Setting Your Online Presence Up For Success
Creating your web presence involves more than just getting your brochure content onto a five page website with a contact email. You need to take multiple factors into consideration and determine your goals. For most businesses, the purpose of being online is to increase their amount of paying customers. In this article I’m going to walk you through an overview of a successful online presence through quality website design, publishing content, driving traffic and connecting with visitors.
“Creating your web presence involves more than just putting your brochure on the Internet.”
Website Design
People need to accept you visually as a credible professional immediately upon laying eyes on your website. It only takes two seconds for a visitor to determine whether or not they are going to click the back button based on whether or not your website looks legit. Having a website that looks like it was created by a middle schooler in their desktop publishing class (because for a lot of small businesses, it probably is) will not get you customers.
Your design should also keep your visitors experience as a top priority. Make sure that your navigation is simple and clear and that visitors can easily find what they are looking for.
“A visitor will leave your site in under ten seconds if they can’t find a solution to their problem.”
Keep your Calls To Action (CTA) in mind. If you want to encourage your visitors to share your content, make that easy for them with social sharing buttons on each piece of content that you publish. If you want them to fill out a form, give them a clear path to that form and make it simple for them to go through. The less options to fill out, the higher the completion rate. If you want your visitors to call you, make sure you have your phone number clearly at the top and bottom of every page and put it right in front of them on the contact page.
Publish Quality Content
This is not even a question anymore, it is the cost of entry, no matter what type of business you are running. You need to be publishing information on your website for people to find you, promote you and engage with you. Without content to connect with your audience, you do not have an online presence. Even using the phrase “quality content” seems a little silly now, why would you create low quality content? (This used to be true for certain shady search engine optimization companies that would publish malarky in order for search engines to rank them higher for keyword stuffing, but those days are long gone thanks to the Google algorithm updates.)
Using content published on your website reenforces to your visitors that you are an industry leader in your market and you are a credible authority that they can trust and hire. People no longer just want to find a company that says they fix their problem, they want to be educated first then hire someone based on their proven expertise.
Offering frequently posted content on your site also gives your audience a reason to return to your website and gives you something to talk about on your social channels that can be shared by your followers.
Search Engine Traffic
By publishing new content on a regular basis to your website, you’ll be able to get found through search engines when people are looking for things that your site is optimized for. There are over 200 factors that go into how Google ranks a website. If your site is set up optimally for small business SEO then when the search engines come and analyze your site, you will be ready for them. Your chances for ranking on the first page of the search results will increase tremendously.
Once someone lands on your site through a search term that you are ranking for, they’re likely going to find you once, get the info they need and then vanish forever. If they don’t sign up for your newsletter or connect with you on a social profile to be updated with your new content, then you are leaving visitors on the table. Driving traffic to your website through search engines is a key factor in being successful online (leading to your success offline), but if they are coming to your site and leaving before completing a CTA, then counting the amount of visitors to your website is about as useful as a restaurant who counts people that read their menu from the window without coming in and ordering anything.
With the customization of search engines lately and personalized search results pages, it’s going to be harder to measure how you are ranking for every individual who is searching for your keywords. This will become harder and harder as search engines bring more personalization to searching. This is another reason that search engine optimization, although very important, should not be your only approach to bringing in new customers on the web.
You can use different SEO tools to estimate how many people will arrive at your site depending where you rank for certain keywords, but those people who land there are only likely to be searching for that term that one time when they are looking for their solution. If you can estimate 500 visitors to your site per month based on keyword research, you should be capturing those visitors to connect with you and become repeat visitors.
Social Media Marketing
Social media can be used for many different things once you have your routine set up. You can use social media to drive your content strategy, build brand awareness, discover new leads as well as a myriad of other benefits. Here I am talking about getting your search engine visitors to connect with you and become repeat visitors.
If someone connects with you via social media, then they are likely to be repeat visitors to your site. Once you establish a connection, they are asking you to keep them updated with your new content.
Now you are gaining your 500 visitors per month on the search engines, and bringing back a group of them from the previous month as well. This will lead to the exponential growth of your site’s visitors, social media connections and ultimately your client base. In addition to your new social connections, they can also become gateways for more people to find your company online.
Your Two Customer Types
No matter what type of business you are in, you have two customer types online:
1. Those who will purchase from you and become your transactional customers
2. Those who will share your company with their circles and promote you to people who can become customer type number one
This is important to keep in mind when building your online presence. Once a visitor comes to the site, if they sign up for the newsletter (adding their email to your list) or connect via Twitter, Facebook or whatever social channel they prefer, they now have the potential to become a Platinum Lead Generator (PLG). What is a PLG?
In the business world, everyone knows that the best type of lead is a referral through word of mouth. Why is that? Because that means that your new lead heard about you from someone that they trust and you have automatically been put into their mind as the credible authority that can solve their problem. This lead is yours to have (or lose), although no lead is ever guaranteed, this is as close as they come.
Social media can help your business in many ways, but social proof is a strong connection between your customers that can help skyrocket your business. This has been true for businesses offline for as long as there have been businesses offline. It would be foolish to not try and take advantage of this practice in the new online age.
Conclusion
From this detailed overview of a successful online presence, you can see that it takes planning and coordination across multiple channels in a holistic effort to truly help build your business. The ultimate goal is for your online success to translate into offline success in your bank account. Set clear goals for yourself and don’t settle on poor design or poor content. Be sincere and try to help your audience and they will pay you back with their business as well as sharing your company with others within their online and offline circles. Word of mouth is the platinum lead and a full fledged online presence executed properly will bring them to you on a regular basis.