How to Make Your Business Website More Visible Online
In order to fully utilize your online presence and boost your business in this day and age, you also need to work on your website visibility.
One process that makes your website more visible on the Internet is “optimization”. It mostly refers to the content you publish on your website. You have most probably read about optimizing your content by putting the right keywords in every website’s URL, title or description. They all make your business website more visible online. But if you want to make your website even more visible, there are some other elements that should be considered too.
Create high-quality content
There are two main reasons why writing high-quality content is so important for your business. The first reason is search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines love longer and high-quality content more than short and low-quality content. Your content should include keywords in strategic places like title, URL and text description. There are many businesses similar to yours out on the Internet, so your content should be optimized if you want to win this battle. The second reason is your reputation. People know that there is a lack of high-quality content online. So if you grab their attention with high-quality content, and deliver them what they want, they will keep coming back to your website again and again. They will become your loyal clients, and share your website more often.
Make your content easily shareable
This means only one thing: place your social media share buttons next to the content on every page of your website you want to share. If you are writing a blog on your website, make sure it is easy to share every blog post on any social media. This way you can get a lot of inbound links, which makes your website more attractive in the eyes of any search engine.
Optimize your images
You can put the pictures of your local business, so people can get to know how space where all the business happens look like. Pictures make a strong impact in persuading your clients to take action.
But first, you have to optimize them, too. Google and the other search engines are great, but they still do not know how to read pictures. You have to write a description for every image and include alt-tags to categorize and describe them. Image descriptions should always include keywords. So when someone is looking for your products/services online, it increases your chances of popping out higher in a search engine.
Social networks
You should create active profiles on as many social media outlets as you can. This will make your business website more visible online, and it will increase the popularity of your brand. A Facebook account is a must because more than a billion people worldwide use Facebook on a daily basis. Twitter is a perfect place to promote your latest blog post that’s perhaps about a new product you have been developing for a last couple of months. Likes, retweets and shares make you more and more visible and you should take advantage of this.
Create backlinks to your website
If you want your business website more visible online, and have it recognized, you have to put the keywords in your headlines and URLs. But also you have to create as many backlinks as you can. Backlinks are links placed on someone’s website that lead people to your website. If you write interesting content or create an interesting video, you can ask someone to place it on their website. Search engines consider backlinks to be something like votes. The more “votes” you have, the more relevant you seem.
Improve your business website navigation
When your potential clients reach your homepage, you do not want to overwhelm them with too many options. For example, in case you run a fitness business, and offer two types of trainings: personal and group, you should emphasize it by putting only two buttons that refer only to them. If you put too many options on your homepage, you will drive people away. Narrow down your options from the start, and then lead the visitor through subtypes of your offers. Continuing with the fitness example, when someone clicks on “personal training”, you can then lead them to “one day a week”, “one day a month”, “12 days a month”, etc.
Make contact info visible
Make it easy for people to reach you. Place your full contact info in a visible spot on the homepage, or in the “Contact” tab. This is one of the most important pieces of information you want to deliver, so do not make people look for it for more than 10 seconds. Be sure to place your phone number, address, and email in a visible place. Make sure to show your working hours, too.
Speed up your website
One thing that can make your website less attractive to your visitors is the time needed for a page to load. Most people do not have the patience to wait too long for a simple thing as web page loading. In a world where people can access high-speed Internet on various devices, this “too long” can last 2 seconds. Low-speed loading can happen if you’ve not optimized large high-resolution images, or large animated Flash files. Your web host can also slow you down. So if you want to test your page speed, you can find online services where you can check it out for free.
Use user behavior metrics
There are some magnificent tools you can use to track your website’s visitors’ behavior. This information can be of great value when you want to improve and make your business website more visible online. Where did some visitors come from? How long did they stay on your website? Which pages did they spend the most time on? What were they looking for? All of this you can see in the Google Analytics. Another useful tool for detecting visitors’ behavior is Crazy Egg. It offers a heat map by which you can see where the visitor clicked the most, where they held the pointer of the mouse, which pages they dedicated the most time to, etc.
Keep your website up-to-date with visual appeal
Your website is a reflection of your business. If you have a great content placed in the beautiful background with stunning photos, you will be safe and sound in your loyal clients’ mind. This image is possible only if you constantly update your website, follow trends in technology, design, content, etc. If you often publish new content but keep the same layout for a year or two, the reputation of your website and your business will decrease. If you want to keep your business going, you don’t want to let your competitors beat you.
Make your website mobile-friendly
This is the best example of how keeping track of new technological progress can help you stay in the tracks. In the last few years, mobile devices reached the top as the most popular devices in navigating the Internet. If your website is not optimized for a smartphone or tablet, it is very possible that you will start driving your customers away. Optimize your website for mobile devices, and you will stay competitive.
Maintain your website security
Your website can be hacked regardless of how old it is. But these things are happening much less to the often updated websites. Old websites are much more vulnerable to the hacker attacks because they rely on older technology. Hackers can attack known security issues in software, so if a security system is constantly updating, the risk of hacking your website decreases rapidly.
Adjust your website to an ever-changing world of technology
More and more features find their place in the market every day. The concept of the mobile app did not exist only ten years ago. Today, everything in the Internet world is happening around them. And everything is still changing. If you want to stay competitive, you have to track new technologies and update your website according to them.
