Defining "Online Presence": When you hear someone say "Online presence", "Internet presence" or "Online visibility" they usually refer to the fact that if a potential customer is searching on the Internet for a service or product your company offers he should be able to find you. Find out how you can help customers find your website. Since most people these days, use the Internet to research what services and products are available in their local area and beyond, before hopping in the car and driving to a local business, those businesses without an online presence, are missing out on a goldmine of potential customers. Over the last few years the Internet has changed the way we do things including the way we conduct business. If before we differentiated between an online business and brick-and-mortar business now it's becoming more and more difficult to draw that line. The Internet has become a natural extension and evolution of how businesses operate. Therefore, in more online places like search engines, directories, shopping engines, social networking sites the customer finds your businesses the higher your online visibility and consequently the higher the chances he will make business with you. Value of Strong Online Presence The evolution of Internet technology is now allowing your business not only to be present and found online, but also to conduct business online (example: process transactions, sell products, accept reservations, etc.). In many cases when comparing the way the same transaction can be done online and offline, the online way is usually more convenient and cost-efficient. Large companies have long understood the importance of strong online presence; moreover, they created new jobs to support their online initiatives. Just yesterday I came across a Kodak job listing for "Chief Listener, Social Media Team". Kodak and other large corporations perceive online activities as very valuable to their bottom line, so valuable that they hire dedicated people to "listen" to conversations that take place on a web. If you, as a business, do not want to benefit from the convenience and efficiencies that Internet brings, think about your customers, they are more and more enjoying these things and come to expect them as standard. To put it in a perspective, just like most businesses don't like the fees credit card companies charge them for each transaction, they have to accept credit cards as a payment method because if they don't they will suffer the consequences of more customers going to a competitor next door. If before establishing online presence was expensive and in many cases did not make business sense for small companies due to a limited number of potential customers that had Internet access, lack of localization and targeted solutions, limited number of web and Internet marketing professionals that charged a premium for their services. Now marketing on the Internet is not really a choice anymore, but has almost become a necessity in today's marketplace. 6 Easy Ways to Increase Your Business Visibility Online Lets take a look at the top six vehicles available today for establishing online presence and whether or not they should be incorporated in your strategy. 1. Local Business Listing If you ever used Google to find a local business you may have noticed a map and Local Business listings closer to the top of the search engine page. This is called "Local Business Results". Yahoo and Bing show similar business listings in their search results. You don't need to do a lot of research and analyze whether you should get listed or not. This is a free service and being listed will benefit most of the businesses. Plus, registering and creating accounts with Yahoo!, Google and Bing will take you no longer then an hour. These listings will allow you to increase your business visibility by displaying your address, phone number, products, services, coupons, hours of operation and more. 2. Local Directories/Review Sites Business directories and review sites like Yellowpages.com, MerchantCircle.com, CitySearch, Yelp.com can often be seen on the first page in Google when you search for a business or service. These websites have a comprehensive database of local businesses and they often allow users to post reviews and comments about those businesses. Millions of people visit these sites every day to find local businesses and help them make spending decisions. Therefore, for you as a business owner, it's important to be listed in those directories and also to monitor what's being said about your business on the web. I cannot stress enough the importance of taking control and managing what's being said about your business on the web. This is a whole different topic, you can learn more about online reputation management here. To sum it up, most of the directories listed above are free and easy to setup, so we highly recommend you create your business listings on those sites and monitor the reviews on a regular basis. 3. Social Networking Sites Social networking sites refer to online communities and websites that allow users to interact (email, instant messaging) with people that share their interests and/or activities. Popular social networking sites include Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn and more. Most of the social networking sites are currently free and make for a great tool for establishing new contacts, promoting online events, connecting with your customers and more. Before you decide to create social networking profiles for your business you need to carefully outline your strategy and allocate enough resources to maintaining those accounts. Even though its free and relatively easy to set up, if you don't have a comprehensive strategy on how you will use social networking tools to benefit your business you may as well not do them at all. 4. Website Business website is another great tool for establishing online presence. If you're thinking you might not be able to afford creating a website, think again. Most small business can now afford to create a simple brochure-style website. It comes to how much you want to differentiate your business from your competition and whether it makes financial and long-term business sense. Websites, like cars, are not all created equal. You can buy a used car for $500 or you can buy a luxury car with sunroof, four-wheel drive and leather seats. So are the websites, robust sites with streaming videos, social networking features, e-commerce will be more expensive to create and maintain. Most businesses will benefit from creating a basic website, but depending on the nature of your business you can consider adding additional features and online tools to streamline your operations or offer extra benefits to your customers. 5. Search Engine Optimization Before you create a website you also need to think about the way to promote it and make sure its easily accessible to your customers. The biggest mistake businesses do is assume that creating a website is enough and that somehow the day after they launch it they will get tons of site hits and increase in business. Unfortunately this is not the way it works. Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the ways of promoting your website. Properly implemented SEO helps your website rank high in search engines for the keywords and phrases that your target audience is likely to search for. Statistics show that the majority of search engine users don't go past page one in search results. The higher your website shows up in search results the higher the probability that the person will click through. SEO is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines. Search Engine Optimization consists of on-page and off-page optimization. On-page factors are related directly to the content and structure of the website. Off-page factors are primarily tied to site's link popularity. SEO should be a lifelong engagement for any site. You need to constantly be optimizing, monitoring your competition and following keyword trends. Continuously looking for opportunities for backlinks is also important. It's also essential to remember that site changes take time to be recognized by search engine spiders. It can take up to six weeks for Google to update their index, and even longer for rankings to change accordingly. Do it yourself vs. professional services With a few exceptions, most of the basic online marketing (adding business listing to Google local business results, opening twitter account, etc.) you can do yourself and do not need to spend a lot of time and money. But as complexity grows so does the time you will need to put into figuring everything out and at some point it will inevitably require use of professional service. Theoretically, we can all spend time and learn how to do taxes, defend yourself in court or diagnose a cold but beyond basic services that accountants, lawyers and doctors provide it becomes impractical and very time consuming to learn that's why we prefer to pay for professional services. If your strategy is designed with ROI in mind, investing into hiring a web marking professionalto do the job should be a no brainer.
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