What Is Online Visibility?
Online visibility, in its most general sense, is the visibility of a business in online channels. It is to be found, seen and heard in a large amount of similar digital content, business, brand, product, the number of which increases every minute and can be measured by millions.
Especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, the time people spend online has increased so much. Your online visibility has become almost equal to your brand awareness. It has become difficult for small businesses to survive in this competitive environment without acting strategically. But improving your online visibility with a few steps is not as difficult as you might think.
When you consider that 60% of the world population is digitally active now, it’s clear that you need to strive for your online visibility. It is possible to be seen -even- from space by consistently applying the online visibility ways and tips below and being patient!
But online visibility efforts often shouldn’t always be mainstream; you should aim for the kind of visibility that is more meaningful, directed at target audiences and industry stakeholders. Because you know, to be seen from space doesn’t really help anyone.
That’s why you need to build visibility into your niche with ways that help you to narrow it down to audiences who might be your customers or stakeholders. If you know your target audience, where they are, how they spend their time, what they like and dislike, there is no reason to not be successful.
While paid advertising is one of the best ways to build online visibility in a short time, it is not our focus in this article. Always remember that you can use all these methods in conjunction with paid social media and search engine advertising.
Considering The Overview Effect
There is a feeling that you may be feeling when you search for any word on Google, Youtube, Instagram, or any other platform; the overview effect. The concept is named after the experience of astronauts when they look at the world from space, the complex emotion they feel in the face of micro and macro things when they see everything as a whole without any boundaries and details.
According to space philosopher Frank White, when astronauts return from space, after seeing the whole world, its atmosphere, and the blue sky that seems endless when viewed from the earth, they experience an awareness of how important everything is and how unimportant everything is at the same time. For detailed information on the subject, you can check out NASA’s official podcast series Houston, We Have A Podcast.
For us non-astronauts to understand the overview effect, there is a website created by Andrew Wong and James Thompson in 2011: Astronaut.io . Astronaut.io shows you untitled, unedited, possibly unwatched videos uploaded to Youtube last week, one after the other. Each video stays on the screen for a few seconds, and you are the only person to witness ordinary, worthless, unplanned videos of people’s lives from all over the world.
Here’s the interesting and possibly insightful detail of all these videos to help you understand the overview effect: All these moments are so precious that people would want to record them, they just don’t make sense to you.
This is exactly the thinking we need to build on online visibility. When you find the audience that your business makes sense to, or make the necessary changes to make sense to an audience, you will be seen, heard, and known.
There is another site I want you to browse with the same thought; Internet Live Stats can make you develop an understanding of thousands of online content produced every minute:
All this is not to say that we are dust in the universe, it doesn’t matter what we do, but to grasp what we are trying to be first in, to look for opportunities to stand out with a more holistic approach.
This post will be about providing a small business overview of the ever-growing digital ecosystem, being visible amidst all that content, and perhaps being visible from space one day. You can also read our article on content strategy, the next step in visibility efforts.
6 Free Steps You Can Take To Increase Your Online Visibility
Website
Having a corporate website that will be the center of your online presence, or if you already have a website, updating it; is the first step you should take in terms of online visibility. If you don’t have a website, you can contact tio and have a technology company support your steps, which will make your workflow digitally powered.
Although businesses that do not carry out e-commerce and do not use digital channels during the sales phase are often mistaken that they do not need a website, having a website is critical for you to control your online visibility and reputation firsthand.
First of all, today consumers are also doing online research for their purchases from physical stores. If you still don’t have a website, your first step should be to move your brand identity digitally and improve customer experiences by providing first-hand information about your brand. If you already have a website, you need to make sure it represents you correctly and offers the right digital experiences to the right audiences.
Your website should contain basic information such as which products and services you offer, your working hours, and shopping conditions, as well as reflect your brand identity and corporate philosophy, and offer advanced digital experiences to its users. You can learn more about a simple business website setup by reading this article we wrote about the basic features that should be in e-commerce sites.
A well-designed corporate website also means you can take advantage of digital measurement methods and collect insight for growth. You can access most of the basic analytical tools for free, and with the data you get from your website, you can take the steps that will improve both your website performance and your business based data.
Your website can enable you to acquire new customers, stay in touch with your existing customers, publish reviews for your products, and terms of use, and perform many other sales-enhancing activities easily. You can completely digitize the experience of your customers and potential customers before, during, and after the sale, or you can choose to build phygital experiences and adopt a multi-channel sales strategy. For more information on digital and phygital experiences, you can check out this article.
| Visibility Tip: It is very important to use sentences containing unique and targeted keywords in the title and description of your website to control how you appear on the results pages of search engines. Your title and descriptions are one of the main factors that will affect your SEO success, as well as determine whether someone who finds your website in search engines will click and how they will feel at a first impression. |
Google My Business
According to Google, people are increasingly searching for businesses near them every year. One of the first and simple steps a small business can take to gain visibility online is to create a free business profile on Google. Your business profile -which allows you to list the details of your business, photos, location, services, and products- is important, especially for being visible in local searches.
The business profile, which is also necessary for building visibility on maps, can be a big step that will increase your conversions rapidly, especially if you are selling your products mostly through physical channels. You can manage it successfully by optimizing your business profile and keeping your customers and stakeholders updated about your business with regular publishing.
Whether you have a physical sale or not, you can control the first information users see when they want to learn about your business online, which is very critical for your business’s digital reputation.
With posts related to your business niche, you can highlight your interest to both search engines and users. You can gain trust by using real photos and videos in your publications, and you can also request your users to evaluate you.
| Visibility Tip: There are several factors that determine whether your business profile is visible to more people or not. One simple action you can take to improve your visibility is to add a high search volume keyword that describes your business to your business name. For example, you can list the name of your brand that sells wholesale pencils named “Test” as “Test Wholesale Pencils”. You can avoid missing searches such as “wholesale pencils near me” by entering basic information such as location and working hours accurately and completely. |
Social Media
In the past few years, having a presence on social media platforms suitable for your target audience has become a must for online visibility. While building your online visibility on social media, you should pay attention to maintaining your brand identity consistently, being stable and trustworthy, and using all interaction opportunities.
By building a presence of your business on social media, you can meet new potential customers, ensure that your existing customers do not forget you, and gain the trust of your stakeholders. It is also possible to turn your social media channels into a data-gathering center where you know your target audience and get feedback and insights from them.
By interacting with your audience, speaking, asking, and answering, you can gain valuable information from an outside eye on your brand, and use this information to improve your business.
| Visibility Tip: You need to build your social media presence on more than just making promotional announcements and trying to sell products/services. You can focus on producing informative content that will create value in an area that is curious in your field and gain your audience’s attention. Producing valuable content that you regularly stick to a specific theme, will definitely result as visibility increases. |
Blog
Another step you can take to ensure your online visibility is blogging in the niche where your business operates. Although a visual and video-oriented digital culture has become widespread, people still rely on written sources when it comes to their “serious” research.
You can build your blog inside your website or you can choose one of the third-party blog sites. With a blog in which you identify the most frequently searched questions in your field and answer them, you not only improve your visibility but also show that you are an authority in your field of activity.
At the same time, you provide users who visit your website with a reason to spend more time on your site. To improve metrics such as pages per session, and bounce rates, which are also important for search engine optimization, blogging may be the most profitable activity you can do.
| Visibility Tip: Evergreen content is rich content that is always kept up to date, written on an all-time wondered topic, rather than a trending topic. While planning your blog posts, focus on topics that may be immortal as well as trends. Update your content that has been attracting attention for a long time. Make it evergreen. This is one of the most sustainable ways to improve your online visibility and it has a greater return on investment ratio than any other online visibility method. |
SEO
SEO is all about being more visible on the web. Planning and creating your website content, blog posts and even social media descriptions in accordance with the basic principles of search engine optimization, has become a must for your online visibility in areas where competition is high.
Search engine optimization efforts, which we can distinguish as on-site and off-site, cover a wide range of activities from your URL structure to your keyword selection. If you do not have a consistent and continuous SEO strategy to support external and internal links, it is very unlikely that you will stand out from your competitors and appear on the first results pages.
| Visibility Tip: Using this online tool or many similar ones you can find online, you will be able to find out the search volume of words, frequency of use, and other related words on various platforms. Instead of high-competition generic keywords, you can discover long-tail keywords that perform well in your low-competition niche. As a small business, you can make your SEO processes more efficient by focusing on lower-volume long-tail words that are directly relevant to your target audience, rather than the effort you will spend to rise in competitive generic words. |
You may think emails are old-fashioned, but emails with optimized content, frequency, and well-segmented audience are still seen as one of the most efficient marketing methods.
With an email list that you created with the data you gather from your website visitors, social media followers, blog readers, CRM data, and other channels, it is possible to communicate with your potential customers regularly on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
You can use emails for retargeting marketing with your website data, as well as to deliver announcements about your business such as the latest updates, news, and campaign offers.
| Visibility Tip: You can increase the open rate of your email by optimizing the subject line of the emails you send. A good subject line should be of appropriate length, content, and interestingness. You can make emails a tool to increase your visibility by personalizing your subject line and using truly descriptive subject sentences related to the content you wrote in body. Avoid using click-baits and other tactics that might decrease your audience’s trust. |
As A Result
We have listed 6 free ways that you can increase your online visibility and make your business visible to the right target audiences when you repeat it regularly: Your website, your Google business profile, social media, SEO, blog, and email marketing.
There are many other ways to increase your online visibility. By applying one or more of these ways, which will vary depending on the unique characteristics of your business and its unique target audience, you will start to see increasing online visibility of your business.
