If your company does not exist online, potential clients will never find you. Website Design in Pretoria East is one way to get your brand out and grow your business. An online presence how easy it is to find a brand or company online. It’s important for building your brand’s reputation, increasing brand awareness, and providing visibility to your products or services when users are searching for related keywords. And, meet the strategic objectives for the organization. Online presence can be in a form of a website that is searchable on Google or any other search engine, and social media.
Social Media Online Presence is the easiest as it is much effective and efficient. However, it should be noted that it works fine for retail business or organizations. The reason for this, is that social media users are mostly individuals and this is good for business to clients (B2C). And, it might prove a big challenge for business to business (B2B) unless one considers sponsored social media adverts (Pay Per Click). Alternatively, having a website and invest in digital marketing.
Online Presence can determine whether your company becomes a success or failure. You should take not that business is about connecting with potential clients. If you cannot reach them, they cannot trade with your business. Hence, there is lot of investment in terms of time and marketing to get your brand out there. We will explore different ways of gaining digital presence, and it is not one size fits all solution. Different industries require different marketing strategies. The solutions are customized based on the uniqueness of your offerings in your industry.
As mentioned above social media networks can bridge a gap between small and large organizations. And, it is very easy to create social media pages and does not require any technical skills. With just an email address, some company information, and at little to no cost, social media platforms make it extremely simple when it comes to building your brand. there to the internet’s over 4 billion active users.
However, you need to identity the social media platform e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X), Linkedin, etc. that will fit your business objectives based on the audience you are targeting.
Test out a couple profiles and regularly post and engage with your audience. Staying consistent with your activities on these channels builds your credibility and instils trust in your followers. When potential customers search online for your brand they will often look to social media to see what you are sharing and what other people are saying about you.
It may sound like a no-brainer, but if you want to show up online you’ll need a (good) website.
Your website should act as the hub of all your online branded efforts. Taking into account, that digital presence needs to be introduced earlier and maintained. Hence, you need to register your domain as early as possible. And, have your website developed. The website should be up and running 99.9% of the times so that digital marketing is not impacted negatively.
This is where users can find information about you or your company, your products or services, and get in contact with you. This is also where all your social media platforms should reference and lead back to so that you grow digital footprint consistently.
Website Development should address the problems users have and provide a solution to that problem. Website Design must keep your messaging clear and concise, and keep your site navigation simple. All the website pages should be fit for purpose. Once the website is developed, digital marketing in a form of search engine optimization and google adwords can assist in getting the brand out. Also, social media can assist in promoting the website depending on the line of business and the suitability of the audience.
Creating a GMB profile is a powerful tool for online presence, it needs to be kept fresh so that it ranks highly on Google and generates positive return on investment (ROI). It not only allows to populate the search results with “owned” properties but also to showcase your brand with information, images, videos and additional information such as offers and discounts.
Get your clients to review the profile to give it credibility and improved ranking. A GMB account will also provide Maps, another channel that adds to your online presence and increasing your brand awareness.
Listing your business on top online directories can immediately boost the amount of “owned” search result pages Google, Bing other search engines deliver to users when they search for your brand. This requires a research on what your competitors do and acquire backlinks. In the process, you’ll also earn a backlink, (some) SEO value and start driving referral traffic to your website.
Directory listing can be a winning strategy, especially for local businesses. It is very important to get backlinks with high domain authority as this will improve your domain’s authority, and improve rankings on search engines. This forms an off page SEO technique.
You can go about directory listing in two ways: manually uploading your business information to each directory or paying an agency to automatically do it for you.
Email marketing list can be established by add a call to action for subscription to a newsletter purposes. Creating an email marketing list allows you to engage with current and potential customers on a regular basis via newsletters and is one of the best ways you can build your presence online.
There are various way to collect users’ email addresses:
Creating an email list gives you the chance to let your audience know first-hand of news, new products or offerings, or online content you’ve created, and directs them to those landing pages, in turn boosting your online presence.
It is important to include an opt-out tab on the newsletters so that users can unsubscribe when they wish so. This is as per the government regulations that differ from one country to another.
Once the website is developed, the next phase is to get the website to the world. Think of it as a song that you have and need to get it out to the world. That’s what marketing encompasses and SEO plays a huge role in how visible your brand is online, specifically in search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
You may have built a professional and modern-looking website, but if it is not optimised and ranking on Google. No one will ever see it.
SEO (content) can be categorised into two types: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO means optimising the content on your website for search engines to generate organic traffic. Some examples of this on-page content are product descriptions, blogs, headlines, HTML tags and images. On-page SEO helps search engines understand your content and how relevant it is to searchers’ queries.
Off-page SEO goes more technical and refers to what happens off your website and how it affects your business’ search engine rankings. Examples of off-page SEO are acquiring backlinks, brand mentions and social media signals, among others. Off-page SEO gives search engines such as Google a better idea of how other websites and users perceive your site, enabling it to rank more or less authoritatively.
We have a team of SEO experts that specialize in both on-page and off-page SEO optimisation for a different markets and industries.
Sharing content that is informative, grows the brand awareness and increase domain authority. Content can take various forms, such as blog posts, ebooks, podcasts, video tutorials, infographics, etc. Choose the best channel for each piece of content and share it there. For example, a video tutorial can be posted on your YouTube channel, while an infographic would be most appropriate on Facebook or LinkedIn.
Conclusion
Digital presence can be measured by using tools such as Google Analytics, etc. These tools measure the success rate of marketing strategies, campaigns, etc. Building your online presence can be a time-consuming, difficult process and as you can probably tell, there is no single strategy that can be applied to all businesses. Solutions are customised for each project by taking into account a lot of factors such as the industry type, audience, etc.
Building up an online presence doesn’t happen overnight and often times it can take months or longer to do so effectively. Consistency in executing the techniques requires a lot of patience.
Listed on www.website-designers.co.za
