2015 Website SEO Guide for Businesses (2015)

Brand Building

You have already started to build your brand if your business already has a bricks and mortar store or already has a website. You need to develop your own distinctive brand that helps your business stand out.

Start off by picking good colours and sticking with them. This makes your company instantly recognisable, whether someone sees your name mentioned online or in print or on the sign across your shop front.

Tweets should be done by the head of the company as much as possible; it makes people feel more engaged when it’s the business owner they are communicating with.

Users will always interact better with a real person instead of a faceless company.

Proactively engage with your customers through social media. Post content that will generate discussion. For example, if you sell tractor parts online, post pictures of some really nice looking examples of tractors that your company has supplied the parts for.

It takes a long time to build your brand and it won’t happen overnight, but don’t let that put you off. Everything that you will read in this book will help your brand gain awareness online, from social media to content marketing.

Instead of trying to sell customers one or two of your specific products, give them information on everything your company does and the benefits of buying products or services from your company. What does you company do better than your competitors?

Be consistent with the colours that you use for your brand. This is especially important if you are on multiple social media networks. You want your customers to be able to look at your colours and logo and be able to recognise instantly who you are. This also takes time, but keep building.

Make sure and claim all social media profiles related to your brand. You may not use them now, but in the future, Twitter could be lot more popular than Facebook, so make sure and claim your Twitter name before someone else gets it, just in case you decide to use it in the future. This also stops other people from registering you business name on social media networks and will save you a lot of hassle and money trying to claim it back from them.

If you already have a domain name, for example www.mybusiness.com, make sure and register www.mybusiness.co.uk and www.mybusiness.uk, and so on. They’re cheap and it’s better than having to claim them back later on down the road. You can them forward these domain names to your main website.

You should also claim some similar domain names. This really helps to protect your brand.

Local newspapers can be a great way to promote your business and I don’t mean running advertisements in them. Write an article yourself, then contact the local newspaper editor and ask if they would like to publish the article. Editors are always looking for local content and it doesn’t matter what your business does. At the bottom of your article you can include links for your website address, twitter account and your email address. Think about it this way, having a newspaper article shows readers that you are a thought leader in your profession. With so many local newspapers also having a website, your article will be published there and you will get a link back to your website that people can click on and browse through your products and services.

Participating in a Questions & Answers site such as Quora.com can be another great way to build your brand online. You will be giving people helpful advice and at the same time promoting yourself and building your business brand.

Remember, be yourself, don’t try to copy big businesses. Be innovative, bold and daring and stand for what you believe in. Show your potential customers what makes you better than dealing with a big corporation and what makes you better than your competitors.

A trap that some smaller companies can fall into is offering large discounts on prices to try and lure in more customers and beat the competition. This usually ends up making your brand look cheap and any customers that do buy your product or service will always expect cheap prices in the future. Offer something more valuable to your customers through your brand, offer excellent service, your knowledge and your time.

People will always recommend you if they feel that they have got value for money, but that does not always mean cheap prices. It usually means a competitive price, along with something extra that your competitors don’t offer.