3 Things Startups Need to Consider Regarding Their Online Presence
One of the most important things when starting a modern startup is to immediately focus on building your online presence. We are living in a digital age, and since the beginning of widespread web usage at the start of the 21st century everybody has been online for several hours a day. This means that there are a lot of business opportunities to be found on the internet.
Besides this, optimal business results and maximal exposure can be achieved more quickly. Still, this doesn’t mean that creating an online presence for your business is easy and that it should be taken lightly. You need to think things through and have a strategic approach from the very start, if you are going to set off your online presence properly.
Taking the right approach is highly important – if you create a good foundation for your online endeavors, you will be able to build on it. However, if you make the wrong moves at the very beginning, fixing your mistakes and making up for what is lost can be quite difficult. So, here are the three core principles you must consider if you want to build a good online presence for your startup.
Start by Creating a Business Website
Before you can do anything else and focus on any kind of marketing, you need to start by building a website for your business. A website is your online HQ, it can serve as a store, information desk and contact location. No startup can be taken seriously unless it has a good website; it is the core of your online presence and all other incentives lead directly to it.
It all starts and ends with your website. When you attract traffic to your website, it has the best chances of converting your visitors into customers. People who land on your website will be able to see all the information about your startup, see your goals, what you plan on offering and what motivates your business.
This is how you will earn credibility when you create a website that shows professionalism. People see that you are reliable and that they can trust your business. A professionally designed website can entice people and spark their interest in what you have to offer. It’s important that you optimize your site for mobile users and that you get good web hosting, so that it always runs smoothly.
SEO or PPC? What Is the Better Path for Startups to Take?
After you’ve built your business website, designed it, inserted content and optimized it, the first thing you need to do is to start working on driving traffic to your website and showing people who and what you are. Two marketing techniques that are considered to be the most adequate are SEO and PPC, but the question is which one to choose?
When it comes to SEO, you need to optimize your website with the use of different long tail keywords and high quality content that is easy to skim through, as well as pay attention to a number of other factors like internal linking, meta descriptions and so on.
This way, your website will slowly climb to the top of the search engine results pages for your chosen keywords, and it can gradually grow on its own while you develop your business. However, investing your efforts solely in SEO from the start is not a great idea. This is simply because an SEO campaign is a long ongoing process that won’t give you visible results for several months.
This means that it requires a lot of investment, in terms of both time and effort. Additionally, you need a lot of material to work with. This is why PPC is the better option for your startup. A PPC campaign can be created by people who have no previous experience, and it instantly attracts traffic to your site. This means that you can instantly get exposure and returns from your campaign.
Creating keywords for PPC is much easier and you should focus on this method for a while, until your website has become stable. It costs money, but PPC brings valuable results instantly. Then you can switch more to SEO and work on creating organic traffic. Given the fact that SEO is an advanced marketing technique, you should check this detailed SEO strategy for startups article and learn more about it.
Control Your Web Presence from the Very Start
You cannot just set up everything and think that your job is done. No, this is just the beginning and you need to control your web presence and work on improving the way people perceive your business online. It’s all about being active every day and building your reputation bit by bit.
Find a powerful influencer marketing platform that suits your niche to be utilized on the social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, and work on making contact with amazing people who have a lot of influence in your niche. Find bloggers and ask them to guest post on your blog, talk to other experts in your industry, and create solid business relationships.
If they approve of you, the people who follow them will likely be more open towards your startup as well. Write blog posts and share your content on social media to show your audience how you think, and let them get to know you better. Always make sure to respond to comments and clarify things, if people have a problem understanding something.
These are the three most important things you need to consider when building your startup’s online presence. Make sure that you always strive to learn more and try to improve your online image, as it can drive your business forward and help you grow.
