4 ways to get found—Your website and your business.
There are many ways to get found online. Tactics generally fall into two general categories – Online and Offline. Offline tactics can be a valuable tool to drive traffic to your website but our discussion here will focus on Online tactics which is where most people are searching.
Think about how your website gets found.
Whether you are doing the marketing yourself or hiring others to help, you need to know about the tactics of getting found—how the pieces fit together.
The Internet has become a crowded place...or haven't you noticed? Because it is crowded you need to be everywhere, especially where people are hanging out, sharing, and looking for information. Sometimes people don't know they are interested in what you have to offer until you pop into their 'space' and get noticed.
Being everywhere to get found means, uh, being everywhere. This includes:
- Local business listing or local search
- Top of the search engine results, at least first page
- Having a blog
- Social media presence
Get on the map
If you read my last article about "getting found" you should have downloaded the free worksheet which will help you get setup in local search, such as Google Places, Yahoo Local, Yelp and more. Don't underestimate doing this. You don't even need a website to get listed in some of these. This will literally get you on the map.
Search engines may not be able to find you.
My rant about invisible websites says that when you don't come up on the first page of a search for your product or service you are invisible. You are not getting found. Your website needs to be optimized so it isn't invisible to search engines. If the search engines can't find you, no one who doesn't already know you, will find you either.
What's blogging got to do with it?
Blogging will increase website traffic. Sounds like a good title for a blog post! In essence, you have the opportunity to write about every aspect of your business and blogs let you update your website yourself. If you have the blog hosted with your website, your total website pages will increase every time you write a post. The more pages you have, the more opportunity for new eyeballs to see your content if you optimize them. You are expanding your website and attracting new traffic at the same time. Blogs feed the search engines. The more you feed it, the more pages it will return in search results.
Social media helps you get found.
As you blog you also should take the opportunity to let everyone know about it. The easiest way to do this is through social media. So what is all the buzz about with social media? Are you still fighting the fight for not getting involved?
Social media is about the buzz. This doesn't mean shouting sales pitches, but rather, more about informing. You have just created a blog article with information. Now go out and inform others!
Now stop thinking and start doing, so you get found.
- Get on the map
- Strive for first page presence in search results by optimizing your pages
- Blog
- Shout about it, in a quiet, consistent manner.