Before embarking on any effort to improve your business’ online visibility, it’s important to understand where you currently stand. Here are three things that you can do yourself to see what your potential customers are seeing when they try to find you online.
Search for Your Business Name
Go to Google and search for your business name. At minimum, a directory listing should appear that contains some basic information about your business. Hopefully, the listing information is correct. If not, you’re first to-do is to claim any free directory listings and make sure your business information is up-to-date.
If you have a website, a link to your website should be in the first few search results. If it’s not, then you have some work to do. If it’s there, but you’re not happy with the way your business name reads or the description underneath the link to your website, this is an easy fix that you can do by updating your title and meta description content on your homepage.
Search for Your Name
When much of your business is based on referrals and word-of-mouth marketing, it’s important that your own name has visibility because most of the time, that is what people are using to search for you online. Frequently, links to your various online profiles will appear on the first page of the search results. This includes links to your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn profiles. By including a short description of what you do in your profiles, you can clearly communicate your expertise in multiple search results.
Here’s an example of searching for “David Lelong” on Google:
The first nine results are about me, and for the most part, the descriptions explain what I do. You can do the same thing for your name.
Try a Free Grading Tool
There are a number of free tools online that will run you website through some algorithms and give you a score. While the actual scores are not very meaningful, they are a relative indicator of how well your site is meeting specific criteria that determine its position in the search results. Most of the tools also give specific recommendations on what you can do to your site to help improve visibility.
Here are some of my favorite:
Give these a try with your website’s URL and see what they say about your site’s visibility.
Like any new business initiative, it’s important to establish a baseline so you an clearly identify the specific metrics that you want to impact. You can then create a plan to improve each of the metrics. The overall outcome will be increased visibility for your business online.
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