By Contributing Author

There are more websites and businesses competing for attention in the online space than ever before. Competition for traffic is fierce, no matter who your target demographic is. Any business which is hoping to remain seriously competitive in the online space, and that wants to attain their maximum revenue potential, needs to invest in online exposure.

Raising the online profile of a business requires a different approach to raising awareness in the real world. The online space doesn’t operate in the same way as the world around us. This opens up a world of opportunity for businesses who are hoping to raise their profile and gain exposure. Whether your business is large or small, at every stage of its life you want to ensure that it is being put in front of as many people as possible.

If you are smart with your online marketing, the internet provides a very powerful platform for gaining exposure. The internet is, to state the obvious, a very big place. If you want your business to be visible amongst a sea of competitors, you need to be taking the right approach to the online world.

Using Offline Advertising

Offline marketing in the real world can easily be used to bring more visitors to your website. Simply make sure to incorporate the URL of your website in your advertising. Some businesses make use of QR codes; when the user scans one of these with their smartphones, it takes them to a specific webpage. However, while QR codes might sound cool, and even though they seem to be everywhere, relatively few smartphone users seem to engage with them.

Social media pages are no substitute for a fully-fledged website for your company. However, it is still worth maintaining a presence on social media in order to be able to target key demographics with marketing. You have probably noticed that when businesses advertise themselves as being present on social media, rather than providing the URL to their specific page, they instead simply show the logo of the services they are present on.

This approach works because the audience will understand how to find your business if they use social media services themselves – you just need to let them know you have a presence on the various networks.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) has been an important buzzword for a couple of decades now. SEO once had a bad reputation, but as the means by which search engines determine how prominently to list results, there is clearly a lot of power in SEO.

In days gone by, it was mostly being employed in order to fool Google, tricking its algorithms and artificially raising the profile of websites, against the spirit of what search engines are for. Since then, Google has come to embrace SEO and now works with developers to allow them to legitimately improve their scores without threatening the overall integrity of Google’s results.

Investing in SEO is essential for any business that wants to remain competitive online and who want to see a consistent stream of traffic to their website. Internet users aren’t going to stumble across websites by magic, they are either bought there by a search engine, a link from another website, or because they already know the address. Of these scenarios, the latter two are made possible by the former.

Investing in SEO will allow you to produce reliable and sustainable increases in traffic, increases which you can then capitalise on in order to improve your revenue. Increasing both traffic and exposure are important steps in increasing the overall profitability of your business.

If you want to do more than just exist in the online space, using it as an opportunity to grow and expand your business, SEO will likely play a key role in this. Once you start to attract more traffic to your website, you will start to naturally generate links to your website from elsewhere on the internet; this will help to further improve your SEO score.

Perhaps the biggest selling point of SEO is the phenomenal return on investment (ROI) that it offers to businesses. The money that it costs to implement an SEO strategy is nothing compared to the potential gains.

Online Reviews

When consumers are thinking about trying out a new product or service, one of the first things that many of them do is to go online and to search for reviews. The widespread availability of reviews, from both professional and amateur sources, has been both a blessing and a curse for consumers and businesses alike.

It is worth pursuing reviews as part of your marketing strategy, but it is important that you approach it in the right way. Clearly, if you are paying someone for a positive opinion of your product, then this isn’t really an opinion at all. Some businesses choose to buy reviews, but there are only a limited number of reputable blogs and websites that will accept payment in exchange for positive reviews.

It is much better to encourage organic reviews of your products and services. Offering free samples is one of the most common ways of doing this. It increases the chances of your product being reviewed, as reviewers won’t have to pay for it, but it doesn’t obligate them to give you a good review.

A positive and well-written online review can be a very effective marketing tool. For example, having a good review entices the reader without being overly pushy about it.

The internet offers the most powerful potential marketing platform in existence. If you want your business to be able to seriously compete with the biggest players in your market, you will need to invest the time and money necessary in raising the online profile of your business. Once you have a decent flow of traffic coming to your website, it is much easier to capitalize on the opportunity and turn traffic into revenue.