Has COVID-19 put a damper on your business?
The best thing to do at such times is to focus on growing your business online.
For a small business, it can be challenging to work around the restrictions placed on brick-and-mortars and the mass shift to online shopping. Owning a small business means adapting to the ever-changing market. And right now, one of the smartest moves you can make is building up your online presence.
By online presence, we don’t just mean adding your products to e-commerce websites or have a social media page that you’ve barely opened. We mean the task of managing your business in the online world every single day and working to gradually increase your followers and customers through the power of the internet.
So, how can a small business grow your company online?
Let’s find out.
Establishing Online Presence for Small Businesses: 5 Opportunities to Fully Utilize
At YellowFin Digital, we’ve worked with many small and medium-scale businesses in Houston, offering SEO services and other online marketing services. We have become one of the primier go-to SEO companies in Houston due to our tailored solutions that have brought steady, long-term growth for the businesses.
In this blog, our Houston SEO experts will share some of the essential things a small business should do for their online presence.
It’s Not Just About Having a Website
Many small businesses nowadays have a decent-looking website but don’t make proper use of it. When you want to develop your business online, then you definitely need to focus on having a responsive, well-designed website that’s updated with your products or services.
Once you have that ready, then the next step is to implement the SEO practices. SEO is essential for businesses to get discovered by the people who’re looking for your products. A website optimized for search engines will fetch you so many leads and get you in front of customers you never knew you had.
Since you’re a local business in Houston, you can start with the following SEO best practices:
- Ensure your loading speed is between 1 to 5 seconds. (The faster, the better.)
- Identify the most suited keywords for each landing page that’s local to Houston.
- Optimize your individual webpages’ title tag and meta description with the keywords.
- Include keywords in your URL.
- Have a smooth user experience.
- Internally link your webpages.
If you want assistance in figuring out the keywords, then you reach out to us for Houston SEO services.
It’s More Than Just Creating Your Company’s Social Profiles
You may have created accounts on the top social media platforms for your company. But that isn’t what we’re talking about.
You need to be active in those social media pages where a bulk of your customers are hanging out. If you haven’t been regular on social media, then choose one platform, to begin with. Analyze where you can find most of your target customers. For example, if you’re a clothing store, then Instagram and Facebook are the best options. You can then branch out to Pinterest later. If you’re a service provider, then YouTube can be a good place to start.
Similarly, you can choose one platform and then give it your complete focus. Post regularly on the platform, respond to those who engage with you, engage on the posts of the influencers in your domain, and build your exposure.
According to combined research by CoSchedule from 14 studies, here are some of the recommended frequency of posts and timings for Twitter and Instagram.
It’s All About Creating Online Relationships
If there’s one thing we need to learn to ace online marketing, it’s the power of relationships. Similar to the offline world, the online world too runs on connections and relationships.
If you want to increase your exposure in a short time, you can reach out to the social media influencers in your domain and start building relationships. Make sure to reach out only to those who have a huge following of your target customers from Houston. As you build meaningful relationships with more such people, you can steadily build your online presence.
As you’re forming relationships with influencers, don’t miss out on making real conversations with your customers too. Reply to the customer messages on social media and emails, engage with them on comments and conduct specific Q&A sessions on social media to reach out to them.
It’s Effective with Testing & Analysis
As you have started implementing a few online marketing strategies, you need to begin analyzing the effect of your efforts. There are a lot of free tools like Google Analytics that gives you an idea of the effectiveness of marketing.
Sit down with the data, analyze them, understand why there’s a drop here and a high there, and then modify your subsequent marketing strategies accordingly.
If you need any help to get started with online analytics, you can approach a Houston SEO company like YellowFIn Digital to get your base clear.
It’s Only as Good as the Content You Produce
Yes, implementing all of the above strategies will help you to grow your small business online. But keep in mind that the level of impact you create depends on the content you produce. So focus on creating content that has great value for your audience. Instead of just promoting your business, create content that has something useful for the people.
Publish content regularly on your website, social media and, if possible, guest blog on authoritative websites on behalf of your business.
Conclusion
Building your online presence requires regular work every day in and day out. When you do things right, you can create a solid customer base online that’ll keep reaping benefits. Get external help whenever needed, invest yourself in marketing online and you can notice a steady, exponential growth over time.
