Lets face it – we all need new customers, we want to maintain or enhance our relationship with our current customers and we all want to boost revenue per sale. The good news is that there are very simple and cost effective steps you can take right now to achieve these core goals.
How do your customers find you online? When your keywords are searched do you show up in the top five results, or are you even on the first page of the search engine results? It’s surprising how many organisations online presence are not working to their benefit.
Does your online presence project the core values that your organisation holds dear? Do you think that your prospects and existing customers might be more likely to want to work with you if your values and ethics were easily found and consistently projected?
By managing your online presence you can easily take control of your rankings and your online reputation. This will create more sales for you.
Here are the 5 areas where you will see the best results for the amount of effort required:
1. Audit Your Website
Very few websites are correctly formatted, or optimised for the search engine crawlers. Consider auditing your website regularly to ensure that it is correctly formatted and that the search engines can easily index your site. There are tools that will do this for you, but check areas like your website tags and that your site has up to date and easily found sitemap and robots files. Also check that the keywords your customers would use to search for you are sprinkled appropriately through your pages.
2. Create a Following
You have a business; obviously you have interesting stories and specific skills you can share. Your customers and prospects would love to share in your experiences and to learn from you. This boosts your online authority in your area of expertise.
3. Be Consistent
Your online presence is the definition of your brand. You want to create a consistent impression so your customers and prospects know who they are dealing with, what your values are and what experience they should expect from your organisation. Also make sure that your branding (logos, banners, icons and images) are consistent across all media so that your audience recognises your pages immediately.
4. Post Regularly and Frequently
Try to post at least twice a week every week. Occasionally this may be sharing someone else’s material, but make sure you post regularly, while keeping to your message. Posting regularly maintains and boosts your online audience.
5. Link
Every time you create a link to your website, you build the search engines’ confidence in the authority of your website. Create your articles as a blog on your site and link your social media to them and your rankings will improve. Make sure your articles are properly formed for the search engines with correct tags and a balanced sprinkling of keywords.
While none of this is rocket science, it’s surprising how few businesses are making the small effort required to ensure that their online presence reflects the true values of their business.
You can boost your sales by implementing these simple steps.