How do customers or visitors find your website?
Given the volume of content that floods the internet every second, it has become crucial to not only put out great content but also use the right means to get that content out there.
Excellent online visibility is crucial in driving more site traffic, leads, and sales.
There are several ways customers can find your business website. The question is—how do you make sure they find you online amidst the tight competition?
Here are some tips and tools you can use for your website to up the chances of customers finding you online.
6 Effective Ways to Boost Your Online Visibility
Optimise website for local SEO
Local SEO is an online marketing strategy that involves optimising your website to rank higher on local search results. Most local businesses do local SEO to bring in both online and foot traffic to their store. And one of the important aspects of a successful local SEO strategy is optimising keywords that answer local search intent. If your business website doesn’t contain the right keywords your audience is using, don’t expect your customers to ever reach your website.
Identify industry keywords relevant to your business, as well as locale-specific keywords. For instance, you run a bicycle shop. You may use key phrases like “buy a bicycle in Perth” or “bicycle store near Amy Street.”
You can use third-party tools like SEMRush, or just conduct a test search on Google to gather keyword ideas for your target locale.
READ: Local SEO Tips for Small Businesses
Improve your Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics that Google recently implemented to measure page experience. It focuses on three primary metrics: loading speed, responsiveness, and visual stability. This means that Google is greatly looking at on-page experience as an important ranking factor.
But Core Web Vitals does more than just improve your ranking. It also provides your users with an excellent experience. And that translates to more engaged customers, higher conversion rates, and potentially other positive benefits.
The recent algorithm update may seem a bit technical to apply but adhering to the changes will enable your local business to focus on the key metrics.
To help you get started with Core Web Vitals, join our FREE on-demand webinar where we talk about how to optimise your website for the update.
Use a local-specific domain name
If you have a short, relevant web address, customers can easily remember and look for your website.
Simpler is better, so for a baker in Sydney, the domain bakery.sydney would be preferable over joesfinestbakerysydney.com.
There’s also a much greater chance that you can secure the short and exact-match web address you want. Melbourne’s Flower Drum restaurant switched from using the clunky and hard-to-remember flower-drum.com to the cleaner flowerdrum.melbourne.
Why complicate things with a hyphen in your web address? The fewer steps someone has to take to get to their goal, the better.
If your website is hard to remember, and so asking a search engine for your website is one of those steps, there is a chance it might be one too many for your customer’s journey
READ: Buying a New Domain Name? Choose From Our A-Z List of TLDs
Leverage social media
If you share your content on social media, hashtags and geotags serve the same purpose as keywords.
Using well-chosen and relevant hashtags increases the likelihood of people finding your posts. For example, #sydney, #3bedrooms, #villa, and #realestate are some hashtags you can use as a realtor to sell properties.
You can also tap into paid social media advertising to increase the likelihood of your target audience finding your business.
Earn quality backlinks
Link-building is another effective SEO technique that shoots your website up on search engines.
The goal is to get other websites to drive traffic to your own website SEO through backlinks. The more backlinks you get from other sites, the more you earn Google’s trust. This just proves that your website is credible enough to get other brands and companies to promote you on their platforms.
But for Google to consider your backlinks as legit, they should also come from authority sites. These include websites of industry leaders, government agencies, and the likes.
READ: 7 Easy Ways to Do Link Building
List your business on online directories
Now that we’re on the concept of link-building, here’s another way to earn them—online directory listings.
Remember when we used physical directories to find the contact number of a local store? Think of online directories like the yellow pages of the internet.
Business directories are high domain authority sites that list businesses to their network for the convenience of their users. So if your business is listed on one or 10 of these sites, your website is more likely to win your audience’s trust and confidence.
READ: 4 Best Online Directories to List Your Business (and Boost Your Web Presence)
Use the right resources
Having a strong social media presence and paying for ads are effective ways to boost online visibility, but local SEO is really where you want to bet your money. It’s the ideal cost-efficient investment, especially for small businesses, to reach more local customers and get positive results in the long term.
