4 Ways to Grow Your Business Through Online Strategies – Part 1

As mentioned in a previous blog, most customers’ first experience with a business is online. Even if you have a physical store, it is important to build a strong an online presence as many customers will check out the online reviews before even reaching your location.

At One Stop Media, we recognised that forming a strong online presence can be a confusing and daunting experience. With technology changing so rapidly, many businesses owners simply cannot keep pace and so simply suffer from a poor online presence.

With proper focus, a strong and optimised presence will establish a professional reputation, attracting and converting more customers than your competitors. We recommend focusing your attention on four key areas (two organic and two paid strategies), which avoids stretching both your budget and concentration too thin.

Leading with the most important – An optimised website.

In the 21^st century, with many consumers searching online if your business does not have a website, it essentially does not exist for consumers. Regardless if it is a simple custom site or complicated template, ensure the entire site is optimised. Run through this checklist to determine if your current site is optimised for the internet.

Ensure your website:

• Is mobile responsive, resizing text and menus for smart devices.
• Load quickly
• Includes a call to action which translates into a phone number on smart devices.
• Is well designed with updated information
• Maintains optimised URLs on the important pages.

Focused SEO Strategies

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation, is something that every business, regardless of industry, can implement to develop a better online presence. It is essentially arranging your website and content to fit into what your customers are searching for online. This gives Google and similar search engines confidence that your website is an authority on the subject, thus ranking the site highly for industry-related searches. Unfortunately, this is an area many customers struggle with, and so dismiss the entire concept as too hard.

However, one of the easiest ways to develop and maintain an online industry reputation is through content optimisation. As a leading SEO company in Melbourne, we can tailor website content for SEO rankings, however, to maintain a competitive advantage we recommend developing a regular blog or content schedule. Not only is blogging an easy platform to get started on, but it also defines your brand’s voice and builds trust with your online customers. Consider creating a variety of unique and quality content that customers will find entertaining or informative, with examples like:

• Videos or Podcasts
• Creating Infographics
• Releasing Cast Studies
• Publishing informational material, and
• Developing an online course, webinar or recorded info session.

It Doesn’t End Here

We understand that developing an online presence is not an easy process, so it makes sense to hire the experts. If you don’t know where to start with developing and improving your online presence, come talk to our experts today. Stay tuned for the last two areas to focus on when building an online reputation. For a different approach, we discuss paid online strategies in Part 2.