The first thing you discover as an entrepreneur is that starting a business and making sure people know it exists are two very (very!) different challenges. You can have a great product or service and even a clear idea of who your customers are, and yet, none of that guarantees that those customers will actually find you.
That’s where building an online presence for your business comes in. Today, potential customers can encounter a new company almost anywhere online. They might find its website on Google, see a social media post, or even come across the name in an online directory. But they still need to decide whether the business looks credible, which they do by visiting several digital spaces to make up their minds before buying anything.
For a new company, the temptation is to tackle new business marketing by setting everything up at once:
- Build a website
- Open accounts on every single social media platform
- Start posting everywhere
- Think about SEO
- Budget for a few ads
This ambitious plan tends to result in a collection of disconnected channels instead of the coherent presence you expected.
Indeed, you want to build those foundations in the right order. Your website, branding, social profiles, content, search visibility, and reviews should reinforce the same business and message.
Here, we’ll look at tips for building an online presence from scratch.
What Does an Online Presence Include?
An online presence is essentially everything someone can find about your business on the Internet. Your website is an important part of your overall digital presence, but it is only one aspect.
You only need to search for an established company to notice it. The results usually include a variety of things:
- Website
- Google Business Profile
- Social media accounts
- Customer reviews
- Directory listings
- Articles mentioning the company on other websites
First of all, in this context, consistency is crucial. A customer who finds your business through Google should encounter the same basic information, branding, and proposition whether they check your website or social media accounts.
Ultimately, some of that presence belongs directly to the business. You can control what appears on your website as well as what you publish on your social media profiles.
However, not everything that makes up your online presence is under your control. Customers write reviews. Other websites decide whether to mention or link to you. And in the end, search engines ultimately decide what, out of all this, will appear in their results.
That distinction matters particularly when you’re developing an online presence strategy. Ultimately, creating a website and social media profiles may put your business online, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will reach people. You need to create a connected digital footprint that makes you easy to find and recognise. In other words, building an online presence for your business isn’t about occupying as many online spaces as possible.
Define Your Brand Before Going Online
You can’t build a website or social media profiles without defining what people should understand about your business when they find it.
Who Are You Trying to Reach?
Start by defining your customers. This will shape your message and wider online presence strategy. Who are your customers? Where are they? Ideally, you should understand which problems they are facing that your product or your service can solve.
This is an excellent opportunity to consider how you approach their problems compared to competitors. Indeed, this will already help you identify what sets your business apart.
What Does The Brand Look Like?
Once you know the customers, you can move on to the visual elements of the brand:
- The logo
- Colour palette
- Typography
- Style of imagery
It’s important to define your brand identity before you make the first sale. This will ensure consistency between the different channels, so people can immediately recognise they are dealing with the same company.
What Is Your Voice?
Your written voice matters to keep messaging consistent across all channels.
Is your tone formal? Conversational? Technical?
Ultimately, online branding ensures that the impression people form when they encounter your business remains consistent. This will help you become recognisable.
Choose and Build a Professional Website
For most businesses, the website should become the centre of their online presence. Social platforms can be useful for reaching customers, but they are hard to control. Social media algorithms tend to change, along with features that can appear or disappear on platforms. So, it makes sense to make the business website the central space where you decide what visitors get to see and where they go next.
Your Website Should Be Your Online Base
Your website is an important step when you build an online presence. It is the place people tend to turn to for enquiries, bookings, or sales.
Everything starts with a domain name. As a rule of thumb, your domain name should be straightforward, memorable, and connected to the business. More often than not, it is the brand’s name.
Your visitors need to be able to understand what the company does quickly and to navigate to the information they need effortlessly. Your priority is a mixture of clarity of messaging and smooth user experience. This means that the messaging should not just be easy to understand for newcomers; it should also be properly accessible from a variety of devices, including mobile devices. It should load fast and efficiently. Finally, your web visitors should also be able to perform important actions easily, such as contacting you or requesting a quote.
Bear in mind that professional design doesn’t have to mean expensive design. Clear navigation, readable text, good-quality images and consistent branding can achieve a lot more for a new business than elaborate effects that can make the site hard to use.
Pages A New Business Website Needs
Naturally, the exact structure will depend on the business. A new website may not require dozens of pages at the time of launch. But it needs to ensure its structure provides all the useful information for a visitor to understand the business. However, most sites need the following pages:
- Homepage
- About page
- Contact page
- Dedicated pages explaining products or services
Depending on what you offer, you may also need to add FAQs, testimonials or case studies, and a blog or resources section. A blog acts as an informative and educational section that enhances credibility. Even a blog needs to follow a specific structure that is designed to help Google understand the site and pass authority between pages.
Privacy is also something you need to consider when setting up your pages. Most websites collect personal information through different means:
- Contact form
- Customer account
- Mailing list
- Web traffic analytics data
For UK websites, GDPR regulations and data protection strategies apply, so it’s important not only to understand how you collect, store, share, and use information, but also how you protect yourself against data breaches. This to say that you also need a privacy and data protection page.
Set Up Your Business Social Media Profiles
Do you need an account on every available platform? No.
Choose Platforms Based on Your Audience
Part of identifying your target customers is also finding out where they spend their time and what type of content is relevant to them (and therefore to your business). This will help determine which platforms are the best for your business.
You should also consider what you can realistically maintain. A couple of active accounts that regularly provide useful content will contribute more to your digital presence than stretching yourself thin across every single platform without being able to update them regularly.
Keep Your Profiles Consistent
Ideally, you want to use the same username across platforms and make your profile images immediately recognisable and consistent. Similarly, it’s best to keep the bio, website links, contact details, and opening hours (when relevant) accurate and consistent across all the platforms you are using.
However, this doesn’t mean that you have to publish the same content everywhere. Ultimately, each platform has its own format and audience. So, it makes sense to adapt your posts. Your online branding should remain consistent across every profile, but your individual posts can vary to better meet the expectations of the relevant audience groups.
Create Content That Introduces Your Business
So, you’ve got a website and social profiles. Now what are you going to put on them?
For a new company, content has a particularly important role to play because potential customers don’t know you yet. So your content is designed to introduce your business and make the first online encounter appealing.
Target Questions Customers Already Have
Your earliest content doesn’t need to chase clever ideas. At this point, you should focus on what prospective customers genuinely need to know. This will also ensure that your new business marketing content is useful because you are targeting questions that people have.
- What does the business offer?
- Who is the service/product for?
- How does it work?
- What problems does it solve?
- What should someone expect before buying or making an enquiry?
These questions can be addressed in your online content, as part of blog posts, FAQs, product pages, videos, social media content, etc. It helps create engaging content that doesn’t come off salesy, as you are not repeatedly telling people to buy something. You are explaining who you are and what you can do for them.
If you tend to receive frequent questions about something that you have not targeted yet, it can be part of a future content creation project.
Give People a Reason to Come Back
Once the basics are covered, content can move beyond introducing the company. By intentionally keeping it entertaining and valuable, you can give people reasons to return and consume more content.
This is where content planning is crucial. A content strategy helps determine what you are publishing, who it is for, and what you want it to achieve. Whether you are producing a blog post or content for social media platforms, it’s important to create a content strategy that covers:
- Setting goals
- Researching topics
- Planning and scheduling content
More importantly, you need to pick a schedule that you can maintain. Publishing every day may seem like a good idea at first, but it is unlikely to build your online presence effectively if you can’t stick to the schedule.
A slower rhythm that is more sustainable can give you time to produce genuinely useful material and create a library of content that represents what your business knows and does.
Get Listed on Relevant Online Directories
Online directories can create additional ways to find you, especially while the new website is building visibility.
For eligible local businesses, Google Business Profile is an obvious starting point. It allows businesses to manage information that appears across Google Search and Maps.
Additionally, there may also be specialist directories, depending on your industry. Local business directories can be a useful resource too. While you may be tempted to submit your business to every directory you encounter, you want to focus specifically on those that are both high-quality and relevant; otherwise, it isn’t going to add any value.
Here again, consistency matters, no matter the listings you end up choosing. So, make sure that information doesn’t contradict the content displayed anywhere else. This can undermine the online presence for your business by making it harder to find or contact you.
Start Building Search Visibility With SEO
A website gives your business somewhere to exist online. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO for short) helps search engines understand that website and connect its pages with people searching for relevant information, products, or services.
Help Search Engines Understand Your Website
What would potential customers actually type into search engines? These searches can include the products or services you sell, questions about the problems you solve, or, for local businesses, they can even include a location.
These searches can influence what your business website will cover, but of course, you shouldn’t use the search terms as forever repeatable keywords across your site. Google’s own SEO guidance emphasises the importance of creating useful content that is easy to read for people and search engines.
This translates into:
- Clear page titles and headings
- Descriptive URLs
- Useful copy
- Sensible internal links
- Appropriate alternative text for images
- Clear location and service area (when relevant)
These elements help search engines understand the structure and content of the business website and support indexing.
SEO Is a Long-Term Process
The hardest and most frustrating part of trying to build your online presence through organic search is that results are not immediate. A new website won’t appear prominently simply because its pages have been published and optimised.
Search visibility develops over time. So, the more useful and optimised content you create with links to related pages and updated information, the more opportunities you generate for people to discover the business in a search.
That is why SEO should form part of a broader and ongoing online presence strategy, instead of being a one-off job you can tick off the to-do list. Ultimately, search behaviour can change, your competitors can publish new materials, and the pool of information you are working with can also evolve. So, your website content is a constant work in progress, as it keeps adapting.
Build Trust Through Reviews and Social Proof
Being visible online is only part of the challenge you’re going to face as a new business. Once people find you, they still need a reason to trust you. Needless to say, this can be difficult when your company hasn’t yet had time to build a reputation or develop its brand recognition.
Reviews are one of the clearest ways to start building that confidence. You can encourage genuine customers to leave feedback after a successful and positive purchase or project. Generally, this can happen through Google reviews, recommendations on relevant industry platforms, or reviews on the marketplace where products are sold, such as Amazon reviews.
What about negative reviews? These can happen, and depending on your public response, they don’t need to ruin your digital presence. In fact, they can even help convince potential customers if the business shows accountability and resolves the issue.
Social proof can appear on your own website and provide a trust signal. You can use different types of content:
- Customer testimonials
- Case studies
- Examples of completed work
- Photos that customers have shared (provided you have permission to use them)
It doesn’t need saying, but you can manufacture credibility. Fake reviews and misleading testimonials are quickly found out, and they damage the trust and reputation you are trying to establish.
The bottom line: Your online presence isn’t made up exclusively of things you publish yourself. What others say about your company and how you respond can also become part of your online branding and reputation.
Create a Simple Digital Marketing Strategy
At this point, you already have a website, social profiles, directory listings, content, and some level of search visibility. The logical next step is to make sure these elements work together efficiently.
What You Want Marketing to Achieve
Any useful online presence strategy starts with an objective. It could be anything from wanting more people to discover the brand to boosting purchases. But the key is to determine your goal.
Trying to achieve and improve everything at the same time is going to make it difficult to find out whether your marketing is working. For a new business, it can be more effective to select one or two priorities to focus on and decide which channels can support them.
You should also consider the resources available. Your new business marketing plan needs to reflect what is available right now, rather than the marketing operations you hope to build in the future:
- Time
- Skills
- Budget
- Tools
Choose the Marketing Mix
Every company needs a combination of channels, but their importance will depend on the business:
- Organic search
- Social media
- Content
- Paid ads
For example, a local service provider might prioritise website, Google Business Profile, local SEO, and customer reviews. On the other hand, a B2B consultant might get more value out of a professional website with a LinkedIn presence and expert articles.
Your marketing mix will help you deliver the most effective strategy, but the right mix will constantly need assessing against:
- Current market trends and habits
- The essence of what your business does
- Your knowledge of your customers
This is why strategy should determine where you spend your time. It’s also worth noting that you don’t need to do everything immediately. It’s generally good practice to start with the channels most likely to connect with your audience, and expand when you’ve learned what works.
Measure and Improve Your Online Presence
Once the foundation of your online presence is in place, you need to understand which parts are actually helping the business and where improvements are necessary.
Measurements Connected to Your Goals
What do you need to measure?
Website traffic and search impressions show how many people are discovering your business.
Enquiries, bookings, and sales reveal whether visibility is turning into transactions.
Reviews and other social engagement are valuable insights into how people respond to your digital presence.
So, depending on your goals, not every metric is relevant.
Measurements & Troubleshooting
Instead, establish a baseline you can regularly review performance against. Some common considerations may include:
- If one channel consistently produces customers, it could deserve more investment.
- If you have a lot of social media followers but nobody becomes a customer, your social media presence needs improving.
- Increasing web traffic without increasing enquiries highlights a problem in audience targeting.
- Etc.
Your online presence strategy needs to change as you learn about how customers find and interact with the business. That is why measurement isn’t necessarily about chasing bigger numbers but about identifying what contributes to genuine business growth.
In conclusion, learning how to build an online presence for a new business can initially feel like an overwhelming job where everything needs to be interconnected. The truth is that it doesn’t need to happen all at once.
You can start by building the foundations and gradually creating content, visibility, and growth. Ultimately, a strong online presence for business isn’t measured by how many platforms you use or how often you post. It is about making your business easy to find, easy to understand, easy to trust, and easy to interact with.
