What are prospective customers seeing about your business when they search for you online? Because search engines provide such personalized search results, it can be nearly impossible to understand how you really look online unless you’re armed with some serious technology and a lot of time.
Are customers and prospects seeing your website? Your social sites? Your local listings? Is all the information about your business not only accurate but also compelling enough to make them take the plunge and become your customer?
Right now, more people than ever are relying on search engines to find new businesses. We’re not spending a ton of time out-and-about, and when we are out, we typically have a mission: get to the grocery store (or wherever our destination is) and get home.
So, you want to make sure your online presence is wowing consumers – but you’ve got a lot going on too, so you don’t want to spend weeks on end making updates.
Here’s how to complete a quick 5-minute web presence check. And, if you want to take a deeper look into how you’re showing up online, let one of our experts run a digital health check for you!
Step 1: Search for Your Business on Search Engines
The majority of searchers, 93%, in fact, begin searching for a new business on search engines. So, this should be the first step in your check-up. Search for your business name on Google and Bing and take note of everything that shows up on each search engine.
Here are some things to pay attention to:
- Do you have local competitors bidding on your business name?
- Is your website showing up?
- How does your meta title and meta description look for your site?
- Are your listings showing up?
- If so, which listings?
- Are your social sites showing up?
- Are any videos from your YouTube channel showing up?
- Is anything weird showing up that you need to look in to?
Step 2: Check Your Local Listings
Next, look into the local listings that popped up on search engines for your business name. Consumers rely on local listings, especially ones like Google My Business, to connect with businesses. Even at home, I conduct any search for a local business directly through my Google Maps app so I can see the website, phone number, and any relevant information around their operations right on my phone.
Take a note of the following:
- Are your phone number, website, and hours of operation correct on your listings sites?
- Is your business name displayed consistently across all these sites?
- Are there relevant pictures and information that would entice a searcher to contact you?
- What do your reviews look like? Are there any that need to be addressed?
Step 3: Check Your Social Pages
Even if your social media pages aren’t showing up in a search for your business (and maybe even more so!), it’s important to see how they look for potential customers or existing customers who may search for you directly on social sites.
Consumers are spending record amounts of time on social media, so if your pages aren’t looking good, you could be missing out.
Make sure your social pages have:
- The correct phone number, website, and business name.
- A high-quality profile and cover photo image. Bonus points for a consistent profile picture (usually your logo) across your sites!
- Information about your business and who you are.
- Regular social posts.
This quick audit is meant to give you a snapshot look at how your business appears online for searchers. Once you have a list of any items that need to be updated, you can start working through those. If everything looks good, then you can start building on your online presence with additional tactics like social ads, YouTube ads, and PPC ads if you’re not already running them.
If you’d like help updating any of these aspects of your web presence or are looking for other ways to get in front of customers right now, we’d love to partner with you! Reach out today.
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