Gone are the days of creating a website and leaving it as is. With the search engines being as sophisticated as they are
today and online searches continuing to grow, actively managing your website and increasing its authority online is necessary in today’s business climate.
You need to take care of your website. Just like you would with your health or fitness, you need to actively manage your website so that it performs well and looks good at the same time. That’s the only way to get the top-notch results you’re looking for. Of course, that is more easily said than done.
So, what are some ways to get started on building your website’s authority with social media and SEO?
Let’s use a “social media audit” as a starting point. First, examine your social media use. Some questions to ask yourself are:
- What social media sites are we on?
- How often do we use them?
- Are these good social media venues for us to be using?
- If we are on social media sites, are we actively monitoring our brand mentions and reputation?
These are a few of the important questions you need to make sure you ask yourself about your social media presence, because you could be doing more harm than good, and not even know it!
Once you are able to answer these questions, it’s time to use that information to come up with a social media strategy. A social media strategy is your road map to how you are going to engage in social media and measure your goals over time. When you utilize social media as a marketing channel and customer relationship/reputation management tool, you expose your business and make it more social and transparent. Another benefit of using social media is to drive traffic to your website. Driving targeted traffic to your website is an important part of the conversion funnel. Website traffic is just traffic, but targeted website traffic leads to conversions.
How can SEO help build my website’s authority?
Search engine optimization or “SEO” is the act of making your website more visible to search engines. SEO is necessary in order to be visible online and stay competitive. Search engine optimization involves many things; keyword research, link building, on-site and off-website analysis, and technical website issues.
Only when you develop an SEO strategy, implement it, and actively track and benchmark your results and your goals, will you be successful in your search engine optimization endeavors!
When you master SEO for your website, you build quality, targeted traffic that will convert. SEO can be applied to your social media profiles as well. Social media optimization or “SMO” is SEO for your social media profiles. If you pay attention to your competitors (like you should), and you create a great strategy that others are sure to notice, you will slowly start seeing your competitors change their tactics to compete with yours.
Once you get to that point, you know that you’re an authority in your market. As for being an authority in the search engines such as Google, that takes a little more work. Google recognizes websites as an authority when they have a large number of quality links pointing to it. When you have properly crafted and implemented a link building strategy, Google will give your website more weight in the search engines over your competitors. The more links you build, the stronger your website becomes, and therefore the more authority you have.
What are some tactics you have used to build your online presence? Did some work better than others? Don’t have any clue? Leave a message below!