Your digital presence is how online users view you online. It’s what people enter into search engines to find you or your business. You are probably found in some locations you didn’t even know about.
Since your potential customers or target audience is online, they are looking for solutions to whatever problems they may be experiencing. You want to reach them, right?
Make sure your About page or Contact page has everything about your business accurate so that people can reach you when they are ready to. They need to know the who, what, where, why, and how about your business to see what kind of solutions you offer or how you can help them.
A Digital Presence Defined
Your digital presence refers to how you and your business appear to other people online – your online presence. It’s how other people see you, including the information they discover when they search for you or your business on the Internet.
Unfortunately, you cannot control all of the information that’s out there, but you can control more of it than you probably think! In fact, it should be your goal to manage your digital presence to the best of your ability and take control of as much of it as you can. You want it to be consistent and accurate across all platforms.
Your digital presence is found everywhere, including your website and blog posts, your social media profiles, maps, directory listing, online reviews, and digital ads. If you have an email marketing strategy going on, subscribers will contact you based on the contact information on your website. If this information is incorrect, they won’t be able to get in touch with you.
How Your Digital Information Appears on the Internet
Unfortunately, you just can’t control all of the information that’s posted on the Internet about you. Your business or business owner information is probably listed on the Internet somewhere, whether you want it out there or not. After all, there are hundreds of different directory websites out there, and they will scrap the Internet for your business information and list it as they find it.
Often, the information that is floating around out there about you is going to be listed on ad pages. This may sound like a benefit rather than a hindrance, but those who list your information as they see fit aren’t doing it out of the kindness of their hearts. They actually do it as a means to increase their profits.
They sell advertisements on the pages that have your listing information on them. This is not always a bad thing, though. In looking at things from their point of view, they want to get your listing information and report it swiftly, so they can obtain more pages with listings, which gives them the opportunity to have even more advertisements out there.
For digital or content marketers who list your information for you, their goal is to list your information as quickly and easily as possible. They aren’t typically going to check out your address, phone number, and the spelling of your business name, so if that information is incorrect out there, it’s probably incorrect everywhere.
Listing sites typically don’t care about this and won’t fix your information (at least not immediately) to make it accurate. Because of this, you need to pay close attention to how they list your information and fix it in the areas that you are able to. After all, you should want your listing to be correct, right?
However, you just have to also realize that you cannot control everything that’s out there about you. This is actually a fact that you must accept, but it shouldn’t hinder your efforts to reach your target audience. After all, there are ways to check out what the Internet is saying about you, and there are things you can do to improve how you appear to other people.
The Importance of Managing Your Digital Presence
Having the correct information on the Internet is a crucial element to both Google and SEO purposes. If you have the same information across the board on multiple websites, Google will reward you by placing you higher on the search engine results page.
This is because you have earned a higher SEO ranking. This means you must have exactly the same information across all websites. For example, if you list your address as:
Angry Ape Creative
1075 Broad Ripple Ave. #221
Indianapolis, IN 46220
You need it listed exactly like that in every place that lists your company information. Note that “Avenue” is not spelled out. To achieve a consistent listing across the Internet, you need to use “Ave.” every time your address is listed and not have some of your listings say “Avenue” or “Ave.”
So, why is this all so important? You might be thinking, “Aren’t all listings about my company and me a good thing?” They all give you a chance at exposure, which should be what your marketing goals are centered around. You should hope that people find you when doing searches on the Internet.
There are actually a couple of reasons that you should want to ensure your information is correct on the Internet. First, you want people to be able to find your business and know how to contact you. Having the wrong phone number or business name won’t help your traffic, because people won’t be able to get a hold of you, which is usually your ultimate goal – to gain more customers.
The second reason you want to make sure your digital presence is seen as correct is because of Google. The search engine expects you to have accurate, consistent information. In other words, Google wants to see your business information in exactly the same way on multiple sites. If you use “Avenue” in the above example, it should be listed that way across the entire Internet.
How You Can Check Out Your Digital Presence Online
Did you know that you can actually check out what the Internet says about you and your business? In fact, that should be part of your marketing strategy – to see what’s out there when people find you through their search results. This is huge because it gives you a chance to better control your digital presence and analyze, making adjustments as needed, how people are finding you.
Check the health of your online business information with this listing scan. You can instantly see the most critical information about you and your small business, as it appears on Google, Yelp, Facebook, maps, applications, search engines, and any directories you are listed in.
When you get to the How is Your Business Listed? form, you simply need to enter your country, business name, address, and telephone number. The process takes less than a minute to process your information, and you can easily see what dozens of websites are saying about you.
Another way that you can make sure your information is the same (and is accurate) across the board on all websites is to use a service like Yext, which allows you to add your business information and publish it in the right way across multiple websites.
If you need to change your address or phone number, this website can be very useful. It makes quicker work of a tedious process. There are times when your business information is randomly changed across the board. Services like Yext help in preventing that from happening.
Since the process is so easy, you should implement this step as part of your marketing campaigns. After all, don’t you want an easy way to see what the Internet is saying about you?
To Sum It All Up
Are you ready to check out what’s going on with your digital presence today? While these tools are handy, you may wish to work with a digital marketing expert. Angry Ape Creative can help manage your listings for you.
Sometimes, when deciding whether to hire someone to do something, you have to see if it makes sense to do so. Think about the amount of work you would need to do to manage all of the listings of your business online. Wouldn’t you like to know about your complete digital presence, as featured all over the Internet? Angry Ape can assist you in discovering areas that need improvement, like your SEO or digital presence.
Contact Angry Ape to help you with managing your digital presence. After all, is it really worth your time to manually manage all your online listings? Let Angry Ape Creative do all of the work for you; that way, you can relax, knowing that you are in good hands!people
Jay Bilunas is a graphic designer and marketing consultant. He loves helping small businesses succeed with great marketing and design. He also teaches and tries to help up and coming designers.
-300x158.png)
