Whether you’re just starting out in the world of business, wish to grow your online presence, or are looking to take your offering online for the first time, knowing how to grow a business online is crucial.
The ‘busy bees’ at beefound have years of experience helping businesses of all sizes and industries to grow by optimising their online presence. Follow our guide on how to scale a company using the 14 simple tips and tricks outlined in this article, and start growing your business today.
Measuring the growth of your business
What’s key to your business’s success? What are your short- and long-term goals? What do you offer? These are the sorts of questions you should be asking yourself before diving into our guide on how to grow your business online. Depending on your answers, your growth strategies may look a little different.
For example, a global eCommerce business should be looking to expand its reach into new untapped markets, improve its brand reputation, retain its existing customers, increase its customers’ lifetime value, and—ultimately—improve sales.
On the other hand, a local accountancy firm would not need to worry about sales, nor likely their international reach. Instead, in order to grow their business online, the owners of the firm would likely be looking to leverage local web searches, improve their conversion rate, expand brand awareness, and explore niche offerings which their competitors lack.
With these considerations made, we can more effectively engage with the tips and tricks presented below for scaling a business online.
How to grow a business online: 14 expert & affordable strategies
We’ve divided our 14 growth strategies into different sections—from creating great content to investing in inbound marketing—to help you better navigate the growth of your business online. For each strategy, we note whether it is more applicable to new and emerging companies or those already established. Of course, it ultimately depends on your unique circumstances as to how you employ what you learn here today. Let’s get started
Building a website that works for you
The starting point for any online business seeking to grow is, naturally, its website. Without a website capable of facilitating growth, now and in future, your brand’s online presence can be severely restricted, and the online image of your business more or less out of your control. Here the beefound ‘hive mind’ offers tips on optimising your website, from building it to expanding its reach.
1) Choose the right website host and theme
There are countless website hosting providers out there, each offering a variety of different packages to business owners looking to come online. WordPress and Squarespace are two of the most popular website hosts, though there are other more specialised providers like Shopify, too—the latter specialising in eCommerce.
If you’re just starting out, take time to speak with different webhosts and gauge what they can offer you both now and in the future. You’ll want a website provider which achieves your short-term growth goals as well as having scope for future scalability.
When considering which host to choose, you can consider the following:
- Cost: What plans are available and do they suit your budget? Small business owners just starting out may wish to utilise a free plan before committing to a bigger investment.
- Plugins: What plugins does the website host provide? Plugins are tools and add-ons, like a Newsletter Subscription button or Social Media tie-in, which help you to build a website optimised to your customers’ ideal user experience (UX).
- Ability: Some websites demand more creative and design experience, or even experience with coding, than others. Depending on your skill level, you may opt to choose a website provider like Squarespace which makes building a site as easy as possible. Alternatively, you can work with a web designer to build you a website which functions well and delivers on your branding.
- Industry: If you’re in eCommerce, you’ll likely want a web host which has a positive track record in the industry and which makes it easy to list and sell your stock of products—such as Shopify. Whilst other businesses, such as service-based ones, will probably not need the same functionality, and could choose instead to focus on the overall look and feel of the website.
Once you’ve chosen a host, it’s time to choose a theme. The theme of your website entails its look, style, and to a certain degree, its functionality. Choose a theme which feels representative of your brand and brand ethos, whilst also appealing to your target customer base.
Who’s this most useful to? New and established online businesses
2) Optimise your website for search engine traffic (SEO)
One of the most effective ways to ensure your business grows online is to spend time optimising your website for search engines. This is a process known as SEO. The better your SEO, the higher your site is likely to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs) for user queries relevant to your business.
SEO covers myriad strategies, from keyword research and copywriting, to H1 tags, formatting, site structure, link acquisition, metadata and more. With an estimated 3.5 billion searches taking place on Google every single day, it is imperative you optimise your site for SEO in order to help Google find and display your site to potential customers. For small businesses just starting out, SEO can prove key to ‘bee’-ing found online amidst your bigger, older competitors.
SEO can be carried out ostensibly free-of-charge, but it can also take a long time to work—this is the case for both established and new businesses. Nevertheless, the cumulative effects of SEO and the low-cost investment mean that of all the techniques for growing your business online, SEO has one of the best ROIs.
Who’s this most useful to? New and established online businesses
3) Opt for mobile-first design
According to a report from Hitwise, nearly 60% of all UKinternet searches are conducted using a mobile device—such as a smartphone or tablet. Moreover, 79% of internet users say they’re more likely to revisit or share a site if it is mobile-friendly.
These statistics prove just how important it is to make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Putting mobile design first means optimising your site’s layout, assets (e.g., videos and images) and features to look and feel accessible for mobile users. Your web hosting provider will often offer mobile-first design as part of your package.
Who’s this most useful to? New and established online businesses
4) Utilise email marketing from day one
When visitors land on your site, the truth is that many of them will leave before ‘converting’—which is to say, buying a product, engaging with a service, filling out a contact form or signing up to your subscriptions. This is by and large the nature of the internet.
However, you can hope to turn the odds in your favour and grow a wider, more stable customer base by utilising email marketing through your website from the get-go. Email marketing—whether weekly, monthly, or otherwise—is a cost-effective way to ensure your brand and offering remain present in the minds of current and future customers. You can use it to share blog posts, news, offers and more.
Make sure to clearly display an action-driven and accessible call-to-action (CTA) button on your site, so that visitors can sign up to the newsletter before they leave.
Who’s this most useful to? New online businesses
5) Bake in backlinks and social proof
Another provably effective way to scale a company online is to expand your reach and improve your trustworthiness with backlinks and ‘social proof.’
Backlinks are links to your site published on other online platforms—such as other websites, blogs, social media posts, etc. The more authoritative and high profile the sites are which publish your backlinks, the more likely Google is to recognise your site as high-quality—in turn ranking it higher on SERPs and driving more traffic to you. You can encourage other sites to publish your backlinks in numerous ways.
Social proof is the technical term referring to any type of content which demonstrates to your site visitors that:
- Your offering is high-quality
- Your offering provides good value for money, and
- Your brand can be trusted
Social proof can take the form of positive reviews from customers and clients, or an image-based list of the companies you’ve successfully partnered with in the past.
Who’s this most useful to? New and established online businesses
6) Optimise website speed and performance
We’ve likely all visited a website before which loaded so slowly, or functioned so poorly, that we left the site before engaging with it any further. Worse still, we were probably left with a negative impression of the site and the brand behind it, and remain less likely to revisit the site in future. This speaks to the importance of optimising your website for speed and performance.
Build a better-performing website by regularly testing that your internal links and external hyperlinks are working, optimising the size and format of your media assets (e.g., reducing image size, shortening videos and embedding them optimally), and speed tests to ensure your pages load nice and quickly. With improved speed and performance comes a more satisfied base of website visitors, in turn helping to grow your business through sales, lead generation, and word-of-mouth.
Who’s this most useful to? New and established online businesses
Create great content
More often than not, growing a business online means standing out from the crowd. And the best way to do that? Create great content. Make sure that the content you produce neatly and powerfully conveys your branding and offering, whilst catching the eyes of your customers in a way unique from your competitors.
7) Blogging and content marketing through your website
The first place to start when it comes to making great content is on your own website. For most businesses, this means blogging. You can reach new and sometimes unexpected audiences with the right blog post, through which they become aware of your brand and, in time, may even become customers.
Choose blog topics by researching the sorts of queries your customers often have, as well as topics which are less covered by competitors. Make your blogs pop with accessible formatting, quality writing, and colourful media. Just make sure to weave you’re newly-learned SEO skills into your blogs to ensure they can be easily found online. And finish your content marketing off with an accompanying post on social media!
Who’s this most useful to? New and established online businesses
8) Social Media content creation
Speaking of social media, it is—equal to your website—your greatest free asset when growing your business online. There are 5.17 billion social media users in the world right now, equating to 63.7% of the world population.
Almost all of us spend a not-insignificant amount of time each day scrolling through our favourite social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, X or TikTok. Each platform boasts its own unique demographic mix, which you can tap into through social media marketing. For example, TikTok’s users tend to be Millennials and younger, whilst Facebook’s users tend toward an older demographic.
To scale a company online, it is almost obligatory that you establish a social media profile for your brand—perhaps even several different location-based profiles for different bricks-and-mortar or international outlets. From this profile, you can start to expand your reach, improve brand awareness, cement brand reputation and sell your offering to millions of new customers through digital content marketing.
Similarly, you can create YouTube videos and ‘cross-post’ them by embedding them on relevant pages on your site. This can improve the accessibility and engagement of your site whilst simultaneously conveying your content’s message more clearly.
You can also diversify the impact you have on social media by engaging with your audience by reposting UGC (user-generated content) which tags you—like a backlink!—and by engaging in Affiliate Marketing—known on the social media circuit as Influencer Marketing. Just like the social proof you built into your website, UGC and branded influencer content can help to elevate the trustworthiness and reputation of your brand in the minds of your prospective customers.
Who’s this most useful to? New and established online businesses
9) Nail down your branding
Our last tip for great content creation to grow your business is to really nail your branding. The branding of a business—its ethos, logos, colour palette, name, tagline and core message—are what help you convey to customers in the blink of an eye both what you offer and why they should want it. There’s no set rules to branding, but there is plenty of research out there to help guide you—e.g., on the psychology of colours in marketing, on how to write concise copy, and more. Even if you’re already well-established, it’s never too late to reassess and/or reinvent your brand.
Who’s this most useful to? New and established online businesses
Make the most of Google
Google is the world’s #1 search engine, used by billions of people every single day. The queries punched into Google are so diverse that on average 15% of them have never been searched for before! As the main search resource for internet users, it behoves companies seeking to grow to make the most of what Google has to offer.
10) List your business on Google
You can start by listing your business on Google. To do so, you need to set up a Google Business profile—note that this was previously called Google My Business. Google will use the information you enter here to populate its various search channels, such as Google Maps and Discovery, and your profile will allow you to accrue Google Reviews, a Google Seller Rating, and/or some product or service reviews—all of which can help to convince prospective customers to click on your link and engage with your offering.
Who’s this most useful to? New online businesses
11) Invest in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
Pay-per-click advertising is a model of digital advertising whereby you only pay for your advert when someone clicks on it and is redirected to your website. On Google, PPC advertising is known as Google Ads. One of the biggest advantages to PPC advertising is that, no matter how small or fresh your business, once you start advertising with Google you’re eligible to appear at the top of SERPs—even above links to bigger, much more established brands.
There are various different types of Google Ads campaigns you can choose from, each of which comes with different perks for different industries—such as Shopping Ads for the ecommerce industry, or Local Ads for local and service-based businesses.
Google Ads are a cost-effective way to stay on top of your marketing budget whilst placing relevant, high intent and actionable ads directly in front of the right customer at the right time. You set how much you want to bid for each ad, pertaining to specific keywords your customers search for. For even greater control and maximum results, you can outsource PPC bid management to the professionals—linking up with a Google Partner is especially useful when looking to spend larger amounts on your PPC campaigns.
Who’s this most useful to? New and established online businesses
12) Utilise Google’s free analytical tools to measure performance and traffic
In growing a business online, it is also imperative that you regularly monitor the performance of your website, the traffic it’s receiving, and the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. Google’s package of free analytical tools are designed to help you better understand your customers’ journey and improve your marketing ROI—as such, they can provide a decent guideline for analysing your online performance.
For more detailed, actionable analysis, however, you’ll need to partner with a provider capable of accurately highlighting who comprises your web traffic, where they’re being redirected from, and most importantly, which of your growth campaigns is delivering the best results. A good place to start is with Plausible, which you can connect to your Google Search Console for clear, accurate assessment of the impact of your paid ads, email campaigns and/or social media marketing.
Who’s this most useful to? New and established online businesses
Revisit your offering
Last but not least, there are also a few offline tips we have for growing a business online. These may seem fairly obvious to some, but for established businesses which already have a fully-fledged online presence and are struggling to see continued growth, they may just prove key!
13) Diversify and improve your products or services
If you feel you’ve done everything you can to scale your business’s online presence, it may be time to return to basics. Start by reconsidering your offering—are the products and services you offer still relevant to your customer base? Could they be improved? And is there a gap in the market which you could fill by diversifying your range? Simple changes at the product or service level could lead to increased sales, lead generation, and help you gain a competitive edge over other companies.
Who’s this most useful to? Established online businesses
14) Review your pricing
Lastly, it’s worth reminding ourselves that the growth of our business—whether online or off—ultimately depends on profitability. As such, it’s worth reviewing your pricing regularly to ensure your profit margins are, well, profitable, and that they remain competitive in the online marketplace you’ve just entered. This could mean increasing or even decreasing the prices of certain costs and services to win more customers and offer them greater value for money, all whilst improving your ROI.
Who’s this most useful to? Established online businesses
Grow your business online with beefound.agency
Growing a business in today’s endlessly busy online world is no mean feat. It requires time, patience, careful management, creativity, ingenuity, and sometimes a financial investment, too.
Some small businesses fall at the first hurdle—unable to devote the resources needed to really get their digital marketing and website optimisation campaigns off the ground. Whilst on the other hand, well-established businesses can fail to realise the full potential of their online presence without external professional help.
To start growing your business today, in a budget-friendly, goals-oriented way, consider exploring the various business expansion solutions offered by the ‘busy bees’ here at beefound.
From our SEO and web design services to PPC management we’ve got what you need to take your online business to the next level. Get in touch today.
