Improving your site’s online visibility by structuring it well and submitting it to Google are good first steps, but they’re not enough.
1.Build up your website
The first step to standing out is to build up the size of your website: sites with more pages tend to appear on higher rank in search engine results.
How many pages are needed? There’s no official number, but even take your site from one to five pages should help: start by segmenting your homepage content into secondary pages (like About us, Contact, Services, Locations).
Other than these steps, the easiest way to add pages to your site is by maintaining a blog: make sure the blog is part of your company domain, blog as often as you can, and remember to turn on your comments.
Finally, try to avoid Flash in your site design, give the ever-rising amount of users who navigate the Web on their smartphones and tablets.
2.Whet your social media knowledge
You don’t need to become the foremost expert on Twitter and Facebook: merely having accounts in place and keeping them fairly active can raise your visibility; set up accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest.
Social media has a second, more useful function in small business visibility: your social media pages will be indexed by search engines, and searches for your company name will turn up results for all of these sites.
When you are setting up you social media accounts, use images and logos consistently, make sure that all contact information, spelling, and capitalization styles remains the same; everything should link back to your homepage, and you should post on your accounts as often as you can.
3.Leverage Yelp
Yelp listings perform really well in Google search results, so if your business has a physical presence, make sure that your Yelp listing is claimed, accurate, and up-to-date.
4.Set up Google services
Google+ is not the only tool you can use, especially if you have a physical location.
Google Places is a free service available to any business owning a mailing address: you can add helpful information, like business hours or service photos, about your company, integrating them automatically with Google Maps and traditional Google searches.
With Google Business Photos you can also give customers a virtual look of your offices, with Street View-like features.
5.Consider other merchant listing
The more you build out your third-party merchant listings, the higher your visibility will become: most of those services have a cost, but there are some alternatives that you can use for free (including Judy’s book and Yahoo Local).
6.Publish press releases
Press releases are an optimal way to generate a large number of back links to your website in a legitimate way: the purpose of a press release is to encourage media to write about your business, but the online ones generate more back links due the several sites looking for free content to publish, often verbatim.
7.Don’t overlook Web directories
Web directories are not much valued today, but it’s not a useless idea to submit your site to a few of them.
One high-quality directory to use is DMOZ: a bit difficult to enter but free; it’s also useful to search industry-specific directories suitable for your business, and avoid the nonspecific ones.
8.Use videos to advertise your business
Given the weight that google gives to YouTube videos in search results, spending time and effort in creating an appealing and amusing tape to promote your business is a great idea: if it’s successful your sales could drastically increase, if it’s not it will still improve your visibility online.
Remember to link back on your YouTube channel, on all your other social media sites, and use keyword tags consciously.
Are you still having problems in dealing with your site visibility? Contact us!