4 Free Ways Small Businesses can Improve their Web Presence

Small businesses, especially those just starting out, can often times have bad web presences. Your web presence is the sum of your online activity from your website to social media to online reviews. It’s hard for small businesses to find the time to do this when they are focus on customers. Maintaining your web presence on top of that can seem like another daunting task, but you shouldn’t ignore it. Improving your web presence not only converts people into customers, but gives insight into what you need to work on. We have made a list of 4 free ways small businesses can improve their web presence.

1. Take advantage of short form video

This is one of those that’s going to seem daunting because it’s something that requires dedicated time to do it. You don’t have to spend hours making TikTok’s, YouTube Shorts, or Instagram Reels. You can literally make them in minutes and here’s how.

First you’re going to download a video editing app for your phone, something like CapCut or InShot. Recording your video and editing it outside of social media apps lets you easily upload it everywhere.

Identify Value

Next you’re going to identify something of value you can give viewers for free. What that is really depends on your business. If you’re a restaurant maybe you can walk them through how to do something in the kitchen. It could be how to make a vinaigrette or how to actually caramelize onions like you do. Seriously if you have a good tip on how to caramelize onions go to our Facebook page and let me know because mine never come out like I want them. Also, if you are a restaurant you should be posting videos (and photos) of your food, especially your specials frequently. People love food posts.

If you are a plumber, pest control company, or electrician maybe show how to identify issues that need attention from someone in your industry. Give viewers something of value, it might not be something they need right now, but when they do need it or are asked for a recommendation, they can go “oh yeah I saw this restaurant on TikTok that’s got great looking food” or “I haven’t used them myself, but this plumber I saw on TikTok is really knowledgeable and taught me how to identify if I have hard water and what it does to pipes”.

Post Often

You don’t have to post every day. If you are a restaurant try to post at least several times a week and make sure you post your specials. Service based businesses can post less frequently, but if you’re on a job and find something that is valuable information. Record it. You can add a voice over later to explain it, just keep in mind privacy laws and ask for permission to do so. If the person you are working for says no, respect that, make a note of what you wanted to talk about, and then record a video later back at your business or home about the topic.

2. Post on your social media

Having a Facebook, Threads, BlueSky, LinkedIn or Twitter (we’re still calling it Twitter right?) is great but if you don’t post to them you’re never going to have followers and you’re likely going to make people wonder “Is this place even still open?”. We’ll admit that we are bad at this, but are working on improving it. Our Twitter is so neglected we have two followers and that is what inspired us to write this article. We’re are doing or going to be doing every step in this article that we can from here on out.

If you do the short form videos like we previously mentioned these places let you post or share them, but unlike TikTok and YouTube these are the perfect places to share photos and write about your business. Everything you would do for short form video, put it in these places as words and images. You can even put your short form video there and write some text to go with it. Restaurants, post your specials as images or a video and then write out what what your specials are, their prices, and if there are any allergens in them. If you post photos make sure you put a caption on each photo stating which item it is so people see the food and know exactly what to order.

If you have deals, sales, discounts, or even a loyalty card post about them on social media. Do it often, once isn’t enough. Every few days while it’s running post about it.

3. Read your online reviews

Google, Yelp, anywhere people can leave online reviews for you are places you should be reading. If you aren’t reading them then you have no idea what people actually think of your business, product, or service outside of what they say to your face. Online reviews are often one of the first place people go to see if they want to be a customer.

There’s no requirement for people who leave reviews to prove they were a customer. This means anyone can go leave a bad review just because they feel like it. You need to read online reviews and respond to them. When you respond you need to keep in mind that your response also will affect how people view you and your business.

If you want more reviews from customers find a way to prompt them to do so. This could be a note on the bottom of your invoices, a little sign in your business, or for service businesses where you have to go out to customers just saying something when you are leaving to them about leaving a review if they want.

4. Blog

This one is very dependent on your business type, a restaurant, bakery, or law firm might have an easier time with this than other businesses because they can post about recipes, upcoming events, or legal information (not legal advice). If you can write content for a blog I highly recommend doing it because it provides value and it gives you content to link to on social media or make short form videos talking about. You don’t have to post blog content as often as short form videos, once a week or once every two weeks will help. You’ll have more pages on your website that will be indexed by search engines and it gives you the opportunity for people to find you organically through searching.

Conclusion

You’re not going to be able to do all of these in one go, they all take some amount of time. We recommend starting with two of them and it’s up to you which two, but we highly recommend checking your online reviews as one of the two, especially if you haven’t done so before. You might have lackluster reviews you can easily address or no reviews at all which tells you that you should ask for them.

There’s one other thing you can do to help improve your web presence, but it’s not free. Redesigning your website can help, especially if you want to blog but currently can’t due to your website not supporting it. If you want to go that route we have several website packages that are affordable, if they are not a fit we can quote you something custom or you could consider a monthly retainer.

You’ve read this far and we appreciate it, so if you have an existing website we will give you a free website audit. This is where we go through your website and identify areas that could be improved. We then send you this list and if you’re interested in making the changes we can get you an estimate for each item we identified, and if you aren’t interested no worries, we won’t contact you about it further. If you are interested in the free website audit all you have to do is fill out our request form.