7 Ways to Build an Online Presence for Your Small Business

Whether you have an SMALL BUSINESS that has existed for several years or a startup that has recently arrived on the market, it is important to have a good online presence to increase your notoriety and increase your visibility on the web. Several options are available to you, however, you will need to follow a strategy from the start by defining the objectives to be achieved according to your needs. helloDarwin offers you several methods to maximize your company's presence on the web.

7 ways to create notoriety on the web for your SMALL BUSINESS

1) Be present on social media

Competition is tough on the internet and companies, whatever their size, are very present on social media. For a successful presence, it is not enough to have your page on this or that social network, you also need to know how to manage and run your accounts on a regular basis in order to keep in touch with subscribers. Social media are also a good way for startups to make themselves known at a lower cost, or within a given budget, depending on the budget.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, the choice is wide when looking for a social media to promote your SMALL BUSINESS, but there is also no question of creating an account on every possible social media imaginable. The ideal is to choose your platforms according to your field and to use them rigorously and effectively.

It is very likely that you do not have the time to invest in social media on a daily basis. To do this, certain platforms offer the possibility to schedule your publications in advance. If you choose this option, you will have a wide choice of websites that offer this type of service. Hootsuite, Sendible and AgoraPulse offer this service for a monthly cost that varies between $19 and $499.

2) Have a fast website

It is important to have an aesthetic and ergonomic site to maximize internet traffic. Your SMALL BUSINESS website must also be fast, because if the site loads too slowly, it can scare away the user. On average, 25% of people leave a site because of slow page opening, which will have an impact on the bounce rate. In addition, speed is an important criterion for the search engine, if we want our website to be well referenced. You must choose your hosting based on the content of your website.

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Several hosts offer free or paid content. There is what is called shared hosting, the cost of which varies between $5 and $10 per month. In this case, several sites (which can number in the thousands) will share the resources of the same server, which can slow down the loading of pages. If speed is an essential criterion for your SMALL BUSINESS's website, you will surely have to opt for VPS hosting, where the server is only shared with 20 websites. As you can imagine, speed on the web has a price, count on $80 to $450 per month for this type of hosting.

To measure the performance of your website, several free tools are available to you. In this category, we find Gtmetrix, Google PageSpeed ​​and Pingdom.

3) Focus on off-site SEO

Off-site SEO is a way to improve the positioning of your website on search engines. It is done in several ways, notably with linkbuilding or link creation. In this case, these are partnerships with other sites which will refer to the website of your SMALL BUSINESS, what we call inbound links (backlinks). This exchange of good practices is common, but be careful when choosing sites that refer to your platform. Their relevance will be of great importance in the eyes of search engines like Google, which will have an impact on your SEO.

Another technique to increase your off-site SEO is to be present on forums that respond to your field of activity. By giving your expertise on the subjects as a representative of your SMALL BUSINESS, this will help increase your online visibility.

5) Focus on organic referencing

The natural or organic referencing aims to optimize the indexing and positioning of a website in order to so that it appears as high as possible in the results of a search engine. This work becomes essential when we know that the majority of traffic on websites comes directly from the natural results of search engines like Google. Organic SEO directly depends on the efforts made in SEO, hence the importance of investing your time in optimizing online content.

6) Implement a paid search strategy

Paid search also known as Pay Per Click (PPC) or Search Engine Advertising (SEA) is an online advertising system. The most popular is surely Google Ads (Google Adwords) which ensures optimal visibility among Internet users at the precise moment when they are searching on Google for the products or services that you offer.

This tool is used to generate traffic to a website, in return for payment each time a user clicks on the ad that brings them to your site. The price of paid SEO varies depending on the budget. You can adjust this amount at any time depending on the progress of your campaign.

7) Create a newsletter

If the content of your website is often updated, it would be interesting to create a newsletter (or electronic bulletin) in order to get Internet users to return to your website regularly. This is a good way to increase traffic to your site and maintain direct contact with your target audience.

MailChimp is a marketing platform that allows the sending of automated electronic emails. This tool is free if you have less than 2,000 people in your list and you send a maximum of 12,000 newsletters per month. Beyond that, the subscription to MailChimp is paid with different packages available to you.