Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Five Ways to Enhance the Visibility of your Local Business


If you own a website and realize that it is your gateway to make your business bigger and better then you really need to work on improving the visibility of your website. If this is done, it will automatically enhance the visibility of your local business. Although some serious and expensive strategies could be adopted, there are other easy ways too and let’s look at five ways that will help you achieve this.

Take advantage of Google Maps
Google Maps is a popular tool and it is available for mobile platforms too. Although the tool is designed for finding your way through suburbs, it is great for mining information about local businesses too. Listing your business on Google Maps is easy and the best part is that it is free. When someone searches for or navigates to a particular area, Google lists the local businesses in that particular area and drops a pin on the geographical location too. By briefing about your business and the services you offer, you can improve the visibility and attract customers.

Getting listed on local directories
Local directories are a great way to improve the visibility of your business. Directories usually have a high page rank and once listed, there is a good chance that your business will come up in search results. It is believed that more than one third of the businesses these days are generated through online listings. That is a huge number and it is wise to take advantage of it. Moreover, directories also have reviews written by customers, so keep an eye on what is being said about your business. Just like Google Maps, getting your business listed on directories is also free in most cases.

The power of social media
If anything is certain, then social media is here to stay. Most of the social media sites are free and give you the option to create profiles for your business. By sharing information about offers and services, you can get the word out and reach a large number of people. You can also consider giving out special promotions and coupons to those who actively share information about your business. Social media platforms are easy to set up and moderate. By effectively using the power of social media, you can generate potential customers and improve the visibility of you business

Print the URL of your website
Consider printing the address of your website on your products, shopping bags and wrappers. This might not mean a lot now, but will help you a lot on the run. Moreover, printing the website’s address on your products improves the credibility and helps you in getting the word out.

Optimize your website for search engines
As we discussed earlier, your website is a gateway to your business. By optimizing your site, you can drastically improve the visibility. There are a lot of professional services whom you can approach to get this done. Although this is slow process, it is very effective on the long run.

Although there are a lot of other ways to improve the visibility of your local business, these five are proven ways.

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