VIDEO – 5 Ways To Gain Online Visibility

Posted 21.09.2017

By Rob Twells

VIDEO – 5 Ways To Gain Online Visibility

Rob & Liam take you through 5 great, actionable ways to increase your online visibility!

Video Transcript

Hello!
Hello!

We are back. We are going to talk you through 5 ways you can increase your visibility online. And we are gonna jump straight in:

Gathering Data & Acting

So number 1 is gathering data and acting upon it. So we would always recommend logging into your Google Analytics account at least once a month, once a week if possible. And the first thing you should be doing is looking at your audience overview, so what you can see there is how many sessions, how many users, bounce rates and headline figures. If you can do a comparison to the previous month or week you can start to see where you’re doing things well and not doing things well. So if you see things are on the up and in this sort of nice green colour, that means whatever you’ve been doing do more of it because it’s obviously working. If it’s red that should say to you it’s not working so well, so there’s probably not much point in putting more time and effort into it.

So once you have looked at those headline stats, that will tell you if you’re going in the right direction or the wrong one. Spend a bit more time in there and drill down into these next 2 important bits of it. So the first one is acquisition, this is where you see where the traffic is coming from; whether it be social media, organic, paid search or direct to your website. Have a look and see where people are coming from because you might find that no traffic is coming from social media so you might want to start putting out more tweets, links to your website across there. It might be that your organic visibility is not very good, you’re getting no organic traffic so you might want to have a look at running some kind of SEO campaign. So really have a look at the acquisition on your site, and see where the traffic is coming from.

The next one is behaviour. So these are the most popular pages on your site. So you will be able to see where people are going to, how long they are spending on pages, what pages they are going to next and all that kind of thing. You will also see the pages that aren’t performing so well, so if you’ve got a page on your website that is important to you it showcases what you do well, you want to make sure that people are going to it. If not, have a look at why, drill down into the figure and again you want to start looking at how you can get more people to that page.

And we always say: Action, Measure and Learn. So action something, measure the effectiveness and learn from it. If it’s going well, keep doing more of it. If it’s not that is probably saying to you it’s worth any more time or money on that. And that’s point number uno.

Done.

Leverage Existing Relationships

So point number 2, of the 5 ways you can gain visibility online is building authority with external links. So I’m sure you’re all aware that having links from one website pointing to yours is a really good ranking factor. Google will see that as them endorsing your website and saying this is a valuable source. And we’ve identified 4 ways you can start building links today.

So the first of those 4 ways is using any existing partners you’ve got. We’ve got IT support partners that refer us business, we work with PR companies that refer us business and it’s these types of relationships you can utilise to get links. So you might be able to write a post for them, you might be able to have a service page on their website which points back to you and generally these kinds of people are the ones that will be happy for you to have a link on their website.

Yeah and also what you can do with those partners you’ve got is ask to write fresh content for them for their kind of news area for their website and also think about people in your industry and who you can write content for because they will be grateful for the content you’ll get a link back to your website and it will also open your business out to new people.

And the third way is utilising any PR you get. So if you do write press-releases, see if where that press release goes will let you have a link back to your website. It’s sites that publish press releases that have really good authority with search engines because they are putting out content so regularly. So if you can get a link from them, always ask the question if it is more than welcome.

Definitely and finally, have a look at local events that are on in your area and offer to sponsor them. So it will raise the profile of your business and you will also get a link back to your website on theirs.

The key takeaway is: Leveraging any existing relationships you’ve got. Building links is one of the most difficult parts of digital marketing, so if you can get the ball rolling with utilizing people in your network that exist already then you are onto a winner.

And that’s point 2.
Smashing.

Gather Testimonials

Part number 3 of the 5 ways you can gain visibility online is gathering testimonials and improving your online listing. Gathering testimonials and reviews is one of the most important things you can do especially in local visibility. So getting reviews on your Google My Business profile, getting reviews on Trustpilot, Yahoo!, Yelp anywhere else where you have a profile where people can leave reviews is a really good way to say to the search engines: We are a credible business, our service is great and if you want to give your users value point them to us. So that’s the first way, it is really really useful, really helped us personally and a lot of our clients so we can really vouch for that.

There is a stat that says basically 30% of online reviews, no…….. Online reviews contribute 13% towards your ranking so that just goes to show how important it is.

He saved it… So as well as reviews what you want to do to get Google to trust your website is to look at all of your directory listings around the web, so that’s your Google My Business profile, Yell and all the other directories that your business is located Have a look at your profile on there and make sure that your address is all consistent, phone number is all consistent, business name is consistent, phone number, link to your website, it all needs to be the exactly the same across all of the directories. And just going back onto reviews, we have another stat which is 88% of people, when they are looking to buy or get in touch with people will look at reviews before committing to that decision. So I am sure you will all look at reviews before looking at new service providers or buying a product and it really helps you make that decision. Make sure you have them.

And that is point number 3. So a couple of nice easy points there, try and get people to leave reviews, build that in your business process and just have a quick look over where you’re listed on the internet and make sure everything about that business is consistent. And that is point number 3.

Give Value

So point number 4 of the 5 ways you can gain visibility online is to give value and be an expert. So give value and build trust with your audience. Put out articles in the form of blogs, put out videos if you can, and any form of media, podcasts, it can really just show your expertise, give value back to your audience. Bolster your website that way, and that is how you gain visibility in the search engines.

And once you’ve got all of that new content, what you want to start doing is pushing it out on social media. So you’ve got all the content on your website, you want to start opening that out to new people to get people to see the content. Use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook any form of social media to get it out there and you’ll also be getting more traffic back to your website.

The more value you can give, the better your place with search engines. All they want to do is give as much value to their users as possible. And if you can do that, you’ll start to be seen as an expert in your sector. People will have you at the front of their mind when they do want your service because they have seen that video or that blog and you have got a much better chance of getting more customers and more visibility online by doing that.

So you’ll be getting more traffic to your website, and if we go back to point 1; you can action, measure and learn and keep going at it to improve your visibility.

Bish-Bash-Bosh point number 4.

Lay Those Technical Foundations

So the last point of 5 ways you can gain visibility online is to lay the technical foundations. And I’ll over to Liam who will tell you more about that.

So everything we have just spoken about is really important but it won’t be that effective if behind the scenes on your website if it’s not technically well set-up. So there are a few simple ways you can get this done, the first is alt tags which is just a bit of a description about each image that helps Google read what the image is about or what content is on that page. The next one is content – make sure it’s unique, well structured and well written. The other one is meta-information, so this is the title and description you see when you Google things and make sure that is relevant to the page and descriptive. Another important one is responsive, make sure your website is fluid across all browsers and all viewports down to mobile and if you haven’t got a mobile ready website you need one because it is a really important factor now (we can do it for you) with SEO, and we can do it for you. We can help you out there.

Another important factor is speed, the biggest culprit of this is when people upload 6 Mb images without compressing them. And again Google wants to serve people with great pages that load quickly so it is important you compress them. And have a look at your overall site speed. So all of these factors combined will make sure your website is nice and crawlable. Google will be able to index your site well, it will know what all of your pages are about that will help you get better visibility.

And that’s it, that’s all the 5 points. If any of that doesn’t make sense feel free to get in touch with us we will be more than happy to help you with a technical audit of your site, free of charge. That’s 5 easy ways you can gain visibility online, I hope you found it useful and that all the points were nice and actionable for you. If you want any more information, head to our website which is frogspark.co.uk or follow us on Twitter @FrogsparkStudio.

Cheerio Chaps.
See you later.

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