by Phil Chow
Managing your online web presence means striving to become well known online, which increases your online presence.
When you become well known online, you’ll attract more visitors to your website. This gives you more opportunities to convert into sales, if you’re a business, or increase engagement, if you’re an organization.
The following gives you ways you can increase your online presence and therefore, visitors to your website and conversion opportunities.
The Four Drivers of Managing Your Online Web Presence
There are four drivers that make up managing your online web presence. Leverage these drivers and you’ll maximize your online web presence. These drivers are:
- on site SEO (how search engine optimized is your website)
- social proof (your number of likes, shares, back links)
- online reputation (your number of reviews on your Google My Business Page) and
- website performance (your website’s page speed and how secure it is from attacks, malware and infection.).
On Site SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
One way to managing your online web presence is on site SEO. On site SEO is about finding out what keyword phrases visitors type in to search engines to look for your type of business or organization.
You can find these keyword phrases by using Google’s Keyword Planner Tool (opens in a new window). This tool suggests keyword phrases relevant to you with each phrase’s number of monthly searches. Shortlist those phrases with the highest monthly searches that are most relevant to you.
If you serve a local area set the Google Keyword Planner Tool to list searches only for the area you serve.
Next, take your shortlisted keyword phrases and create web pages or posts for each phrase. Focus on one phrase per page or post by listing the one phrase into the page’s meta title and description tags, at least on one header and no more than two to three times into the page’s body text. Write content around that one phrase.
Also, If you serve only a local area, list your name, address and city on each page via the header and/or footer section in schema markup language (opens in a new window). Search engines can then ‘know’ what city you are in when people search locally.
Your website will be properly SEO this way for keyword phrases you targeted for your site. See my earlier post for more detailed information on finding keyword phrases (opens in a new window) and strategically including them on your site. You can also use our free tool to conduct an SEO audit of your site (opens in a new window) afterwards.
Social Proof
Another way to manage your online way presence is to show the search engines that your website has social proof (i.e. is popular). This is indicated by the number of people liking your site, sharing your content, commenting on it and relevant websites linking to your site.
You can increase your social proof by:
- regularly blogging interesting content (tips, humour, news, happenings, opinion, photos, videos, etc. and the occasional offer related to your business/organization) on your site and encouraging visitors to like, share and comment on your posts. Put share buttons (opens in a new window) on your site to encourage this
- creating social media pages on social media sites like Twitter, Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc. and posting interesting content on there as well
- finding relevant websites and offer to guest blog for them with a link back to your site and
- listing your website in a consistent format in website directories related to your business/organization and city.
Online Reputation
Ask people to leave you reviews and testimonials after every sale or engagement to maximize your reviews and testimonials on your website and across social review sites like Yelp, your Facebook page and especially your Google My Business Page, etc. See my earlier post on how to maximize your reviews and testimonials (opens in a new window) for details on this.
The more reviews you have, and the more recent they are, increases the chances of people buying from you over your competitors who don’t regularly collect reviews and testimonials.
People now regularly search for testimonials and reviews as part of their decision buying process on who they can trust to engage and buy from. Search engines factor in reviews and testimonials as another criteria to rank your website.
Website Performance
Search engines like Google, the most popular search engine in the world, also consider website performance, too. They equate good website performance with good user experience.
What this means is if your site loads quickly, is secure (not infected, etc.), is easy to navigate, besides providing content that matches people’s keyword search, search engines will favour your site over others that don’t give as good a user experience as yours.
Here are some things you can do to make sure your website performs well:
- takes no more than 5 seconds to load (1 second is the ideal). Use the Pingdom Speed Tool (opens in a new window) to measure this and followup on its suggestions on what to fix to speed up your site.
- use Sucuri (opens in a new window) to check your site for hack attempts and fixes. They charge a nominal monthly fee to make sure your website is free from malware and viruses.
- add a site map of your website
- use strong passwords and change them regularly to prevent hacking attacks. Find out how secure your password is (opens in a new window) with this free tool and
- keep the software that your website is built on up to date.
Conclusions
By maximizing your on site SEO, social proof, online reputation and website performance as above, you’ll manage and increase your online web presence.
Search engines will “see” that your site is relevant, popular and provides a good user experience and they will rank your website higher over other similar sites as a result. Your higher ranking will lead to more visitors to your site and thus more sales and engagement conversation opportunities for you.
Website Links Cited in This Post
https://adwords.google.ca/KeywordPlanner
http://schema.org
http://www.sharethis.com/get-sharing-tools/#sthash.0uPkJi7F.dpbs
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
https://sucuri.net/lp/website-malware-removal-basic?sitechecksidebar
https://howsecureismypassword.net/
What are your thoughts on this post? Did I miss anything? If you have any comments or questions, please write below. I welcome and appreciate your opinion!