As a small business owner, you know that your business needs to be online – but with websites, social media, and more, do you know whether your small business online presence is optimized to inspire and engage your current and potential customers? Your small business will grow with an optimized presence through high customer engagement, strong sales, and long-term loyalty.
Here, you’ll learn simple steps to assess and improve your small business online presence, from website basics and SEO to social media, that can help you build engagement, inspire sharing, strengthen your brand, and boost sales.
What are the basics of a strong online presence?
To have a strong online presence, you need to use some basic tools:
- A website that offers your business’s core information.
- An e-commerce site, if that’s relevant for your business.
- Social media updates to engage your customers and followers.
To optimize your online presence, you’ll also need regular updates to your website, e-commerce, and social media sites using search engine optimization (SEO) and brand-building strategies. These should leverage digital marketing capabilities to make your online presence the best for your business and your current and potential customers.
As a result, you’ll gain more views and engagement and, ultimately, boost your sales online and in-person.
How to optimize your website
Today, social media is so dominant in cultural conversations that it’s easy to forget about your website – but that’s not exactly the case for small businesses.
While the percentage of consumers making purchases through social-media sites has grown, it’s still relatively small compared to the number of purchases made through websites or in-person locations.
Consumers turn to websites because there’s more detailed information about products and services, which can be helpful when making purchase decisions. Especially when online scams are rampant, small business websites provide a sense of legitimacy and build trust. As a result, a small business website is still one of the most time- and cost-effective ways to build your brand, connect with your current clientele, and attract new customers:
- You can create a landing page for your business with easy access to contact information, hours, location – whatever is most relevant to and beneficial for your customers.
- Your website is the foundation for digital marketing, a low-cost and easy-to-update strategy to showcase new products and services, sales, and anything else you want to highlight.
- Your website is a trusted tool for lead generation and e-commerce – consumers are still more likely to make first-time purchases from a website than a social media site.
- You can develop, promote, and maintain your brand image, voice, and messaging through your website.
Websites remain the preferred way for customers to purchase your goods and services, so an updated and easy-to-use website that works well for all devices – laptops, tablets, desktops, and smartphones – is essential. If you already have a website, you can try to identify ways to update and improve it by performing a website audit.
To optimize your website, take these steps:
1. Regularly review the basic information to ensure it’s up-to-date
While things like your business’s phone number and physical location won’t change often, if your hours do, make sure that information is updated. Also, if your website includes staff information and contacts, update it anytime there’s a change that could impact your customers.
2. Use your website to highlight goods and services that you want to promote
While using social media for sales and events is a great way to get word out, once people learn about the events or items you’re promoting, they’ll want to learn more – and your website is the place to do that. Websites that are updated regularly also tend to do better in search engine results. If your website has e-commerce, there are easy ways to optimize your presence and sales.
3. Ensure your website has and displays key security information
An SSL certificate is a digital certification verifying your website’s identity. It also allows for encrypted connections, which is essential for financial transactions (such as online orders) and the protection of other customer information.
This is often an option that you can add when purchasing your domain name, and if you didn’t, you can contact the domain registrar to add it – there is usually a small annual fee for this. A quick way to know that your website is secure is that the address will begin with https, instead of just http.
4. Your website’s design should support your business and brand
Your website should have a clear call to action that makes it easy for people to purchase an item, make a reservation, or schedule an appointment. This includes ensuring accessibility for visitors with disabilities—most website-development platforms will walk you through the steps to build this into your site.
5. Create a Google Business profile
It’s free, easy to create, and essential today, especially for businesses with in-person locations.
Starting with these tips will go a long way toward strengthening the basics and ensuring you’re better positioned to use your online presence to build your brand as you grow your sales.
How to use search engine optimization (SEO) to boost results
Tips to boost your search engine optimization (SEO) results across your website and social media are essential to improving your online presence.
When you type words or phrases into Google, Bing, or social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram, you expect to receive relevant information regarding your search. Search engines use complex formulas, called algorithms, to decide which websites appear first in search results, based on the information found in each website’s digital content.
These algorithms look at many factors, including words or phrases (called keywords) that match the searcher’s input, how well your content answers a searcher’s questions or needs, and if your website is user-friendly and updated regularly.
Your search engine optimization are the steps you take to ensure that your online presence achieves the best possible placement in search results. To make the most of SEO, you need to tweak your online presence in three key areas:
1. Search essentials
When someone searches for businesses like yours, your website or social media sites must use relevant keywords to find them. Use search engine optimization (SEO), as well as local SEO if you have a business that serves local customers, to strengthen your online presence. For example, if you have a pizzeria in Rome, NY, your website and social media sites should have your essential information. This makes your online presence more relevant for related searches.
An area that many business owners overlook when creating their websites is “snippets,” which include title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags. Using relevant keywords in these can also boost your search results as long as they’re related to the image, page, or content, so that the search engines identify the integrity of your site. This means that when the search engine finds your business, the result will be helpful to the searcher.
Another way to incorporate keywords successfully is with high-quality, relevant content that naturally uses keywords. For example, you can do this on product or service descriptions, “About” pages, blog posts, and within-page content.
2. Speed
You’ve been there: You click on a search result, only to find a slow-loading website, so you return to the results and click on something else. Websites and social media loaded with unnecessary, unhelpful, or slow-loading content are a no-go for optimization.
You can use free online tools, such as Pingdom, to test your website by simply entering the domain address (URL). It will even tell you the areas where potential problems were found, making them easier to address.
If you’re more advanced or want to explore additional tools, things like XML sitemaps can boost your online presence even further.
3. Information quality
While steps one and two will improve your online presence, the quality of the information on your website and social media sites will go the furthest in the long run. That’s because search engines have ways to measure how relevant and valuable your online information is for those searching – and when customers go to your website or social media, read relevant content, and find the information they need, your online channels build trust.
Your site’s information should be relevant, reliable, useful, and updated regularly. Customer testimonials and Google reviews also build credibility and trust. Your content should be engaging, and you should avoid overusing keywords (because search engines also pick up on this).
Consider not only what you want people to do after visiting your sites (such as make a purchase or bookmark your site), but how you want them to feel. Will they feel educated, interested, on-trend, or empowered? This reflects the brand that you’re building, and your content, as well as your design elements, are key to this.
How to boost your social media engagement
There’s infinite information available about how to improve your social media presence for your business. Here are a few key factors:
- Focus on relevant platforms: Often, small businesses have less-than-optimal online presences because it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the upkeep needed for social content to be fresh and found. Instead of trying to do everything, focus your time and energy on one or two platforms that are most relevant to your customers – it’s better to reach 100 engaged and interested potential customers than 10,000 people who couldn’t care less about what you offer.
- Keep your brand’s visual identity and voice consistent: This spans across your website to your social media channels, and it builds engagement and trust. For example, your logo and colors should be the same and easily identifiable, and your “voice” should be consistent, whether appealing to aspirations with a luxury service or an easygoing, conversational style.
- Use the right type of content for different platforms: These include informative posts, behind-the-scenes, and customer spotlights. For example, if you have a skin-care line, you can do an informative post on Pinterest that shows how and why to add sunscreen in a skincare routine, a behind-the-scenes look at your manufacturing facility for YouTube, or a customer spotlight on your website.
Another key point is to post consistently and to respond to comments when possible. This will also build trust. AI can help with content generation, and there are many programs available to automate the work.
How to measure the impact
Improving your small business online presence will only be a good investment of your resources if you know what ultimately works and what doesn’t – and then tweak it accordingly.
Use analytics tools, such as Google Analytics and social media insights, to track performance. Look at key metrics like website traffic, engagement, and conversion rates to identify what’s working. If the results don’t show immediate positive impact, don’t be discouraged – often, it takes consistent effort to get the best results.
Also, pay close attention to online reviews and respond to good and not-so-great reviews. When doing so, always be professional, acknowledge where your business can improve, and let customers know you appreciate their shared experiences and insights.
If you need financing to achieve your goals, Pursuit can help
Now that you know how to improve your small business online presence, if insufficient funds hold you back from implementing your plans or taking other steps to move your business forward, we can help.
With loans from $10,000 to $5.5 million, we have financing for working capital, equipment, the purchase or construction of commercial real estate, to refinance business debt, and more for businesses in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Nevada, Illinois, and Washington.
We also offer business advisory services for guidance to boost your marketing efforts, improve financial management, and more!
Apply today to set your business up for success!