What is Online Visibility and Why Does it Matter?

Last month, we talked fairly extensively about the importance of brand credibility and ensuring that your business delivers what it says it’s going to. In focusing on credibility, encouraging reviews, and other brand-building activities, we were also helping your brand do something else equally important: build your brand’s online visibility. 

In this central piece to our discussion on online visibility, we’re going to talk at length about what online visibility is as well as how to maintain and build your visibility over time. 

More importantly, we’re going to dig into why it’s an important marketing metric to pay attention to given the current economic conditions across all industries. 

Ensuring Visibility of Your Brand Across The Web

At a foundational level, online visibility is something all businesses strive for in the modern online era. Regardless of the amazing website you’ve built, if it’s not properly optimized or marketed in the right places, your target audience will never learn that your brand exists. In that sense, businesses have two distinct paths to visibility: one via technical methods, and the other route via intentional activities and behaviors taken online on websites and across industry-specific platforms and niche outlets.  

SEO-Focused Approaches to Visibility

It’s almost impossible to estimate how many total searches occur across all major search engines each year, but it’s important to start this conversation knowing that over the course of the year, Google is visited upwards of more than 62 billion times, and each day those users are performing 3.5 billion searches. When it comes to searching for a product or service, almost half of those searches start on Google, so it’s clear that it’s important to understand how Google’s algorithms work. 

To put that into action across your digital media and online footprint, you’ll need to either invest in training someone on your marketing team, hire a trained search engine optimization professional, or partner with a managed online marketing services provider. 

In any of these three situations, your goal will be to ensure your website is optimized both technically and in regards to your content for keywords relevant to your brand and industry in order to attract the attention of Google’s search algorithms. 

You also have to work with your marketing solutions provider to create an inbound marketing funnel with targeted landing pages. Your website content, social media platforms, and off-site content should all then be optimized to direct traffic to the appropriate product or service landing pages, helping to build traffic and convert visitors into income-generating long-term clients. 

Building Visibility Through Social Proof Without SEO

Much of the work in the previous section is built around technical SEO methods designed to be attractive to Google’s search algorithms. Because of the sheer volume of searches and the amount of competition in the market, strategic keywords and phrases integrated throughout the content and the technical infrastructure of the website aren’t the only methods for generating site traffic. 

Increasing visibility without depending on SEO and SERP performance depends upon social proof. Ultimately, non-SEO methods require others to direct the attention of various audiences towards your brand. Whether they are social influencers, other professionals in the industry, or satisfied customers, everyone interacting with social media has access to a potential client base that can only be reached through relationship building and social influence. 

Why It’s Important to Maximize Visibility Online In the Current Economy

When the COVID-19 pandemic was officially recognized in March 2020, the United States economy was ravaged by quarantines, stay-at-home orders, and entire industry segments having to choose to either shut down entirely or operate at a loss for months at a time. In the months following the Summer of 2020, many businesses have slowly recovered, but overall, the United States economy has forced them to decrease their marketing budgets across the last 10 months by 24% or more. 

In response, marketing and advertising agencies started to identify alternative marketing strategies based on the drastically modified consumer behavior caused by the pandemic. With consumers laser-focused on identifying businesses they could trust to deliver on claims of product and service quality, they also began to place enormous importance on businesses seen to be acting in support of employees and the local community. 

To capture more of the market share, businesses have to not only focus on this brand credibility, but also on ensuring that their messaging is reaching their target audience by maximizing online visibility. This is not only extremely important in the short-term to improve a business’ chances of recovery, but also for long-term marketing strategies focused on remaining top-of-mind with consumers. 

UpCity Opens the Door to B2B Partnerships That Help Your Brand Create A Strategy For Visibility You Can Get Behind

If potential customers can’t find your company online, then your chances of recovering from the pandemic are slim. That’s why UpCity wants to help you connect with B2B providers who will be focused on creating that vision with you. 

Working with other experienced service providers will in turn help potential customers find your site organically or through SEO means. Over time, your brand will grow and your online community will work to show their support of your brand, providing your business with a stronger brand reputation and visibility, until eventually, you outshine the competition in a landscape where it’s hard to see businesses operating in the dark of obscurity.