These days, the average small business sets aside at least $75,000 a year to spend on digital marketing. While this number might be a drop in the bucket for a larger company, most businesses have to try to draw traffic to their site in different ways.

Search engine optimization is the best way to build up a more robust web presence and attract people interested in your products and services.

Here’s what you need to start doing to improve your web presence.

Content Matters

When you’re trying to build your online web presence, you need to do more than to just promote yourself or try to sell something. You need to be building an online community. You do that by creating consistently valuable content.

No matter the format, whether ebooks, seminars, podcasts, or videos, it needs to be essential to your customers.

Start by putting together a content creation plan for your company. Everyone needs to know what your brand voice is, who your audience is, and the style or attitude that you have. This ensures that all of your content is consistent.

Ultimately, you want to grow with each new piece of content. That requires you to gain credibility and authority within your industry. The only way that you’ll grow is if you can prove to people that you have great ideas ante there’s a reason why you’re so successful.

You should tell a story with each piece of content. Share with your customers why you love your company and why you love to provide products and services to them.

Teach them new things about you or your business. If they can find a new way to use or appreciate your products and services, they might just engage more often.

Social Media Matters

Every company needs to have social media profiles on every channel. They also need to be understood as having different purposes and requiring different levels of engagement.

Some people take the tactic of being everywhere all the time. It’s most important that you pick just two or three channels to be on and make sure those are the top three for your customers. Managing them can easily become a full-time job, so be aware of the demands.

Medium, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are great ways to share your content. However, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook get some of the highest levels of engagement. Even if you’re on every channel, make sure to focus on regularly updating two or three every week.

The marketing tools on social media are second to none. You can target your audience directly and really increase traffic back to your site easily.

Build Some Relationships

Making an online community is vital. You want the people who appreciate products and services like yours to find one another.

There’s also plenty you could learn from your own engagement.

Look for groups or online communities who share the interests that your company shares and join them. The people you find there aren’t there to be pitched or sold to, but this is a great way for you to conduct some research around your products and services.

Get involved in the conversations. If you have some expertise that might be valuable in answering a question, add it. People will see that you sincerely care about the community and start following you.

Leave one comment every day for a few weeks and you’ll start to see yourself getting more traffic. After a few weeks, you might be able to leave some links of your own when they answer a question in context.

Connect With Existing Brands

One of the best ways to expand your network is by connecting with existing brands who are already doing work in your industry. While you might be in slight competition with some, there are others that you could collaborate with.

Consider putting together videos, guest posting, or recording a podcast together. You could add a lot of important information that your customers will appreciate.

Be strategic when you’re asking to write a guest post or be on someone else’s podcast. First, it has to be valuable to them. Secondly, don’t expect to be there just to promote yourself.

Other companies want to have quality content as well. IF you’re showing up to be a guest, remember to maintain some etiquette as a guest. Get your name out there but don’t take over their channel on behalf of your own interests.

Continue Optimizing and Improving

Just because a link or a blog has been posted doesn’t mean that its life is over. The links that you included might go dead over time. The content might have expired dates in it.

It’s important that you try to make all of your content as evergreen as possible. While data and information collected a year ago isn’t suddenly irrelevant, it always feels like there should be something more current.

Keywords and algorithms change over time as well. You need to make sure that you’re using the latest keywords, even in your old articles. Every post could stand to be optimized or rehashed over time, so make sure to carve out some time to do that.

Check out the work that Falcon Digital Marketing is doing to keep content evergreen.

Web Presence is a Constant Struggle

Unlike any other aspect of digital marketing, your web presence is what matters the most to new and old customers alike. The more that people see your name and your company’s impact, the more that they’ll trust you over time.

If you’re looking to bring your marketing to the next level, check out our guide for some apps you should be using right now.