Helping Your Brand Gain Visibility Online

If you want to succeed in business today, you need a strong online presence. That’s because most consumer purchases begin ONLINE (61%, according to a recent study). Unless you’re doing everything you can to help your brand gain visibility online, you’re losing out on more than half of your sales potential. Here are a few more stats if I haven’t convinced of the importance of online visibility:

• 66% of shoppers have purchased an item online in the last 12 months
• 44% of shopping journeys start with an internet search, and 41% start at online stores
• 20.1% of retail purchases are expected to take place online in 2024 and 22.6% by 2027
• 56% of people prefer to shop online over shopping at a physical store
• 96% of purchases will be made online by 2040

So, as you can see, the future holds promise for brands that gain visibility online and doom the rest to a slow failure. But we’re here to help. In today’s post, we’ll discuss tips to help you gain visibility online. If you are hungry for more insights after reading this post, check out other posts in this category by following the link.

How to gain visibility online

Make your site search-friendly

While social shopping is becoming more popular among consumers, the number of consumers who start (and maybe even complete) their product purchase using a search engine dwarfs this online alternative (although we’ll discuss this later, as well). Ensuring that your website shows up near the top in the search results for related products is crucial for increasing online visibility and online success. Even when consumers choose to purchase products from a physical store, they use search engines to compare prices, find retailers with immediate stock to fulfill their needs, locate retailers, and compare alternatives. If your website content doesn’t show up on the first page of search results (preferably in the top three organic links), you’ll struggle to gain traction for your brand and make sufficient sales to survive over the long run.

Clicks from search (termed organic search) represent approximately 53% of all traffic that visits your site compared with 27% that comes from paid online advertising and 5% from social media. However, some sources put the percentage due to organic search even higher. It also appears that the percentage of traffic visiting your site through organic search increases over time. Hence, you can’t afford to ignore SEO (search engine optimization) if you want to gain visibility online and survive in the long run.

SEO begins with optimizing your website’s structure and content to make it easily accessible and understandable to search engines like Google. Employing effective SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices, such as incorporating relevant keywords and then using them judiciously in crafting meta tags and alt texts for images, can significantly enhance the rank of your site’s content in search results when the keywords match user intent. Additionally, ensuring that your site is mobile-friendly and loads quickly is vital, as these factors are prioritized by search engines in ranking algorithms. Implementing a clean, user-friendly navigation system and creating a sitemap can also help search engines crawl and index your site more efficiently, leading to better search rankings.

The most impactful factors (those with the highest weights in the search algorithm), however, are social signals that tell search engines something about the quality and value of that content to users. Among the factors that imply value are:

• time on site
• number of pages per visit (a low bounce rate is among those used as a bounce reflects viewing a single page before leaving the website)
• repeat visits
• engagement on social media
• backlinks from high-authority websites
• internal linking
• external linking to high-authority websites, which acts like citations in a research paper

Get it listed in directories

Getting your site listed in online directories is another effective way to boost your brand’s visibility, although the SEO significance of this strategy is minimal. Despite this, directories such as Yelp, Yellow Pages, and industry-specific listings can help potential customers find your business more easily. Not only does this help your brand gain visibility online, but these directories often contain helpful reviews that can convince users to give your brand a whorl.

Make sure your business information is consistent across all directories, including your name, address, phone number, and website URL. This consistency helps search engines verify the legitimacy of your business, which can improve your local search rankings. Additionally, directories often have high domain authority, meaning that a backlink from a reputable directory can significantly enhance your site’s SEO performance.

Speaking of local SEO, you should register with Google My Business. After verifying your physical address, this tool not only provides legitimacy to your brand but also provides for an enhanced listing like the ones below when users search for your brand online. Significantly, these listings appear before other organic search results and just below paid advertising on the page.

Find blogs and publications for guest posting

Gaining backlinks from high-authority websites is a major ranking factor when it comes to determining your rank in search results. Don’t leave gaining backlinks to chance, however. Being proactive by securing features in blogs and publications can greatly amplify your brand’s online presence.

Start by identifying influential blogs and online magazines within your industry or niche. Pitch valuable and relevant content ideas that align with their audience’s interests. Guest blogging not only helps with gaining backlinks but also exposes your brand to a broader audience and establishes your brand as an authority in your domain area. Being an authority can drive more organic traffic to your site. Additionally, you can leverage these features in your marketing materials, further boosting your brand’s credibility and visibility.

Create shareable content

Creating shareable content is essential for spreading your brand’s visibility online, as it encourages other website owners to include your content in their posts, which provides a backlink to your website. Moreover, sharing content that resonates with your community encourages engagement on social media that improves your SEO. When your community shares your content, you can significantly increase your reach.

Types of content that are sharable include blog posts, infographics, videos, and interactive content like quizzes and polls. Focus on producing high-quality, informative, and engaging content that addresses the needs and interests of your target audience. Incorporating social sharing buttons on your website makes it easy for visitors to share your content, further extending its reach. Additionally, creating content that sparks discussions and encourages user-generated content can lead to more shares and higher engagement rates.

Conclusion

Over time, you can gain visibility online and grow your brand with the tips shared above. But you have to keep at it by producing a steady flow of high-quality content shared on a regular basis. Plus, give it some time. Your efforts to gain visibility online can easily take six months or more before you see significant movement in your rank. It’s not a climb to the top; it’s an ongoing race with your competitors to capture and keep the attention of your online market. You can’t simply stop once you see some success or give up the effort when you don’t see results immediately.

Efforts to gain visibility online also sometimes seem like you take two steps forward and one step back over time. Don’t get discouraged, as this is normal, especially when it comes to gaining backlinks. Over time, you lose some hard-won backlinks as it’s common for websites to update their content and delete older content, especially when it comes to high-authority websites. Set a sound strategy to gain online visibility and stick to that strategy and you’ll see results.

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Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our full range of services.