Helpful summary
Overview: We emphasize the significance of a strong digital presence for businesses, detailing how it enables reaching and targeting customers online, especially through SEO.
Why you can trust us: We helped Valheim Server Hosting (VSH) generate $35,000 in revenue by enhancing their digital presence through SEO. This exemplifies our ability to deliver tangible results in digital strategy, making us a reliable source for digital marketing insights.
Why this is important: A robust digital presence is important for reaching thousands of potential clients. Effective SEO and online marketing strategies can significantly boost business growth and revenue growth.
Action points: We advise starting with a well-structured SEO strategy, creating engaging content, and building an online community. Continuously measure and analyze data to refine these strategies.
Further research: Explore more SEO tactics and content marketing strategies to enhance your digital presence. Consider our detailed guide for a comprehensive understanding.
Want to expand your digital presence and get thousands of clients online?
As a content marketing agency focused on acquiring thousands of clients through Google Search and blogging, we’re pretty big on growing online in ways that will get you paying clients.
Here’s a no-bullshit guide on how to meaningfully expand your digital presence and take your online marketing customer acquisition processes to the next level.
Why listen to us?
Many small businesses struggle with turning their digital presence into a client-attracting platform. At Embarque, we've firsthand experience in transforming this challenge into success. For instance, a downloadable software program came to us with dwindling web traffic. We boosted their monthly organic traffic from about 5,000 to over 20,000 in just six months. Our strategy included refining their SEO content, focusing on commercial topics, and strengthening internal and backlink quality.
Our approach not only skyrocketed their traffic but also enhanced their online authority. Through targeted keywords and quality content updates, the client's pages began ranking in less than a day, with a significant increase in referring domains. This success story reflects how we help online businesses leverage their digital presence for rapid traffic and revenue growth, especially through effective SEO strategies.
What does it mean to have a strong digital presence?
A digital presence comprises your total activity on the web.
If you’re launching any type of business today, having a digital presence is a must. Why? It lets you reach and target customers that are looking for you online and helps you build a community based on your product or service.
Think about this. More than half of the world is now online. And even if your business only operates locally, your potential clients within your region searching for you are still in the thousands.
For example, when I search for plumber London on Google, a bunch of plumbing services within that area pop up.
These services are amongst the ones getting the most clients. According to Ahrefs, a search volume tool, this keyword gets around 2,300 monthly searches per month, alone.
The first 3 search results get clicked by almost 1,000 people every month.
In particular, Pimlico Plumbers almost gets 6,500 visits through Google.
Understandably, these plumbing services reach a lot of people just by expanding their digital presence and using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Even if just 1/10 of these 6,500 clicks converts into paying clients, this is still 650 potential clients… every month.
Now, this is just the beginning…
Imagine if you’re an online business, such as an eCommerce platform or a software-as-a-service business.
These businesses can potentially expand their digital presence through SEO to get millions of people to visit their platforms through organic search.
Just look at how much Canva, an easy-to-use graphic design platform, gets in terms of monthly searches.
23.3 million searches!
By now, you’ve hopefully understood the importance of expanding your digital presence to get more clients.
In particular, SEO can give you the boost needed to take your business to the next level.
Steps to expand your digital presence
SEO is a means to an end, not an end to itself. But it’s an important first step. Ultimately, you want your SEO traffic to convert into paying clients. Sometimes, they pay right after discovering you from a Google Search.
Other times, they need time to decide. For the latter, you still need to be present during the decision-making process. More about this later…
Starting on SEO
Essential elements to start your SEO journey
- A website domain. This is your digital address. Your potential clients will visit this website to learn more about your business. You will need to use this to appear on Google for the keywords you want to rank for. When building your digital presence, this is as essential as anything gets. Read this if you want to learn how to build your website.
- Content. You now have a website, great. Now, you need to fill it up with content. You can create content in the form of landing pages or blog posts, and both can serve to target relevant keywords that many people search for every month.
- Backlinks and local listings. Backlinks are links from other relevant websites to yours. The more backlinks you have, the higher chances you have of ranking. Online listings are online entries on your business, such as on Google My Business, Facebook, and Instagram. You need backlinks and online listings to expand on your local and global SEO presence.
Do keyword research and create your content calendar
You’ve now created your website and now have some relevant listings. Now, it’s time to find relevant keywords that are searched by at least more than a hundred people on Google every month.
But how do you do this? If you have the cash to burn, you can use an SEO tool like Ahrefs, which is relatively very expensive, to discover all the relevant keywords to rank for.
But if you’re just beginning in SEO, I don’t recommend this. While SEO is relatively easy to understand, you need specific tactics to find keywords to rank for.
That said, if you’re strapped on cash, you can use Google’s Keyword Planner for free:
Just enter all the relevant keywords that you can think of. And it should show you their monthly search volume as specific ranges:
Here’s Backlinko’s tutorial on how to set up a Keyword Planner account for free.
That said, Keyword Planner is quite rudimentary as a tool for SEO. Firstly, you can’t see how many searches a keyword gets every month, just a wide range of searches, while Ahrefs specifies this number to a certain amount.
At the same time, it also doesn’t indicate how hard it might take to rank for that keyword. There are essentially two main ranking factors: 1. Quality of your content and 2. backlinks. Ahrefs shows how many backlinks you need to rank for that keyword.
As for content quality? That’s where it gets a little bit tricky. As a good rule of thumb, you want to have more in-depth content than most of the top 10 pages ranking for that keyword.
Once you have your keywords, it’s now time to create your SEO content calendar. You should do this as part of your content strategy to create SEO blog posts and landing pages to rank for these relevant keywords.
Feeling overwhelmed? Creating an SEO strategy is not hard, but it can involve more steps than you realize.
As an SEO content marketing agency, Embarque offers an SEO audit that helps you target relevant keywords and rank for them using great SEO blog posts. We can also write darn good SEO content for your niche.
Building an online community to make sure that people remember your brand
You’ve created a content calendar based on relevant SEO keywords. Now, it’s time to build your community behind your brand. This is the next step to expanding your digital presence and making sure that people remember you online.
Create relevant content for your ideal clients
Figuring out the right keywords to rank for is just half the battle. You also need to create great content through blog posts and landing pages, and to make sure that what you produce is relevant to your online community.
But how do you do this? Well, think about who your ideal target clients are and make sure that the content you make caters to their interests. Read our blog post on using editorial content for your SEO strategy to learn how to do this more effectively..
Figure out where your clients hang out online
Create a list of websites that also attract similar clients and learn how they create their online community. Figure out who the major influencers on social media for your niche are and see how you can catch their attention or their followers’. Find a way to engage with these potential clients and to expand your digital presence and authority within that community.
Build a presence on social media
Of course, you need to make sure that people can find you on social media. One thing about social media is that it requires shorter forms of content than on your website and blog.
Therefore, what you can do here is to repurpose your blog content into a visual for Instagram or even a Facebook caption.
While content repurposing is a good way to cut costs (as you’d be sharing the same types of content), with this, you can also create integrated marketing campaigns on the same content pieces.
A word of caution, though. People that you get on social media are not as intent-focused on your business as those who find you through organic search, so you might not get as actionable prospects as you would through SEO.
And finally, social media is, frankly, a bit saturated nowadays. So do keep these things in mind if you don’t get the results that you might have wanted. Expanding your digital presence, after all, is not just having an account on Facebook and hoping that they will come! You need to hustle hard and make your digital presence known.
Create an emailing list
Make sure that you have email subscription boxes and pop-ups on your website and other relevant places to acquire customers. After all, for every $1 invested in email marketing, you get a return of over $33, according to many studies.
This is essentially your secret weapon to retain people who might need time to decide on whether to purchase your offering. If you’re sending out regular emails, they’ll continue to remember who you are and might convert at a later date.
In terms of growing your digital presence, having a mailing list is important. Your mailing list provides you with an opportunity to get the attention of your subscribers and turn them into returning clients.
Tell your existing clients to follow you online
Of course, expanding your digital presence also involves encouraging clients you might have acquired offline to interact with you online. This is especially important if you have happy clients and want to further your professional relationship with them through online community building.
Need help with expanding your digital presence?
Congrats! You’ve now learned high-level tactics required to expand your digital presence and acquire new types of customers who are looking for your business online.
Growing online is never easy. But these tips should help you grow your digital presence in meaningful ways, without losing sight of the larger picture of getting clients.
Do you want to discuss anything about this blog post? Or do you need help with your SEO, content, or blogging strategy? While these things are relatively simple, you may need the help of an expert to get you on the right track. If so, don’t hesitate to email me: julian@embarque.io
Thanks for reading.