In the present world, having an attractive online presence for a business is no longer a luxury but essential for every business. People who thought their businesses were established enough to not need to be present online are left behind. To stay ahead of your competitors and grow your business rapidly, all business owners need a strong online presence and to stay up-to-date with the present online world. You may hire a digital marketing team or agency to grow your business online, but without some basic knowledge and proper planning, your investment in online marketing can give you no results. In this article, we will discuss where to start or how to plan about growing your business online. This will not only help you do proper planning but also save you from wasting a lot of money on a scammy digital marketing agency.
Table of Contents
Develop a Comprehensive Strategy
Begin with a clear strategy outlining your business goals and online plans. Define your target audience, understand their online habits, and choose the right digital channels to reach them. A solid strategy will guide your efforts and align your online activities with your business objectives.
Creating Website and Search Engine Optimization
Online presence means the presence of your business on various social media platforms and having a website for your business. In this part, we will discuss all you need to know about creating a website and creating a social media presence on the most important social media platforms.
Website Design & Develop
The thing your business need to grow online is a website. A business may have a physical location or not but must need to be present online. Creating a website is the first and most important part of growing a business online. Let’s start with that:
Choose a Domain Name:
Domain name should be the name of your business. But if your business name is to long try to make it shorter in website domain. In domain it doesn’t need the full name and services of your business. You may choose only brand name or brand name+category of your business. For example :abcdgrocery, abcdrestaurant, abcdclothing, abcdlaundry ect. Here you can replace abcd with your brand name and then place your business category. You also can visit your competitors websites to have some idea. Remember all the domain you decide for your website may not available if already taken. So you have try differently like ading or shorting the domain name. If you hire a website developer or digital marketer he also may help you. But read this full article before hiring someone so that you know what he/she is doing.
Design Your Website:
To attract your customers or visitors you need an attractive website. Many people just do copy from other websites which I don’t recommend at all. You may visit some websites which are in same category of your business to have some idea but totally copying a website may defame your business and all your website will loose uniqueness. You can hire a grapics designer (UI/UX designer) to get your website designs done. He/She may provide you some templates of business website with the same category of your business to choose from. You can choose from that and tell him what type of difference your want what brand color, font, look you want. If you want to do it yourself you don’t need to design it. You can create an attractive website by a cms builder. Which cms to choose will talk on the next part.
Developing Your Website:
Now it’s time to develop your website so that people can visit it. First of all you need a domain and hosting for your website. There are lot of domain hosting provider online. I will suggest some of the most popular companies where you should buy your domain and hosting. You may take help of your web developer but remember to create and buy domain hosting with your own email accounts have the access with you all the time. In our website technology section you will get more details about how to do that. Let’s start developing your website step by step:
- Buy Domain Hosting: There are lot of domain & hosting provider but you have to keep in mind some important things while buying your domain & hosting. The server should be enough speedy for your website, should have enough secure, a well known company and offer affordable price. You may choose from Namecheap, Bluehost, Godaddy or other well-known domain & hosting provider. I will suggest you to buy from Namecheap as it’s more user-friendly and affordable in price.
- Choose the Best CMS: CMS means content management systems. Though developing a website by html, cms, java scripts, python, c++ is the best way but for small businesses CMS is the best option. There are lot of CMS builders like Wix, Shopify, squarespace, WordPress which will allow you to build your website by yourself from scratch. But I will highly suggest you to use WordPress CMS builder for your business website. It’s little harder than other CMS builders here but it’s more seo friendly and let’s you customize more than other CMS builders. You may also take help from youtube to build your website. If you want hire a website developer I will suggest you choose a freelancer from Fiverr or Upwork instead hiring a digital marketing agency.
Search Engine Optimization:
After getting a attractive look of your website now it’s time to reach to the people/customers with your website. You may spend money to reach people by various marketing plan but SEO is the best option to reach people organically. Once you have done with your website seo and ranks on search engines people who search for your services/products online will get your website and you will get leads forever. There are some steps you should take to make your website SEO, lets explain step by stap:
On-Page & Technical SEO:
- Keyword Research: Keyword research is the first and most important thing of SEO. Everyday people search for various things on search engines. Among them your to be customers also may searching for the services/products you provide. You have to find those keywords and research them whether it’s easy or hard for your website to rank on those keywords. At the beggining you should choose the low kd (low competition) keywords with high search volume. You may also find keywords from your competitor’s website. There are lot of paid and free keyword research tools though I suggest to hire an SEO expert to do the keyword research.
- Placing Keywords: Now it’s time to place those keywords on your website and optimize for ranking. There are so many places where you must place your keywords so that your website ranks faster. Meta title, Meta description, image alt text, H1, 1st paragraphs, subheadings and other parts of the content should have keyword to rank on search engines. You may also write Blogs & Articles and place your keywords there.
- Technical SEO: After your website is optimized for onpage seo you need to do technical SEO. There are some things which your website needs to fix like, your website speed optimization, mobile friendly, indexing on search engines ets.
Off-Page SEO:
After your website is fully optimized you may need to do off-page SEO to fasten your ranking. This will also help to improve your DA/PA (domain authority/page authority) There are some sort of things you must do for that. You can write guest post (post about your services/products on other websites) with backlinks of your website. Normally you can reach out to various websites owners who writes about products/services you provide. Also there are lot of guest posting service providers on Fiverr and Upwork you can hire to get high quality guest post with a very cheaper rate.
Creating Social Media Accounts and Marketing:
Creating Social Media Accounts for Your Business
Nowadays people spend maximum of their free time on various social media platforms. So, a strong presence on various social media platforms is very important for any kind of business. Regular updates with your products and services can keep your customer engaged all the time and may attract them to buy/use your services/products again and again. While creating social media accounts try to create professional/business accounts/pages instead of individual/personal account.
Social Media Marketing:
Reaching your targeted audience through social media will be little hard organically. As maximum of your targeted audience will not know about your business page. So at the beginning right after creating social media accounts you will need to do some paid social media marketing. Where you can choose your audience by specify location, age, gender, language and their interest or behavior. There are lot of outcome you can choose while doing paid marketing like reaching more people, getting more page likes/followers, getting more messages, getting more calls, getting more website visitors etc. I will suggest whatever you choose keep getting more page likes/followers along with. This will help your social media post to reach more people organically later.
Creating Account on Directory:
There are a lot of directory sites which allow you to create your business profile for free of cost. This helps you to reach more people locally. Two of the most common directory sites are Google My Business and Yelp. Nowadays, maximum people use google maps & apple maps. They look for a local store or service through map. If your business profile is available on google maps and yelp (for apple maps) and also optimized properly your targeted audience may find you easily. And you will get more customers organically.
Google Ads
While you are thinking about paid marketing, Google ads is the best option. While you are doing SEO for your website it will take a little while to rank on search engines. Here is the magic of google ads. When people search for your product or services your website will be at the top with google ads even if your website is not ranked. Like social media marketing, here you will also be able choose your targeted audience by location, gender, age, interest and searching keywords. Google ads also allows you to do video ads on youtube. While people are streaming videos on youtube and your targeted audience sees the advertise of your business may convert to your clients. With the help of google ads you can also choose any specific youtube channel or videos to show your ads.
Conclusion:
Growing online presence of a business is not an easy thing. You have to bring the perfection of your online presence/marketing so that you can always stay ahead of your competitors. Don’t think your online presence will be better than your competitor only if you spend more money. Though money is very important here but you also need proper planning, hiring the best in affordable price and getting the best outcome from them. Instead of costly digital marketing agency I will suggest you to do this by the freelancers from Fiverr, Upwork or other freelance platform you know. Even after reading this article, if you think you need more guidence, you may contact us through our contact us page. We have a great digital marketing team who will help you with all of your questions.
