6 Ways to Manage Your Online Presence During the Pandemic

---

There's no doubt that the Coronavirus pandemic has drastically changed the way business is being done at this time. If you're a small business owner, it's pretty scary indeed. While the future remains uncertain, you want to make sure you're at least doing everything you can to make sure that your online brand presence (and therefore your business) is given the best shot at survival. Here are 6 ways to manage your brand presence online while you're working from home. 

1. Reach out and connect 

Your company's social media presence is just as important as it ever was, even if your services have been temporarily suspended due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Continue to create supportive and positive posts, so that your customers can see that you're still active in some way - and if you've developed a way to help your community in some way, be sure to broadcast it so people can find you. 

2. Check your website for SEO-friendly keywords and strategy

It's a good idea to use this time to take a cold, hard look at your website content and make sure it's SEO-friendly. We know that any good website worth it's salt has SEO-friendly content on each page - but you may not know that this content should be refreshed periodically to trigger Google's ever-present digital eyeballs. That means that every 2-3 months, you need to update written content. How? Keywords, keywords, keywords! Wordstream is a great site for conducting keyword research to find out what's trending with your customers' searches. Keywords need show up in your website content in a strategic way (no keyword stuffing, please!), so that you can organically increase the visibility of your site. Never underestimate this necessary ingredient! 

3. Check your Call-to-Action 

What exactly do you want your current or prospective customers to do when they are on your website? Has that changed with the Coronavirus pandemic? If so, it's time to go back in and adjust your Call-to-Action. Giving your customers clear direction with a button, a phrase or a link to the particular service panel is really important. Make it easy to find and put it on every page of your website - that's because most website viewers only stay on a page for a brief time. 

4. Build your content bank 

Using this time to build a bank of evergreen posts and blogs is a great way to stay productive for your business. These kinds of materials are hugely valuable and you'll save yourself a lot of time when things return to "normal" (whatever and whenever that will be). Dive back in to older images and content (yes, it's okay to reuse, especially if it performed really well the first time) and re-work it in a new way. 

5. Review your social media integration 

This might seem like a no-brainer, but it's easy to forget: check to make sure that all of your company's social media accounts are easy to access from your website, and vice-versa. Social media posts should have a link back to a relevant page or service on your site - remember, they all play off of each other. 

6. Beef up your website security 

You should already have this on your site, but if you don't - now's the time to address it. Brand new clients and customers seek companies they feel they can trust, and having a secure site is one way to instantly boost such trust. Website security controls like SSL encryption and security badges are critical if you are handling sales from your site. Other measures like a public privacy notice and customer reviews go a long way to demonstrate trustworthiness. 


It's true that this is a really uncertain time for the vast majority of small businesses. Working from home may have you scratching your head, drumming your fingers and wringing your hands - and you're definitely not alone. Using this time to un-peel the onion and look at your back office website and social media tasks is a great way to stay on top of your brand presence needs. 

Here at Digital Heartbeat, I'm hard at work helping all of my clients adjust their sails as we all navigate this situation together. In fact, I shifted my own work-from-home schedule to include a massive amount of learning so that I'm prepared to do just that. I am in close contact with other professionals in my field so that we can learn from each other and apply best practices for strategy and brand presence. Reach out today if you need a helping hand - I am at your service. 

Please stay safe, stay healthy, and take care of each other as community. The more we do to protect ourselves and others, the more we demonstrate the incredibly compassionate and creative capacity of humanity itself.  We are in this together, and we will overcome this challenge.