Tips for Making Your Storefront More Visible Online

3. Smartphone applications: There's nothing more powerful than having someone find you online while right in your backyard. That's the power of apps like foursquare and Yelp, which can put your company name and info in front of someone while they're within easy reach of your storefront. It's the perfect blend of online and physical, allowing you to promote your business immediately and directly, then interact personally with the customer and close the sale.

Staying Found
So, you've done all the right things to be found … now what?

The web isn't a static environment. It's important to monitor your site to make sure that the hard work you've done to make yourself visible isn't undone. Setting up monitors in your production environment lets you keep an eye on the most important aspects of your site, like how easily your information can be found. If you've registered your business on Yelp, for example, you should set up an API Monitor to send your business name into Yelp's API and make sure your business page comes back successfully. Likewise, pick your most relevant keyword and send that into Google's search API to make sure your website's homepage is returned as part of the search results.

You can even use a recording tool to conduct a product search on your site, then use the recording as a production site monitor. This ensures that visitors to your site can do the most important activity on it — namely, find what they're looking for and purchase it.

Lorinda Brandon is the technical evangelist at SmartBear Software, a software company that provides tools for software developers, quality assurance engineers and IT professionals. Lorinda can be reached at lorinda.brandon@smartbearsoftware.com.