Has your website been failing to net your desired results? Perhaps you’ve been considering a website overhaul to rejuvenate your brand, boost engagement and increase conversions. This can be an effective strategy, however it is by no means an instant solution. Choosing a theme, reviewing wireframes, finding images, developing new content, integrating CRM and backend… it’s a lot! It can also be costly and can take months to complete.
So, how might you successfully revitalize your brand without spending thousands of dollars or taking months constructing a new website? Today we wanted to share 3 tactics we use with our clients for a quick, easy to execute brand refresh that can enhance your business and even support new website development.
1. Online Listings – Microsites For Your Business
When we refer to “online listings”, we mean the free business profiles that your business can take advantage of across the digital ecosystem. This includes sites like Google My Business (GMB), Yelp, Bing, Apple Maps, and many more search engines, online directories, social platforms and Nav applications. For customers searching for your business, GMB or other free online listings will often be the first stop they make, even before they visit your website. Just by having a GMB listing that shows up in local searches, businesses are 70% more likely to attract potential customers for in-store location visits (LocaliQ).
Image via LocaliQ
Think of your GMB profile and other online listings as microsites. Listings have evolved over the past several years – whereas they used to hold limited information, typically only a business name, address and phone number, today many online listing sites offer the opportunity to utilize over 70+ fields. When used properly, listings contain all of your most relevant business information – from your phone number and address to your business logo and other photos, special offers, and promotions. Customers can get much of the information that they need about your business without ever visiting your website. Your online listings can drive traffic to your business just as effectively, if not more effectively, than your website!
Your online listings are also a great place to test out new content, such as a new tagline, value proposition, special offers, and more. The insights that you gain from the changes to your profiles can actually help you when you do decide to go for the full website overhaul.
2. Monitor Reviews For Consumer Insights
Monitoring and responding to your reviews is an important step towards earning your customers’ trust. In fact, as many as 91% of adults aged 18 to 34 trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations (Qualtrics). Answering your customers’ questions shows prospects that you are attentive to customer needs, and highlights your brand as caring and vigilant.
Monitoring your business’ reputation gives insight into customer sentiment and highlights the questions consumers are asking about your products and services. Armed with this knowledge, you can better tailor content for your profiles and website to maximize user experience and engagement.
3. Improve SEO
Improving SEO performance is a key consideration of most website redesigns. Once again, we can deploy a shortcut by utilizing Online Listings to improve SEO. Fully developed online listings enhance your SEO by integrating keywords into your profiles that promote your business to appear in long-tail searches.
Consumers are increasingly using long-tail searches to locate businesses, and when you incorporate all of your business details into your online profiles (location, hours, category, reviews, and more), your business becomes more relevant to these search queries. Take a look at the example below showing how robust online listing info is pulled into search results.
Additionally, Google considers information consistency to be a high priority when determining your business’ search ranking. This means that it is crucial to ensure that your business information is consistent across all of your online listings in order to rank higher on Google results.
Thinking of overhauling your website? Improving your online presence could be a viable and time efficient alternative or even a valuable incubator to inform your upcoming website redesign. If you would like more information on DSG’s Online Presence Program please reach out to us for a custom proposal!
