5 Key Steps To Getting Your Home Business Found Online
With over 28 million small businesses in the U.S. - more than 52% of these small businesses are home based, according to the Small Business Administration
If you are considering or are in the process of starting a business from home, it’s crucial to get your business found online in order to set yourself up for success.
Related: Build an Online Business Strategy for Long-Term Revenue Growth
Here are five key steps to follow when getting your home business online.
1. Claim Free Online Listings
Google is the main business listing you need to claim first. I say “claim,” because Google usually knows about a business that’s been around for a while. But if you’re just starting out, you’ll need to create new listings.
Other listings you should claim or create include: Bing, Yahoo, Yelp, Yellowpages, Whitepages, Four Square, Trip Advisor, and so many more. It never hurts to add your business to a business listing site. They may not get a ton of traffic, but it’s still free promotion and link-building, which we’ll talk about later.
It’s critical to your online success that you make sure you have your accurate information out there for people to find and that you have the ability to update that information if necessary.
2. Create a Keyword Rich Website
Creating a website is easier than ever now. There are risks and rewards with every level of website you could choose - a free website online, an inexpensive website from a friend, or a high-dollar website from a professional web development company.
The important thing is that you look into all of your options and choose what’s right for your business. Having a spot online is like having a storefront - you want it to be welcoming, professional & attractive.
Your website needs to focus your audience on what they’re looking for. It needs to have content related to the types of things they will be interested in. Most importantly, it needs to have selected keyword-phrases repeated throughout the site to help the search engines know what the site is all about.
Look into meta tags, creating keyword rich content, keyword research, and other SEO strategies to make sure you stay on top of your game - or if you can afford it, hire an SEO specialist to take the brunt of the work and make recommendations.
3. Set Up Social Media Accounts
It’s imperative for your business to be on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Youtube & other social media sites. You may not feel like it’s a necessity for your business, but it is.
You don’t need to actively update every single one of these many accounts, but you do need to try them all and see what’s best for you, and then focus on growing that account.
You may not have a lot of followers or any very good content to share right now, but the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll have a chance of getting there. Social media gives you the opportunity to share links to your website, share news about your business, connect with customer’s, earn new customer for free and advertise for cheap.
It’s crucial to being found online that your home business at the very least has a profile with some information about the business, some photos, a link to your website and a phone number.
4. Link-Sharing & External Link-Building
Sharing your links on social media and on other websites & forums is important to getting your home business found online because links are a major factor in how Google ranks Web pages. According to Google, "In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages."
Getting external pages to link to a page on your website is huge in search engine optimization (SEO). Building links can be difficult and very time-consuming - so it’s important that you do some research into best practices before getting started so that you don’t waste your time.
There are several different link building strategies used to get external websites to link to yours:
- Content Creation & Promotion - Create compelling content that people will want to reference and link to, and tell people about it.
- Submissions - Submit your news to press releases, submit your site to directories, etc.
- Reviews & Mentions - Put your product, service, or site in front of influential bloggers.
- Links from Friends & Partners - Get people you know and people you work with to link to your site
The biggest thing to note when putting your time into link building is this: A link from an authoratative website like the New York Times will help your website out far better than a link from a newly built website. That’s not to say those links aren’t important - just know where to focus your time.
5. Intelligent Internal Link Building
Building content on your site is one of the best and simplest ways to be sure to be found online. You want to be careful here, though, not to go crazy creating content that no one cares about. Bad content can have a negative effect on your search results.
But good content can change everything.
When you create a new page, blog post, contact form, product, etc - you need to make sure to build multiple links to it from other pages of your website - not only so your visitors can easily find it, but also for search-engine optimization (SEO).
The key to intelligent internal link building is keyword research. You want to link pages using targeted keywords in the anchor text (this is the text that you decide to link to other content) - you do this by linking to content using the keywords that you discovered. It’s crucial that the content is related to that keyword phrase.
To help you be sure that you're linking to the right pages with the right anchor text, it helps to earch your site for mentions of similar keyword variations, the pages that pop up may be the best places to add links to your new content.
Example: You created a new blog post - How To Increase Sales in 1 Month. Search your site for the term “Increase sales” - say you have 3 other blog posts about increasing sales, these would be great places to add links to your newest blog post. Be sure that the anchor text you to choose to link from includes the words “increase” and “sales”.