Whether you run a small business, a large corporation, or you are just keen to improve your personal branding, increasing your online visibility is always going to be an important part of the process. There is a lot of information out there about how to get found online more effectively, but which of it can you trust, and what should you be putting most of your effort into? In this blog post, we are going to discuss how you can effectively get found online in 2021, by just following a few key practices. With these, you should be more visible online in no time.
Start A Blog
If you don’t already have a blog on your website, then this is probably the very first thing you should look into doing if you want to improve your SEO and get found online more easily. The ways in which blogging can improve things for your brand are hugely diverse and extremely powerful, and you really shouldn’t underestimate the value of blogging as an SEO tool.
Specifically, a regular and well-written blog can help to drive traffic to your website in a number of key, important ways:
- A blog provides you with the opportunity to post regular updates to your website, causing search engines like Google to re-crawl your site and update their records. This is very good news for your SERP ranking.
- With regular and consistent blog posts, you can create many, strong internal links within your own website, which is another thing that Google will repay you well for.
- If your blog provides people with genuinely useful or entertaining information, they are going to think of you as an authority on your subject – or various subjects – and that will help to improve your visibility in a more manual way.
- Blogs are a powerful way to keep people on your site for longer during each visit. This in turn sends a clear signal to Google that your website is important, and that helps to boost your ranking further.
Setting up a blog can be challenging at first. You need to make sure that you are going to have plenty to write about. It’s often a good idea to plan out some of your posts beforehand early on. You can even write some of them and bank them for later. If you also combine this with the following idea of content pillars, you are going to find your blog especially easy to write and put together.
Remember: while writing your blog, make sure you are using the right long-tail keywords, that you have hopefully researched beforehand. We’ll look into that in some more detail later on.
Use Content Pillars
Whenever you are creating content online – whether it’s for social media posts, blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, or anything else – you need to make sure that you are going to sound like an expert on that topic. You also need to keep your content on-brand, so you can ensure that people are going to return to you again and again to find out more about those topics. This is where content pillars come in.
Essentially, content pillars are four or five subjects that are all inter-related, which you are going to create content around specifically in the future. They should be niche enough that you can become a trusted expert on them, but varied enough that you have a lot to say. And it should go without saying that they should all refer back to a topic central to whatever it is your business does.
With content pillars, you can plan out and create a content calendar each month, and following that is going to mean your social and blog posts are much more successful. This is especially true if you research what topics people really want to hear about, or those which you know tend to perform well.
Master Your Keywords
When you are writing blog posts and creating website content generally, you are going to have much more success with getting the website to the top of the SERPs if you are making good use of keywords. Although keywords are not actually the be-all and end-all of good SEO, they do remain incredibly important, and you ignore them at your peril. So the question is, how do you make good use of keywords, and how do you know which to use?
The answer to the second question is simply: research. You need to go out and find out what people are searching for with relation to your business. Bear in mind that the most successful and powerful keywords tend to be those that are considered long-tail – three or four word phrases – rather than single-word, generic phrases. So, find which of those people are searching for, and make sure you include them naturally and organically in your blog posts and other content on your website. That way, you should increase the number of people visiting your site, and your Google ranking is going to be much higher.
Go Local
With all of the focus on the internet being such a global phenomenon, it can be easy to overlook the very real power of local search. Ultimately, your business is a local company, even if it is also a global one, and by making use of local search you can really help to promote your business’ online visibility in a very powerful and notable way.
Local search optimisation breaks down into the following steps:
- Identify local search terms. You need to know what people in your area are searching for. If you know they tend to look for ‘SEO services Belfast’, you will want to include that on your website.
- Optimise existing pages by including the name of your town or city where appropriate, as long as it doesn’t sound like obvious filler. You should also add contact information.
- Localise your content. If your business has several locations, you can create a separate landing page for each location.
- Get listed in local directories.
- Make it mobile-friendly.
- Remember to include things only local people could know!
If you can do all that, you will find that you get many more visitors from your local area, a huge improvement to your online visibility.
Maximise Your Social Media Presence
In a sense, increasing online visibility often comes back down to increasing social media presence. The more easily findable you are on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the like, the more visible you are – and this is something you really can’t afford to ignore these days. So how do you maximise your social media presence, and ensure that you get found on those sites in 2021?
First of all, work on your bio. Take a look at the bios of your rivals on Twitter and Facebook, and see if you can learn anything from them. But also see what they might be missing – this is going to be your opportunity to stand out from the crowd. Your bio should encapsulate your business’ brand, but also draw people in. Think about what your social media voice is going to be. Are you going to go down the funny route? Or will you play it straight?
Remember that you always have the chance to pay for promoted tweets, but that if you approach your social media marketing in the right way, you will probably rarely need to make use of them. The main rule here is: engage! The more you interact with people, make use of the appropriate hashtags, and get involved with trends, the more visible you are going to be.
And please ensure that you are routinely linking back to your own corner of the web. With enough of an audience, if you provide links to your blog posts, that is only going to help you become more visible.
Work With Influencers
Influencing is big business right now, and that’s good news for you. If you are keen to get found online in 2021 more readily, you will certainly find that working with influencers is going to help you out. The process is pretty simple. All you need to do is find a brand-appropriate and trustworthy influencer, approach them with a product that you would like them to review, and you’ll find a huge amount of traffic come flooding in. There are no promises with influencing, but at the same time it’s not a strategy you can afford to ignore right now.
Get Help From A Digital Marketing Agency
All of that is going to be so much easier if you have the help of a digital marketing agency. Truthfully, whether or not you know what you are doing when it comes to SEO, the help of a good digital marketing agency is always going to be a huge help. Finding a team you can trust, who have a wealth of experience and are dedicated to the cause, is one of the very best moves you can make in trying to become more visible. With their help, you will get found much more often in 2021 and beyond.
