5 Ways To Increase Your Online Presence & Grow Your Small Business

The basic rules of sales tell you that the more people that you can get your ads in front of, the more business you are likely to bring in. When it comes to online marketing, this means representing your brand on every relevant platform.

If you neglect to promote your brand on a relevant platform that your target audience frequents, you are essentially handing your competitors a piece of your market share.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of adjusting your website to Google’s algorithms in order to increase your website’s ranking in search engines’ organic listings. Basically, SEO can be used to make sure that your website listing shows up at the top of the search engine results page for relevant search queries. (So, if you run a car wash, SEO can get your website to show up when someone searches for the term “car wash”.)

According to recent studies, on average, 90% of searchers will click on a website in the organic listings of Google. So if your website isn’t optimised to rank organically in Google’s search results, you are missing out on a huge percentage of your market share.

Google Ads is one of the main types of pay per click (PPC) advertising. It is used by businesses to display paid ads on Google with customised descriptions and landing pages. These ads appear right above the organic results of a Google search. Using Google Ads is the quickest way to get your website infront of new potential customers and drive more traffic to your website, now.

Clicks on Google’s paid ads make up the majority of the other 10% of all clicks (with 90% going to the organic listings). Though 10% may not seem like enough to worry about, no business owner in their right mind would knowingly hand 10% of their market share to their competitors, and neither should you. However, that’s exactly what you’re doing if you are not advertising your business with Google Ads.

Additionally, pay per click (PPC) ads have a much higher average conversion rate than organic listings, meaning that a click from a paid ad is much more likely to turn into a lead or sale. This is largely due to the targeted content and customised landing pages that can be added to PPC listings.

In fact, studies show that clicks from PPC ads are at least 59% more likely to convert to a lead or sale than organic clicks. So, if you’re not advertising your business with PPC advertising, such as Google Ads, then you are essentially handing those leads and sales straight to your competitors.

As the most popular social media platform in the world, Facebook is a great tool to use to drive new traffic and potential leads to your website. Not only can you create a free Facebook business profile to build brand awareness and authority, Facebook also offers an advertising service called Facebook Marketing.

Because people use Facebook everyday, it is a great platform to use to build industry authority and brand awareness before consumers are even searching for your products or services.

Facebook Marketing allows you to display your ads to people based on their age, gender, and interests along with other modifiers. This helps to bring in highly targeted traffic to your website by advertising to users from your target audience that are most likely to be interested in your products and services.

Facebook can also be used for remarketing, which is an essential part of converting users who may be on the fence about whether or not to buy. Remarketing is where you advertise your business to people who have already visited your website.

Remarketing is a highly effective marketing technique as 96% of site visitors won’t buy on the first visit, and 49% of visitors browse a site between 2 to 4 times before making a purchase. Don’t let your potential customers leave your website almost convinced to buy, only to forget about it ten minutes later. Use remarketing to essentially give yourself a second chance at converting their interest into a sale.

Guest blogging is yet another platform that can be used to get your brand and content in front of your target audience. Guest blogging is when you create content to be shared on the blog of another website. Posting a guest blog on a relevant site, with a similar audience, will help to build brand awareness and drive new, relevant traffic to your website.

An easy way to have your guest blog posted on another site is to exchange blogs with one of your industry partners. This is a valuable proposition for both you and your industry partner as a guest blog will give each of your sites a new, relevant link as well as exposing your brand, content, and even the products/services you offer to a wider audience.

Gumtree is an online marketplace where products and services are sold and bought by businesses and individuals alike. Gumtree listings are showing up in search engine results pages an increasing amount, particularly for product based searches.

In fact, for many specific product searches gumtree can show up as over 50% of the organic listings on page one of Google.

Note: Gumtree is not an effective platform for every business, and the relevance to any business should be judged individually. However, if Gumtree has even one listing on the first page for any of your targeted keywords, it could be beneficial to represent your business on that platform, as it has the potential to boost your ad straight to the first page of Google.

To sum up, if you can effectively cultivate your brand presence across multiple platforms and engage with your audience, you will be able to increase the influence and authority of your brand and in turn, help to increase your return on investment in all of your search engine marketing endeavours.