Why Online Visibility Isn’t ALL About SERP Performance

You’d be hard-pressed to find someone working as a service provider or retailer who doesn’t understand the important role played by search engines in building and sustaining business. 

But are we putting too much importance on properly optimizing the content and keywords built into our web pages? Are we overthinking the process of building websites that will capture the attention of Google’s complex algorithms? 

Are we putting too much faith in the Internet’s most-visited website? 

There’s no arguing that appearing on the front page of Google search results for relevant keywords in your niche is one of the best ways to improve your brand visibility; more than 3.5 billion searches are performed on the platform daily. That being said, there are other approaches your marketing team can take to drive traffic to your website and increase your online visibility.

Leave an Intentional Trail Back to Your Brand

Notice above that we aren’t looking to build a trail back to your website. The goal of this approach is to utilize various avenues of communication and content distribution across the entirety of your online digital real estate to get consumers and potential clients clicking on links that belong to you. 

The most important aspect of this approach is that you know the niche or niches that are important to your brand and work within those niche settings. This approach is designed to set interested consumers on a path that lands them within your inbound marketing infrastructure without going directly through a search engine. If your inbound marketing infrastructure is the trap, then we’re testing out different kinds of bait to see what brings them looking in the first place.  

Influencers Help Your Audience Find You

Talking to others within the same industry allows you to create content quickly; the topics are already familiar and within the wheelhouse of your content creators. They also come with an existing community of followers. 

By creating powerful and engaging content around that person’s work, and then linking to their social channels as well as your own, you’ve then created a situation where your traffic will start to be generated by searches for their brand or service. Readers will see that you’re supporting the vision of someone they support, and then become interested in your brand in turn.

As a point of synergy with those working in the same niche, it’s appropriate to also share your links and content about them and their work, and ask that they share those links back to your content with their audiences. This becomes a win for both parties, as sharing content about themselves on other platforms with their audience provides those individuals or companies with an increase in brand visibility and credibility, and by featuring known community voices in your own niche, you’ve done the same. 

Increase Online Visibility With a Well-Designed Signature and Social Media Profile

If you’re struggling (like every other business owner right now) to increase sales volume and recover from the initial decline of the COVID-19 outbreak, then you’ve likely been sending 20%-65% more marketing emails than you did in the first quarter of 2020. Each of those emails is a chance for you to continue building brand awareness and for the recipient to be guided via a powerfully designed signature and embedded call-to-action back to your inbound marketing apparatus. 

You’re also likely posting quite a bit across social media platforms and responding to more customer inquiries. Every single post or private message is a chance for visitors to click on your profile to learn more about you. Designing your social media profile with a similarly targeted call-to-action and a specific link is a free opportunity to drive traffic without relying upon a search engine or keywords. For some businesses, social media visibility can be just as important as visibility in SERPs.

You’ll also find that being more active in the community on niche websites and industry-standard discussion boards can be an extremely effective method for building social proof and online credibility for not only yourself but for your brand as well. 

As with your signature or profile above, you’ll want to make sure every forum you contribute to includes some form of signature similarly formatted to your email signature with an effective call-to-action. As users discuss industry-specific issues or challenges with you and they find that your answers provide value or help to others, they will both click on your link and possibly share it with others who might be potential clients. 

Leverage Video Marketing

Video is an extremely powerful driver for traffic and brand engagement, but how do you leverage video without relying on a search engine? 

The first step of this dance is to create your own YouTube channel and start posting high-quality videos of product reviews, customer educational material, and other content that builds your credibility. Each video description should include the appropriate call-to-action leading viewers back to the appropriate landing pages. Once you’ve done the groundwork and laid the bait, it’s time to make sure your audience knows the bait is there?

How do you get them coming from far and wide? You go to the places where they are already watching video content: niche and industry influencers. 

Identify the most viewed and popular video content creators whose viewership overlaps with your target audience, and work out a deal with them to feature your products or services in their own videos. As the audience is already looking to the influencer for social proof and to establish credibility, they won’t hesitate to follow the links back to your own YouTube content, where your well-designed CTA will do the rest of the work. 

Leverage Guest Posting for Maximum Impact

Well-written and informative blog content that solves consumer problems is one of the strongest drivers of online traffic. Similar to the strategies above of relying on interviews and video content to drive traffic back to your site, hosting guest posts and offering to guest post on other sites is a highly effective method of driving traffic. 

To be clear, your guest poster does have to follow standard search engine optimization best practices, and you have to do the same. The key though, is that instead of relying upon search engines to pick up the well-written content, you’re relying on backlinks and sharing of the posts across social media and within personal networks to generate inbound site traffic to appropriate landing pages. 

Infographics Are Worth Roughly 1,500 Words Of Influencer Content

With the amount of quality content constantly being generated by online marketers, we’re always looking for facts and figures that we can quickly and easily incorporate into our work. Just like our readers, there are questions that we need answers to quickly, and with built-in references that we can ourselves easily link back to in order to provide weight and validity to what we’ve written. 

There’s nothing that works quite as well for this as a well-designed infographic. 

Why? Because while an infographic may not carry the conversion power of a well-shot video, infographics outperform blog posts and text-based landing pages. Infographics also provide a very easily shareable piece of content that can have an immense amount of velocity across the web as it gets shared and re-shared, all the while with a link pointing back to your site.  

Build Organically With UpCity’s B2B Network

The best way to build site traffic without relying on SEO and traffic from SERPs is to have a strong network and a well-designed plan for interacting with that network. 

UpCity’s community of B2B service providers understands the need for identifying opportunities for synergy and cross-posting in order to generate as much visibility as possible. Learn more about who you can connect with and identify more opportunities to organically build your brand through the partnerships made possible on the platform.