5 Tips to Optimize Your Online Presence

— By Tamara Weintraub

With all the things you need to do to keep your business successful both offline and online, there are bound to be a few things that fall through the cracks. Many small businesses focus on one specific marketing strategy like search engine advertising – in fact, paid search spending was up 18 percent in the last year.

But that doesn’t mean you should let other aspects of your Web presence suffer. Here are a few easy things you can do to keep your small business website and social media pages in tip-top shape.

Small Business Web Optimization Tips

1. Complete Your Google+ Local Page

Having an optimized Google+ Local Page is vital to your business in 2013, especially now that the Google Maps app is back on iPhone operating systems. Your Google+ Local page features basic business information, photos and videos, reviews from your customers, and more, so it should be top of mind for your small business marketing efforts.

To begin, ensure that your page is 100 percent complete and owner-verified. Owner-verifying your page establishes that all the information listed on your page is current and valid. Next, populate your page with keyword-rich business information, content and photos. This will help your map listing to show up in the organic search results for your top keywords.

2. Eliminate Old Information

Now is a great time to browse through your website, blog and social media pages to find any old or obsolete information. Get rid of information about old services or products, former employees that no longer work for your business, expired offers or specials, and any copy that’s no longer relevant.

3. Give Your Website a Facelift

Now that you’ve cleared out the clutter, it’s time to give the visual content across your website and social media pages a full facelift. Adding new photos of your staff, interesting videos and customer quotes are great ways to keep your website visually appealing. You can also take this time to update assets like your business logo, landing pages, or your online ads.

Keep in mind you should always maintain brand consistency across all your ads and pages, so make sure that any changes you make are streamlined across your website, blogs and social media accounts. Also, if you have recently added any new products or services, locations or team members, be sure to add them to your sites as well.

4.  Nurture Relationships with Your Fan Base

Your company’s Facebook fans and Twitter followers can have a huge influence on your online presence. Social media engagement such as likes, comments, tweets, retweets, and shares, can drive online word-of-mouth, social discovery and organic search. It’s important to nurture these existing relationships by showing appreciation to your current fans and followers while making sure that the new ones feel welcome and recognized. Here are a few quick and easy things you can do:

• Create personal posts that mention individual consumers and thank them for their business
• Post photos of your customers to your social sites (with permission from the subjects, of course) and tag them so they are encouraged to comment, like, and share the posts
• Create a special offer for fans and followers to promote the brand loyalty and sharing that attracts new customers

5.  Ask For Reviews – and You Shall Receive

After a holiday season full of sales and service, your interactions with many of your customers may still be fresh in their minds, which makes it the perfect time to ask your best customers for a review. Send them a personalized email or create a flyer for new customers asking them to review your product or service on sites like Yelp or Google+ Local after a good experience. This can boost your online reputation while keeping customers engaged with your business.

As your business grows and changes, so must your online presence. Even though many of these items might fall at bottom of your priority list right now, remember that your online pages are live and viewable to anybody at any time, so it’s important to keep them in the best shape possible.  

Tamara Weintraub is the content marketing manager for ReachLocal, where she educates small businesses about local online marketing. You can connect with her on Twitter or LinkedIn.