Owning a local business can be a profitable and fulfilling experience, but without enough visibility, you might not survive long enough to reap the rewards. All businesses need customers to survive, and customers need to know that your business exists for them to find you, so in this article we are going to give you 5 tips on how to boost your online visibility.

Social Media Campaigns

Social media is going to be your main platform for finding more potential customers. Social media sites allow you to find and target people within your area and connect with them on a social level. This can then be used to convert them over to your business. It doesn’t matter whether your business is only available as an establishment or you offer products online; getting your target demographic involved in a social way will help your business, period.

There are plenty of different social media strategies that are being used by businesses today, and most of them with huge success. It might take you some time to learn the ins and outs of marketing with social media sites, but once you understand what your target audience likes, you will be easily able to attract an unlimited amount of business.

Some examples of how to use social media to your advantage:

• Post relevant links, images, and other content on a regular basis to attract a target audience, which you can then link to your main website or let them know about your physical location.
• Interact with communities that are interested in your niche. You can establish yourself as an authority within the niche and help to get more people to trust your company.
• Go viral! It may be a lofty goal, but there have been plenty of success stories where businesses sent out content on social media sites that ended up spreading to millions of people in a short amount of time.

Blogging

Blogging has become one of the more popular ways for businesses to market online. The blogs are extremely cheap, effective, and only takes a few minutes to set up. While we might not want to sit down and create content for our viewers to look at, you should understand the benefits as well as the process of a blog.

When you first start a blog, don’t expect it to become popular right away or drive any sales. Your ultimate goal at first is to just provide quality content regarding your niche and provide as much value to your readers as possible. Once that goal has been accomplished, you will have a large readership that is loyal to you. At this point, you can start to introduce your products and services to help convert them into actual customers.

Some other examples of how a blog can be used to help you boost your online visibility would be:

• Allow other bloggers that are in the same niche to come and post as a guest on your blog. This will help to expose your blog to their audience as well as give your audience some extra value.
• Integrate your blog with any social media efforts you may have and post links to your blog on your social media profiles. This will not only increase traffic to your blog, but will also help your social media efforts

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is an extremely large part of gaining visibility on the internet. It can be used in almost every online marketing aspect you can think of. Social media, blogging, pay per click campaigns, and everything else relies on SEO to get higher ranking so more people see the content and click on your link. Unfortunately, there is no way around SEO and it does take some time to be able to fully understand how to implement all the right SEO tactics. The best thing you can do is be patient and continue to learn as much as you can.

Some great places to start your SEO are:

• On-page tactics. Things such as optimizing your URLs, title tags, images, videos, and other elements will help search engines index your site much better.
• Getting involved with proper link building methods. Doing things such as guest posting on relevant sites will allow you to post your link on their sites, increasing your link profile. The better link profile you have, the higher you will rank.
• Using premium tools and resources to help your SEO. Using sites such as Moz.com will give you plenty of information about proper SEO techniques and can also provide you with many tools to help you along the way.
• Speed up your website. Making the images internet optimized and choosing a reliable provider to host your website are some of the things you can do to ensure that you have a fast loading website.

Customer Review Websites

These are pretty important because if you let some bad reviews go without a response, future readers will get a bad impression about your business. Websites such as Yelp have become a large part in consumers purchasing process. While they are researching which products and services to buy, they usually will also check and see if there is any type of reviews about the business they are about to buy from. Reviews could actually be the deciding factor on whether or not they do business with you.

It is important to always respond to reviews with a professional and courteous tone that provides a explanation or a solution. If the review is good, well then you should just say thank you, but any bad reviews should never be met with force or anger. Future readers will understand your situation, and because you attempted to help the previous customer or at least explained the situation, they will not hold it against you.

Some other tips about customer reviews are:

• Getting involved with as many popular review sites as possible. The more control you have over what your previous customers are saying, the better.
• Don’t take anything to personal when it comes to bad reviews. All businesses have to deal with a few people that will talk bad just because they can. Just handle it in a professional manner and move on.

There are plenty of other ways to increase your visibility, but these should get you started on the right path. The more people you expose your business to, the more chance your company will be successful, so don’t underestimate the power of marketing your local business online.

Ness Garcia is a freelance writer who loves to share her passion for blogging and the internet. Her articles mostly appear on SEO and internet marketing blogs. She also loves to connect on social media so please feel free to have her on your circles.