Businesses have gone many ways in recent years, some remain on the high street and have shops that sell their products to people browsing towns. Others still work from their offices standing high in cities. The innovators, however, have moved a large chunk of their business online. The way things are going if you don’t have an online aspect of your business soon then there are chances you might start to see some failings creeping in.
If you’re scared of the online world, don’t worry, we are going to take a look at some things you can do to help your business thrive online.
Website
Firstly, we need to understand that without a website we don’t have a business online. Our website is the front door to our shop and it needs to be easily accessible. The thing about websites is that there are so many out there that people believe theirs needs to stand out with fancy animations and graphics and it’s just not true.
Consumers use the internet exactly how they want to and if they’re looking for something then they will find it. The best thing you can do is to make your site as clean and simple as possible. Make it clear and concise and easy to navigate and your business will have its first steps in thriving amongst the plethora of other companies.
SEO
Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is the process of growing the amount of traffic your website receives by increasing its visibility to users of search engines.
There are many ways of doing this that include using keywords, backlinking to other websites, and optimizing the images on your site. This can be confusing and time-consuming so if it’s something that you think isn’t within your remit then I thoroughly recommend hiring a professional to help you with it.
The more people visiting your site the more chance you have of them buying something.
PPC
PPC is short for Pay-per-click and it’s an advertising model used to, much like SEO, drive traffic to your website. When you search for something on a search engine you will always have the first few options as ‘ads’ and these are PPC.
The business that is running the ad will only pay if someone clicks on their website, hence the name pay-per-click. Check out this service from Consultwebs.com for more information on PPC advertising. It’s most commonly used with first-tier search engines and is a brilliant way to get your name to the top of the list. If someone searches the category in which you are selling then you can be the first to be seen amongst the many other pages.
Social Media
There’s a lot to be said about social media and within the business world, it has done wonders. It’s a fantastic platform that has allowed us to pinpoint our target market without doing half as much work.
There are pockets of people all over sites such as Instagram that are fanatical about certain things. For example, coffee. If I were to run an advert on the television about my new specialty coffee business then it would be expensive and the number of people viewing it would be huge. Yes, that’s a benefit, but not everyone likes specialty coffee and it could even be a turn off that my advert seems disingenuous, you can’t have a major TV ad that feels like a friend is talking to you.
When it comes to social media, there are people within their niches that have built up a following, and because they are real humans posting real things the public feels as though they can trust them. So I take my specialty coffee business and talk to an influencer on Instagram and ask them to advertise for me. I already know my product is going out to people that love my industry, all I have to now is make sure my product is up to scratch. Advertise on social media, it’s brilliant.
Pictures
If you are selling anything that is a physical product then you have to include high-quality, high-resolution pictures that show what it is. This is the tricky thing, you have to make sure it’s not too large so it takes a while to load as this will affect negatively on your search engine rankings. But, you also don’t want it so small that you can’t see anything. Use your common sense and make everything look nice.
There are many ways to make your business thrive online these days, but if you really want to be ahead of the game I’d take these points into consideration. Marketing techniques such as SEO and PPC are some of the best as getting people on your site, your only job then is to make sure your business or product is good enough to sell.
