The 5 Best Ways to Improve Your Digital Presence in 2021

In my last blog I talked about what a digital presence is and why it’s so important for your business, but what are the practical steps you can take to improve your online presence? In this blog, I’m going to take you through 5 of the ways that you can ensure your digital presence is strong and providing the reassurance and credibility your target audience is looking for when deciding to engage with or buy from you.

1 – Have an optimised website

Your website is the foundation of your digital presence and marketing. This is where your target audience will come for information, see what you have to offer, social proof in the form of testimonials/reviews and your contact details. It’s therefore crucial that your website is optimised for your audience.

That means it has everything easily accessible, your visitors know where to get the information they need at a glance and your website doesn’t have slow loading times or other technical issues.

Check out my blog here about the 5 key things that should be on every business website.

The best thing you can do for your business website is to ensure it’s fully mobile responsive. That doesn’t just mean that it can be viewed on a mobile phone, but that the website adapts to the size of the screen to give a good user experience.

You should also optimise for search engines, particularly Google. Good SEO will help you reach a wider audience and attract more visitors to your website. This enhances your digital presence and can put you ahead of your competition.

2 – Have a Google My Business listing

When a prospective customer Googles you or “your service near me”, it’s often the GMB listings that appear at the top of the page next to a map before your website appears in the search results. And this is where people can leave reviews about your business.

Even if you have a virtual business, it’s worth setting up a listing and ensuring that you’re not missing out on being in these priority Google results (you don’t have to share your address on the listing if you don’t have physical premises).

GMB is great because you can highlight your services and price range, give contact details but you can also create social posts, offers and provide key information like disability accessibility, Covid-19 updates, etc too.

3 – Use social proof wherever you can

Reviews and testimonials are the social proof your potential customers are looking for online to decide if you’re the right business to be buying from or not. If you don’t ensure the positive reviews take centre stage in your marketing, there’s a chance that any negative ones may have a detrimental impact on your digital presence.

We all know that we can’t please everyone and there will be bad reviews left no matter what we do. Responding to them (and asking Google to remove any fake/malicious reviews on GMB) and explaining the situation, steps taken, etc will help your audience understand that you do care about your customers and getting things right.

You can read more about testimonials and why they are so important for marketing in my blog here.

4 – Develop a consistent content marketing strategy

One of the key things that we look out for when we search for a company online is how up to date they are. When was their last social media post? When was their last review received? When did they last blog? Because if it was months or even years ago, that’s a clue that the business might not be a going concern, but if it is, that they’re just not interested in keeping things up to date and relevant.

Blogging regularly, sharing social media posts and asking for reviews is important not just for the marketing benefits of doing so but to ensure that your digital presence remains strong. It can then be seen that your business is still active, that you are able to deliver the goods/services, etc.

If you don’t have the time to be consistent, consider outsourcing to a content writer, social media manager or virtual assistant that can help.

5 – Monitor and evaluate your online presence regularly

Monitoring your digital presence is vital. Reputation management, i.e., spotting those bad reviews and comments in social media posts so you can tackle them before they become a problem is an important element of this (searching on Google and your social media platforms just once a week takes a few minutes but can put your mind at rest).

But there’s also the evaluation aspect too. By keeping an eye on things, seeing what appears to be working and what isn’t, looking at your Google Analytics to see where people leave your website before buying, etc can all help you to redefine your marketing strategies and ensure your digital presence remains strong.

I hope you’ve found those tips useful and will implement them for your business soon. Do you have any tips or tricks for improving digital presence that I haven’t covered? Let me know, I’d love to hear them.