Are you looking to set up your online presence in a relatively short amount of time? For those of you who want some fast online results, there are some things you can do on your own. Of course, you can have even better success if you have a web design pro you work with and an SEO consultant working on your long-term online presence, but these do-it-yourself web presence tips will establish a firm foundation on which you and they can build. Plus, your results will be virtually instantaneous because of the way the Internet works.

For starters, it’s important to understand that what you want to concentrate on are your localized
listings. When you have a short amount of time—say one weekend for example—you want to focus on the most important aspects of your business. For most, this means localized and targeted marketing towards current and new clients.

Tips from a Top Salt Lake City SEO Consultant and Utah Web Design Professional

The best places to accomplish this feat are Google+ Local, Bing Local, Yelp, Facebook Graph Search, and Yahoo Local. These sites are all set up to help optimize your local listings so it’s important you familiarize yourself with each just a little. Of course, the beauty about these sites is that they are probably already set up for you, albeit minimally. When other websites and the people of the Internet post information about your business—even if you don’t realize they it, they do—these localized engines glean the information to compile a more complete database. What this means is that whether you know it or not, there are sites out there with information about you. The best way to set up your online presence in a weekend is to take control of these sites and manipulate the data that is fueling them.

Here’s how:

• Standardize your Business’s Name, Address, Phone Number and General Information.

  The way that local search engines like Google and Bing gather information about you is they gather it from a plethora of sources. This is done to provide the most robust data compilation to avoid misinformation on the web. This primary information is called the NAP (Name, Address, Phone) and to avoid mistakes, you need to ensure all of your NAP info is standardized across the boards. To do this, simply make sure that your website’s NAP info matches your Yellow Pages listings, your chamber-of-commerce listings, your online directories and anywhere else that you can control. Keep all your phone numbers written the same, for example leaving off the 1- before the area code or using parenthesis for the area code or just using a dash. For addresses, ensure that they are all the same, for example using St. versus Street or West versus W. in the address.

• Key in On Geo-Centric Modifiers

  Next, go through your website and other information that you can manipulate and make sure there are geo-centric modifiers throughout. This means placing neighborhood names, street names, zip codes and even landmarks throughout. When many people perform local searches, they will often remember things that matter to them, not particularly what you might list your business as. For instance, they may remember the name of the cross street but not the physical address—you’ll want to include that in your website somewhere so search engines can pick up on it. Or perhaps you’re near a mall and someone saw your office in passing and is now searching for “dentist near Woodbury mall”. You want to show up in local searches for that.

• Claim and Optimize Your Google My Business Page.

  Finally, one of the easiest ways to set up your online presence is to claim your Google My Business page. This is one of the first things that I recommend as will most healthcare SEO consultants. When search engines see that a page is claimed by the business owner, they have greater confidence in the information displayed from that page and thus, rank you higher in local searches. This is because the search engine is confident that your business is active and the content is current. Choose a great, eye-catching photo to use across the boards and then do the same for your listings in Yahoo! Local, Bing Local, and Google Places. Then, fill out these pages with as much information about your business as you can.

Next Steps in Establishing Your Online Presence

Of course, this is just the start, but is a great business booster nonetheless. To take your small business to the next level, you’ll want to hire a professional dental SEO Consultant to ensure that it’s optimized for maximum traffic and results.

If you’d rather not do it or you’ve done all you can, then contact me and find out how easy and hassle free setting up your online presence can be.