Running a successful business online is really hard these days. It is important to build your brand authority to have a strong online presence. Promotion of the website is as important as creating a well designed website for your business. The popular search engines like Google are giving more importance to brand-metrics to shortlist sites that deserve to be in the top search results.
Building your brand’s authority sends the necessary SEO signals to the search engines. It not only ensures a better ranking, but also drives huge traffic to your website and improves sales. Most businesses hire a team for SEO promotion whereas the smaller ones go ahead with the process themselves.
The following tips will be helpful in building your brand authority using SEO.
Build a Professional Website
The first impression you give about your business to customers online is through your website. To achieve brand awareness you will need a really good website. Most of the small companies build websites with the commonly used themes and designs. These websites are template based and will take your business nowhere if you consider the competition you have from other websites.
People who surf the web are very smart and judge a website in the first look itself. Therefore, it is advisable to create a professional website after researching your competitor websites. Make sure that your website offers a great user experience and go for a theme related to your brand. This is the initial step to be taken to start building your brand. A remarkable website will lead to more views and engagement which is essential for your brand awareness.
Connect with your Customers
As a part of building your brand authority you have to know what your customers are doing online. Participate in online communities and check out their online activities. Take time to know your competitors by searching the forums and contributing information to your related category.
You will find a host of blogs both written by novice and professional writers which offer opportunities to contribute and participate and you will also get an idea what people are talking about and what’s trending online. Interact with your online community and let them know about you before directing them to your website by introducing them to your brand. This is an effective way to increase your brand awareness.
Overtake your Competition
Whatever might be your business it is bound to have some competition on the web. If your business is based on very popular categories like health and finance, then you can expect a lot of competition. There are many sites that offer similar products and services on the web and that rank well in the SERPs for your targeted keywords. These websites are your prime competitors.
Your website will get the desired traffic if you offer something that your competitors don’t. If you have a blog, regularly updating it with new posts that provides fresh and informative content, will bring in visitors who would like to visit your blog again. Giving coupons or discounts can be helpful in bringing in more customers and eventually increases traffic and aids in brand awareness.
Be Consistent
Most companies start out with a lot of promise, but as days go by, there is a dip in the blog posts and lesser participation in the social media. As a business owner, you might not observe this, but your clients and community members will notice it. If you have been updating your website with quality content and have been very active in the early stages, but have slowed down now, you will find that your regular customers are gradually decreasing as they are going for other websites that will cater to their needs. To avoid this you need to update your content on a consistent basis.
If your brand makes an effort while other websites are lagging, when it comes to updating new content, you will be rewarded for sure. This includes maintaining an active blog, Newsfeeds, and participating in the online communities that will pay off.
Promote yourself
A little self-promotion will add to your brand awareness efforts. After creating a wonderful website and promoting it online besides participating in social media, the final step would be to let people know the person behind the website.
Customers will be curious to know the personality behind the brand and would be interested to know how hard you worked to bring it this far. Build a strong portfolio by adding a very compelling description and image.
Considering the social media, you can discuss other topics now and then, besides writing about your business. Get creative, share news, stories, etc. This will be a welcome change to your customers and you will see a rise in the engagement and traffic from your target audience.
Choose a niche you can dominate
Establishing yourself as an expert in your area of industry makes you a reliable brand. Building your brand’s expertise is the way, if you want to build a good reputation as a business in a competitive industry.
Instead of trying to excel in all the areas of your industry, it is recommended to choose a few areas first. Once you become an expert in your chosen areas you can expand to the more competitive domains. Search engines give more value to brands that are experts in their respective domains.
Link Building for Online Promotion
Earlier, link building meant to post our url to multiple sites. The search engines began seeing such methods as spam. The best thing to do nowadays, is to build backlinks from trusted websites. These are termed as quality links and Google sees them as one of the main factors to consider, while ranking websites.
Link building using reliable methods like blogging and press releases can bring in quality links. Backlinks from sites within your niche is more effective. When other websites mention your link on their pages or when people share your website or mention your brand, you become a part of these trusted sites. This will help in bringing a lot of opportunities for natural linking. You can see an increase in the brand authority of your website.
More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.