Increase Your Online Presence with These Actionable Ideas

The COVID-19 pandemic has almost doubled the average time people spend with the internet and consume digital content.  The steady increase in daily time spent online makes it essential for your personal brand or professional brand to establish and increase its online presence. YourDictionary.com describes internet presence or online presence as “the online part of an organization, normally including a website, and often links from social networking sites or directories.”

In addition to making your brand more accessible and credible, an online presence helps you understand your customers and run digital marketing campaigns effectively. But you cannot increase your online presence in the age of search engines and social networks simply by building a website. Your online presence management strategy must focus on the essential elements of online presence – website, blog, content, search engine visibility, social media presence, directory listing, online citations, and online reviews.

According to Wikipedia,

“Online presence management is a process that combines web design and development, blogging, search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, reputation management, directory listings, social media, link sharing, and other avenues to create a long-term positive presence for a person, organization, or product in search engines and on the web in general.”

You can make it easier for existing and prospective customers to find your business or brand online by optimizing each of these key elements of an online presence. You must focus on enhancing brand awareness, brand recognition, and brand reputation to strengthen your online presence. However, you must remember that online presence management is an ongoing process. You must look for ideas and best practices to increase your online presence consistently in the short and long runs.

17 Ideas and Strategies to Increase Your Online Presence Consistently

1. Boost Your Website’s Mobile Experience

According to Statista.com,

“In the first quarter of 2021, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 54.8 percent of global website traffic, consistently hovering around the 50 percent mark since the beginning of 2017.”

In addition to accessing websites on mobile devices, most people these days prefer mobile apps to websites. Hence, you cannot increase your brand’s online presence without boosting your website’s mobile experience. You can adopt responsive web design to make the same website look good on desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets.

2. Display and Convey Prominent Information Clearly

You can keep the website visitors by including useful and valuable content on every web page. But you need to ensure that every visitor can see and find prominent information about your business or brand instantly. While designing and planning web pages, you must display important business information – business name, location, contact details, and operating hours – at prominent places on the page. Also, you must persuade the website visitor to do business with you by showing an overview of products or services.

3. Add a Blog to Your Website

Your online presence management strategy must emphasize on diverting regular traffic to your website from search engines.

According to WPBeginner.com,

“A blog is a type of website where the content is presented in reverse chronological order (newer content appears first).”

You can divert more organic traffic to your website from search engines by adding a blog to the website. Also, you can publish fresh and insightful blogs regularly to enhance your online presence and reputation simultaneously. The blogs will create opportunities for your brand to start conversations with readers by asking questions or requesting them to post comments. Here is a guide to how to start your own blog.

4. Repurpose the Blog Posts

You can increase your online reputation and search engine visibility by posting fresh blog posts regularly. Also, you can repurpose the published blog posts to enhance your digital presence without putting in extra time and effort. For instance, you can divert more people to the blog by posting the content on social media. The blog posts help you to run social media campaigns without creating additional content. Likewise, you can reuse blog posts as additional content while running email marketing campaigns. The blog posts will persuade many readers to subscribe.

5. Implement SEO Strategies

Search engine optimization (SEO) strategies help you to increase your brand’s search visibility in popular search engines like Google and Bing. You can increase your brand’s online presence and search visibility by implementing on-page and off-page SEO strategies.

The on-page SEO techniques boost your website’s search performance by optimizing a web page’s structure and content. On the other hand, off-page SEO techniques improve your website’s search engine ranking through a slew of external activities – local listing, blog posting, forum posting, guest content writing, valuable backlink building, and social media promotion.

6. Produce and Publish Content Regularly

You can strengthen the online presence of your brand by producing and publishing a variety of digital content – articles, blogs, podcasts, infographics, and videos. However, your online presence management strategy must focus on distributing the digital content through the right channel.

For instance, you should posts videos on YouTube and Facebook, while posting pictures and images on Instagram and Pinterest. Likewise, you should optimize the articles and blogs for search engines to provide relevant information to searchers. You can post the digital content strategically to boost your brand’s online presence in various online places. Here are some innovative ideas to come up with ideas for your blog.

7. Leverage the Massive Popularity of Video Content

Your online presence management plan must focus on the creation and publication of a variety of digital content. But several studies suggest that people these days spend more time watching online videos than consuming other digital content.

Also, YouTube is more popular than other social networking platforms in several countries. That is why; you can easily increase your online presence by creating and publishing videos frequently. In addition to creating your own YouTube channel, you must explore ways to embed videos in blog posts and social media posts.

8. Boost Your Presence on Relevant Social Networks

As highlighted by several studies, people spend more than four hours every day on social media amid COVID-19 lockdowns and shutdowns. Hence, you cannot increase a brand’s online presence without boosting its presence on popular social networking platforms – Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

However, most brands lack adequate resources and bandwidth to boost their presence on multiple social networking platforms. Your online presence management strategy must focus on identifying and targeting the relevant social networks according to your target audience. However, you must focus on increasing your presence on every targeted social network by implementing multiple strategies.

9. Adopt New Online Forums and Platforms Early

Popular social networking platforms differ from each other in the category of active users. There are many instances when new online forums and platforms acquired millions of users in a short amount of time. You cannot increase your online presence consistently by only targeting popular forums and platforms. It is always important to adopt new forums and platforms early. The early adoption will help you to beat the competition and engage users. Your online presence management strategy must focus on finding and adopting new online platforms proactively.

10. Get Listed on Multiple Web Directories

According to MarketingTerms.com, “Web directories are organized website listings put together by human reviewers, whereas search engine listings are put together by automated systems and lack a navigable structure.”

You can get your brand listed on popular web directories to get noticed by more people over the internet. Also, you can reach out to the relevant customers when they initiate local searches. But you can build a formidable online presence only by getting listed on web directories that add value to your brand. It is also important to get listed on popular web directories like Google My Business, Bing Places, and Yellow Pages.

11. Keep in Place an Online Review Strategy

According to the online review statistics posted on Qualtrics.com,

“91% of 18-34 year olds trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations and 93% of consumers say that online reviews influenced their purchase decisions.”

In addition to making consumers trust your brand, online reviews increase your brand’s online presence and search engine visibility. You must keep in place a strategy to request customers to review products purchased by them or services availed by them. Also, you must encourage consumers to post reviews on popular general and social review sites.

12. Consider Working with Influencers

Both B2B and B2C companies these days work with influencers to boost the online presence of their brands in a short amount of time. B2B companies promote their products/services through industry influencers or experts, while B2C companies approach bloggers and celebrities. While implementing online presence management strategies, you must leverage influencer marketing to increase your online presence in a number of ways – reaching out to a new audience, increase brand credibility, and facilitating cross-promotion.

13. Run Email Marketing Campaigns

As highlighted by multiple studies, 99% of people these days check their emails every day.  Also, there are many people who check their emails as much as 20 times a day. Both B2B and B2C companies run email marketing as an effective digital marketing strategy to build and nurture relationships with a wider audience by sending emails.

You can increase your online presence consistently by launching email marketing campaigns. But your online presence management strategy must focus on creating an email list and divide the email recipients into different segments. Also, you must persuade the recipient to open and read the emails by keeping the subject line relevant and catchy. 

14. Experiment with Paid Ads

The organic strategies increase your online presence gradually over a period of time. But you can increase your brand’s online visibility and reputation in a short amount of time by experimenting with the paid advertisement options provided by popular search engines and social networks. These pay-per-click (PPC) ads make you pay only when a person reaches your website. Many businesses invest in PPC advertisement to increase website traffic, generate warm leads, and reach out to a wider audience in a few days. You can customize and finetune the PPC ads to target different audience segments at once.

15. Personify Your Brand

According to Forbes.com,

“83% of consumers admit paying as much attention to how brands treat them as on the product they sell.”

You can strengthen your online presence only by building an experience-based connection with consumers. You can easily impress and engage the target audience by personifying your brand.

However, you must focus on both values and missions while personifying the brand. The personification will help you to create a persona that conveys important aspects of your brand to the target demographic in an engaging and appealing way. At the same time, the personified brand will persuade more consumers to engage with you through social media comments and newsletter subscriptions. 

16. Don’t Forget to Track Competitors’ Strategies

In addition to increasing your online presence, you must focus on outperforming competitors in the digital world. You can boost online presence management strategies only by understanding why people prefer competitors to your brand and what do people say about your competitors.

The information will help you to identify what is working as well as what mistakes you are making. You can get new ideas regularly by monitoring and evaluating the strategies and ideas implemented by the competitors. Also, you can boost various campaigns by producing more relevant and engaging content.

17. Automate Online Presence Management

You can easily curtail the time, effort, and resources required to boost your online presence by leveraging a slew of online tools. You can avoid additional costs by leveraging the free editions of these widely used tools for online presence management. But you must remember that the online presence management tools differ from each other primarily in the category of features or functionality.

For instance, some of these tools make it easier for you to promote your brand on search engines and social media, while others help you to automate web directory listing and measure your website’s user experience. That is why; you must combine the right tools to automate important aspects of online presence management.

While looking for ideas to increase your online presence, you must remember that a brand’s online presence keeps changing. You must measure and evaluate your brand’s online presence regularly to grow your brand by identifying what is working and what is not. You must make online presence management a continuous process to make it easier for the target audience to find your personal or professional brand over the internet.