by Ausscene Business Directory on 16-12-2016 in Marketing Follow Post

From food recipes to locating a trusted plumber near you, Google has become the first place we go to look for any information we require. Gone are the days when creating an online presence for your business was a shrewd business move, now it’s a necessity for survival!

It may seem like a humongous task promoting your business online, but when you look at the benefits you will gain, the effort is justified. Every day millions of people search online for a business like yours – people who can, quite easily, be converted into customers.

And you don’t have to focus on the whole internet to reap these benefits, with Google accounting for about 65% of all web searches, you can just focus on one search engine.

An edge for small businesses

Google enables your business to share a platform with big global brands giving you an equal opportunity to compete for customers. And unlike other forms of advertising such as mainstream media, you don’t have to pay a tonne for it. As a small business, Google is your best friend when it comes to promoting your company.

By optimising your website to rank well on Google’s search result pages (SERPs), you can be able to increase traffic to your website and as a result increase business. But often businesses will forget that other than adding fresh, engaging and relevant content to their sites and building links, there are other aspects of search results that need to be optimised for.

In this post, we shall be looking at the ways you can make your business visible in Google’s blended results by not just optimising for text, but other aspects of search too. These aspects include:

Videos. These appear both in the main search page and in Video search. Add relevant videos to your site and properly index them for Google to crawl them. Every video embedded on your site should have a title, description, and thumbnail. You can use schema markup or video sitemaps to help Google navigate your videos for indexing. News. To improve your overall ranking, you also need to get your content in the news list on Google. Include news stories relevant to your field on your site that will not only provide information to visitors but also help you attract them to your website. Maps. Customers will often do a local search to look for information such as the address of a business and opening hours before visiting a store. Fill your Google maps information accurately and ensure that the information provided is uniform across all other directories for better local results ranking. Images. To rank well on the images list of Google search, you will need to include unique images to your site. Take photos of your products and use them to complement the text on your website. Also, ensure that they are crawlable by Google by creating an image sitemap. Blogs. Adding a blog section to your website is a great way to improve your ranking on Google and improving the visibility of your business. Post stories related to your industry with useful information on related issues.

Promoting your business on Google can give you an edge over your competition without costing you a tremendous amount of money. Use the above tactics to improve your business’ visibility on Google.