| 
Share

Online visibility

Does your business have good online visibility? Do you regularly attract new clients online, and do they contact you for a quote or ask for moregetting visible online information? Or do they find your competitors first? 
Nearly all businesses are now online, but just because you are online doesn’t mean people will find you. In fact, even if you are really active online and doing everything right, it probably won’t be enough to become visible and drive conversions.
 

What’s doing everything right?

I mean, that you publish regularly – two or three times a month at least. That your content is beautiful, well crafted, well written, with on-point SEO. That everywhere you have an online presence is done properly.
And while I wish it wasn’t the case, that usually isn’t enough these days. Not if you want to find new customers and get more conversions ie make more sales. To achieve that you need to find the sweet spot in your niche. Then dominate it. Then have a proper sales funnel set up, with call to action to achieve conversions. Then wash and repeat until you gain traction.
 

Why do you need to do this?

So people looking to buy what you offer can find you – and FIND YOU FIRST. Because if potential clients can’t find you… or can only find you if they have a direct link, happen to see a tweet, or look really hard, such as click through to the 3rd page of Google, for example (and who does that?)… then you will only be getting business from your current circle of contacts. This will then restrict your business’s sales potential, as well as hamper future growth.

Three steps to online visibility

1. Content

Content is the fuel of any marketing, whether online or offline. But there’s a good way to do it and a not so good way. Unfortunately, the not so good way accounts for most of all published content at the moment. Even more unfortunately, it usually result in zero visibility.
 
Business Basics 
Publish two or three times a month over a period. Optimise text, use H1 headers. Make it beautiful and well crafted. Promote it a lot i.e. everywhere your business is online.
 
Business Uplift
Find the sweet spot to become magnetic using keyword research. Put 90% of your effort in to crafting article/blog titles. Optimise your Q&A for voice search. Add bespoke landing pages with carefully-researched useful giveaways. Track everything. Where do they come from? How long do they spend on the page? Do they read more? Do they share it? Comment? Click through? Contact you? Do more of what works, drop what doesn’t.
 

2. Social Media Marketing

Choose wisely. Your business can’t be everywhere all the time. Even the biggest corporates can’t do that and they have an army of people dedicated to social media marketing. 
 
Think. Which networks are best for increasing your business’s visibility? For attracting your customers? Are they looking for what you sell when they are there?
 
Facebook, for example, might be where your clients hang out most. However, if you sell insurance they might not be interested in buying from you while they are there. On LinkedIn, however, probably yes.
 
Likewise, if you are a wedding photographer then your clients are likely to be on LinkedIn. However, they unlikely to be looking for your services while they are using the platform. On Instagram, on the other hand, or Pinterest? Absolutely.
 
Business Basics
Promote it, make it visible, do it frequently, link it through to the website. Use an image and hashtags.
 
Business Uplift
Twitter lists to inform content and for social sales. LinkedIn blogs for social sales and regular networking. Facebook groups for creating a loyal audience who will refer others to you and promote you. Instagram hashtags to attract a new crowd. Pinterest with optimised descriptions and location activated… etc etc. And then connect them all to create a web of social goodness and create traction.
 

3. SEO

It’s Search Engine Optimisation, but not as you know it. The world of using a few well-chosen keywords or phrases in your content and then sitting back and watching all the traffic pile in are long gone (unless you find a magical unsaturated niche that everyone suddenly wants to know about, which is very very unlikely).
 
Now you don’t just need a strategy, but you also need to box clever to make your content magnetic and findable.
 
Business Basics
Keyword research, meta tags on every page, optimised text using relevant keywords.
 
Business Uplift
Optimise EVERYTHING on every page. Add schema mark up. Optimise your Q&A with questions people are actually asking about and in your niche. Use sweet spot keywords to inform your content and headers and social media. Also use them to locate the right hashtags. Add easy-to-use social shares within the text to make it more sharable. Pinterest buttons for your (lovely and labelled) images. Use your keywords to ensure your giveaways answer real life pain points in your niche. Especially those that no one else is answering (that is your ‘sweet spot’).
 

Create Traction

Once you have all three areas working well, you then need to integrate them to create traction. Why? Because Google likes everything to align. So if you say we’re expert at ‘this’ over here, they like you to also be an expert in ‘this’ over there.
 
And if you link it all together then that will create a circle of visibility goodness. This then creates more traction. Traction? In visibility terms this means using integration to make content work harder to help raise it to the top of Google. Does it work? Yes, it does. We’ve done it often for our clients, and you can read a case study here on just that. This is how we got an architect to the top of Google… and how they then begged us to switch it off again because they were inundated!
 
 

Useful Tools:

For finding your sweet spot keywords 
https://adwords.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/
Useful app for voice recording a blog
https://support.google.com/docs/answer/4492226?hl=en
 
For making your content readable
http://www.hemingwayapp.com/
 

Action Plan:

    • Content strategy – calendar, niche, sweet spot, headers
    • SEO for sweet spot
    • SMM strategy, inc hashtags
    • Tie it all together to create traction
    • Landing pages and USEFUL giveaways to build GDPR-compliant email list.
And if that sounds like a lot of work… well it is, but we can help if that’s too much for your team. Just give us a shout.
Photo by Ray Hennessy
Share

Related Articles