience, create quality, engaging content that will resonate with the needs of the individuals most likely to benefit from your offering. As you continue engaging with this audience, it will generate more likes and comments on your posts. Over time, it will also result in more user-generated content, which has been shown to generate 29% higher conversions than social media marketing campaigns that don’t cultivate user-generated content.
Ultimately, a vibrant profile that provides value to a large audience will have a much greater impact on your visibility than a profile that caters to a small number of niche followers.
Emphasize Shareability When Creating Posts
When people regularly engage with your social media posts, the algorithms will display your posts in users’ feeds more often. This is an important way to improve your social media visibility. In order to improve engagement with your posts, make sure you:
- Provide quality content that delivers value to your audience
- Use emotional words and phrases, compelling statistics, and evocative images to increase the likelihood that users will share your posts
- Respond to likes and comments to maintain greater engagement
The more compelling and engaging your social media posts are, the more likely users will be to share these posts with their network. This dramatically increases your visibility and expands your audience. For this reason, crafting social media posts with the goal of providing engaging, quality material that is likely to be shared will pay huge dividends.
3 Ways to Improve Your Visibility with Paid Ads
You have several different opportunities to leverage paid ads to increase your online visibility:
- Pay per click (PPC)
- Social media ads
- Retargeting ads
Pay per click (PPC) ads are displayed at the top of the SERP on Google, giving your business an opportunity to show up front and center when individuals are searching for keywords related to your products and services. When done properly, PPC campaigns can have an incredible ROI. Effective PPC ads have been found to generate $2 for every $1 spent, delivering a 200% ROI.
In order to maximize your ability for PPC ads to increase your visibility and generate more leads, it’s important to be strategic about the keywords you’re targeting. Often, choosing slightly less competitive keywords that still generate a solid amount of search volume will deliver a better ROI than trying to capture the traffic for the most competitive – and expensive – keywords.
As with every other aspect of your digital marketing strategy, monitoring the success of your PPC campaigns is also a critical step to maximizing your ROI. This will enable you to evaluate which campaigns are delivering the best results and which are struggling. You can then pivot and focus your resources on the campaigns that are performing the best.
Social Media Ads
You can also use paid ads to increase your visibility on social media platforms. Social media ads provide robust targeting capabilities, allowing you to be very specific about the audience you reach. This provides a powerful tool that can improve the reach of your social media efforts and generate greater engagement with your business on these platforms.
Retargeting Ads
Retargeting ads are shown to individuals who have previously expressed interest in your business or one of your products/services. These ads are specifically targeted towards individuals who have visited your website, interacted with a previous ad you’ve run, or clicked on one of your products on a third-party ecommerce site.
Retargeting ads increase your visibility by keeping your business on top of mind with individuals who have previously engaged with your company online. This can provide a powerful tool to convert leads once these people are ready to make a purchase.
3 Additional Ways to Improve Online Visibility
- Implement email marketing campaigns
- Encourage online customer reviews
- Work with online influencers
Implement Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing is a very effective way to improve your online visibility and stay top of mind with your audience. While there are inherent limitations to the people you can reach on the search engines and social media platforms due to the algorithms used, you are guaranteed to reach 100% of the individuals on your email list since your emails will always be delivered into their inboxes.
Keep in mind that the effectiveness of your campaigns will depend on your ability to get people to open your emails, but the ROI on email marketing has traditionally been very high. Studies have found that email marketing generates $38 for every $1 spent.
One of the reasons the ROI is so high on email marketing is that you’re increasing your visibility with individuals who have previously engaged with your business and have opted into receiving your emails. These people are typically more likely to be receptive to your messaging, view your business as a trusted source of information and consider your business when they’re ready to make a purchase.
To get the best results on your email marketing campaigns:
- Build your list by offering gated content pieces such as industry reports, eBooks, guides or downloadable PDFs in exchange for the person’s email address
- Create irresistible subject lines to increase your open rates
- Create quality content that provides value to your audience, ensuring they will continue to open and read your emails
- Segment your list by varying the messaging used with different audience personas to maximize the impact of your efforts and improve open rates
Encourage Online Customer Reviews
Online customer reviews are an effective way to increase your visibility and position your brand as a trusted, quality provider. Reviews have become an important part of the buying process for many individuals:
- 95% of customers read reviews prior to making a purchase
- 92% of buyers are more likely to purchase from a business after reading a trusted review
In addition, online reviews help increase your visibility by boosting your off-site SEO and improving your local SEO efforts.
Work with Online Influencers
Influencer marketing can be a powerful way to boost your online visibility. Influencers are individuals with established online brands and large followings on social media. Working with influencers expands your visibility by exposing your business to their followers. It also provides a powerful tool for establishing social proof within a community because an influencer’s followers value that person’s opinions and recommendations.
To maximize the ROI of your influencer marketing efforts:
- Choose an influencer in a complementary industry to your business so that they can help you reach your ideal clients
- Make sure they have real followers, as well as a large enough social reach to significantly improve your visibility
- Establish KPIs to track the success of your influencer marketing campaigns and ensure the influencer remains aligned with your expected goals and outcomes from the campaign
Webolutions Can Help You Grow Your Online Visibility
Improving your online visibility is critical to achieving your marketing goals and generating the highly qualified leads necessary to grow your business. Due to the varied approaches required to expand your visibility and reach your target audience, it’s helpful to work with a digital marketing agency that can make sure you’re addressing all of the top strategies discussed above. At Webolutions, we have you covered.
Webolutions has been Denver’s leading digital marketing agency since 1994. We offer comprehensive digital marketing services to address any needs you may have.
Our transformational Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach has been developed to grow your business smarter, faster and easier. This collaborative approach helps your team clarify the unique value you bring to your customers/clients. We’ll then work with you to develop the most effective messaging to convey this value to your audience. Our team of marketing specialists will leverage all of the strategies discussed above to improve your visibility, grow your brand, and generate more leads.
Contact us to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions serves clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.
