As more and more of the world gets access to high-speed internet, businesses are faced with more competition than ever. Not only are you competing with the other businesses in the same niche in your neighborhood, but you’re facing off against the countless competitors that can now be accessed with a simple online search. Beyond having a good product at a good price, many businesses aren’t sure how to begin spreading the word about their work.

The following will explore several steps you can take to help your business stand out from the crowd and become more widely known. In addition to the below, make sure that you’re doing adequate market research at each step along the way. You want to be constantly taking note of which steps are most effective for reaching your audience and which ones seem to be missing your core demographic. Not every person hangs out on every app. Part of this process is about learning and readjusting to the new information.

Get Yourself Online

This step should go without saying, but it sadly is glossed over far too much. If you want your business to be widely known, you need to stake out a piece of internet real estate. A website at the bare minimum that contains all the information a person might need if they’re looking you up. You want hours of operation, product or service descriptions, contact information, and if you have set prices, the costs. Because there are so many easily accessible alternatives, someone isn’t going to take the time to look you up in the phone book after they Googled you and found nothing. They’re going to Google one of your competitors.

Make It Easy For People To Find You

This step is a bit more complicated. Whenever someone types into a search engine, the engine does a calculation. It takes the words used, the person’s search history (unless they use DuckDuckGo because that engine doesn’t save search history), all the data it has on all the different webpages that contain the words used and decides what sites to present to the searcher and what order to present them in.

Figure Out Your Keywords

To increase your chances of being organically found, you need to play by search engine algorithm rules. This means you need to do your keyword research and figure out what your potential customers are searching for and which of their searches are less competitive. There’s a fine balance that needs to be struck—if you choose to focus on keywords that are highly competitive, it’s going to be harder to rank, but if you choose keywords that not that many people are searching for, not that many people will be stumbling across your site.

Once you’ve chosen your keywords, you want to sprinkle them throughout the text on your site. For keywords alone, many websites decide to run a blog where they post an article anywhere from once per day to once every two weeks.

Boost Your Domain Authority

Second, you’re going to want to boost your domain authority. This is the numerical ranking a search engine gives your site based on how trustworthy and useful it seems to be. Many factors outside of your control are included in this calculation, but one of the best things you can do is have other highly-ranked sites link back to your page. This is called a backlinking strategy, and it can be accomplished via guest blogging (where the link to your site is included in the author biography tag), guest podcasting (where the link is included in the show notes) or via a press kit strategy.

Send Out Press Kits And Press Releases

Press kits and press releases are a highly underutilized marketing tactic. They involve sending information that would make for a good article to news outlets and other publications in the hopes that a journalist, blogger, or editor will post about the story you’ve sent them on their website or write about it in a newspaper or magazine. Press releases tend to follow a strict news-style format that gives a person everything they would need to write an article about your business’s latest endeavor, which you can learn extensively when you read more about it. Press kits expand upon press releases by including pictures, videos, or other content that can be included. For example, if you’re trying to publicize a book you wrote, the news outlet might like a photograph of the cover and one of the authors they have permission to include in their article.

Optimize For Mobile

More than half of online searches are now conducted using mobile phones and tablets. This means that you need to ensure your online content works on a smaller screen. Your website design platform or website development team needs to be checking that your site and other online content loads quickly and is easy to digest on a pocket-sized screen. This might mean rearranging some features that looked glorious on the big screen. Please note, this doesn’t mean you have to change how it’s viewed from a laptop or computer.

Set Your Content Up For Accessibility

Not everyone uses the internet the same way. When you alter your content so that it can be digested differently, you’re opening yourself up to more potential customers. This can include anything from optimizing for voice search, writing up alternative text describing images for the visually impaired, including subtitles in your videos for the hearing impaired, typing out transcripts of videos and podcasts for those who can’t listen at the moment or prefer to read, and creating audio recordings of your blog posts for those you can’t read at the moment or prefer to listen.

The above seven tips should help you open up your business to more people. The more individuals who come in contact with your work, the higher the chances some of them will be looking for just what you’re offering and become a customer. It is worth noting that none of these strategies can create overnight explosions in viewership, but if applied steadily over weeks and months, they’ll bring in new, organic audience members.