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How to advertise your business online

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Whether you’re a large company, a local business or a startup, it’s never been so important to have an online presence.

Year after year the number of online sales continues to increase. Reasons behind this consist of more and more people getting access to the internet, delivery prices and speed getting quicker, and products often being cheaper online than in physical stores. What’s more, many of us have access to a smartphone these days, from which we can order almost anything online.

The question that is probably on your lips now, is how do I advertise my business online? Here are our suggestions:

Google organic results

Google has approximately 92% of the search engine market share worldwide. More than 3.5 billion searches are conducted every 24 hours. How many of those could be looking for the product or service you offer?

It may seem daunting to get a new website to the top of Google results, but getting to the top of local results can be fairly quick. Being at the top when someone searches “[Your service] near me” could result in new business.

Want to get to the top of the search engine results? Contact a digital advertising agency with a track record of success, to help you out.

Google local results

Have you ever got your mobile out in town to search for a business nearby? Perhaps a restaurant, bar or service station. And the results in Google display a map with local businesses?

As well as organic results appearing in Google, so are businesses in these Google Maps for local searches. And as Google displays the map results above the organic results, along with user reviews of those businesses, it has never been so important to get a Google My Business listing.

They are free to setup and you could be appearing in the results in a matter of days, depending how competitive it is locally for your services. The latest data shows that more than one-third of retail sales in the United Kingdom take place online, up from 20% in January 2020. You may want to be a part of it.

Google paid results

Above both the local and organic results are the paid results. You may have heard of Google Ads (formerly AdWords). This is the service you can join to place your ads.

Google Ads isn’t for everyone though so you may need to employ a professional or agency to run the campaigns for you in order to make them as profitable as possible.

They allow you to bid on specific keywords that your prospect customers are searching for. What’s more, you can allow your ads to appear only in certain locations, days of the week, time of day and set a maximum spending limit, among many other settings in order to reach your ideal customers.

Facebook business pages

Facebook has 2.7 billion active users each month and has the second most downloaded mobile app. There are already more than 150 million businesses on the social network. Is yours?

Having a Facebook Business Page makes it easier for potential businesses to discover your business and services. They’re free to setup and don’t require too much effort to get running.

To keep it simple, you can upload some text and photos, but to make them more effective you’ll want to put as much information on them as you can in order to get more coverage.

Facebook ads

Struggling to get much success out of your free Facebook Business Page? Facebook Ads will help increase your reach.

Similar to Google Ads in the sense you pay for users who click on your ads, you can use this service to target Facebook users. Facebook’s demographic options are more in-depth than Google too, and the social network has more detail about the users than the search engine.

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Contributors

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