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A brand is more than just a product or a service; it’s a customer’s entire perception of you, so it’s something worth taking seriously. Of course, when you’re just getting started it will be more about the message you put across and the quality of your products and services, so do keep these following points in mind.

The way to go about it

It will do absolutely nothing for your reputation if you repeatedly say that you are ‘different’, you have to prove that through your actions. Building online brand is absolutely necessary as it will help your business flourish. You should start developing your brand from your website via blogs, videos, and articles, and through creating professional profiles on social media platforms.

It is also essential to set up social monitoring; this helps in managing and marketing your reputation. Make sure you lend your ears to what your community members, friends, fans and site visitors have to say. This will help you improve and cater to their needs, indirectly benefiting your own business. The right content could help you get the right kind of feedback from people, whilst you can craft content to drive user action when you know more about who your audience is.

Your aim should be to get your website good search engine ranking as this will help the web traffic to come rushing in. This is not a difficult task to attain if done the right way; you can also ask for tips from the many online marketing companies.

Interact with your friends, fans, community members and their friends on social networking sites; this is a must to grab their attention and gain recognition. Get brand ambassadors who will be able to tell more about your products and services to others in a more authentic manner. Engage with people too, and try turning visitors to your site into customers. Remember the influencers are your assets because they help grow your community by inviting others to join.

Social signals are now an important factor in Google’s algorithm and it doesn’t matter what channel you use, whether it’s Google+, Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest. Having active social media accounts with links back to your website’s content can boost your SEO performance. What’s more, you’re able to utilise all or several of the main social media channels for extra SEO performance. Of course, taking the time to update your social accounts can take up a lot of time and hard work, especially if you want to ensure they look good and are conversion driven. There are many ways in which you can improve SEO but the social side of things is often neglected by many small and medium sized businesses. Why not take your SEO performance to the next level by boosting social signals and raising brand awareness? It’s a great way to improve your overall performance and stay ahead of competition.

The correct website optimisation techniques to use to increase website conversion, contingent upon whether the activity is being driven by pay-per-click publicizing or regular internet searcher positioning. When concentrating on the imperative site advancement strategy of changing over activity got from normal internet searcher positioning.

Place your most important information “above the fold.” This is the information that will appear within a page’s initial viewable area. The web space above the fold is more valuable for attracting and keeping site visitors’ attention. Site visitors will scroll.

To convert the traffic, you must give reasons for people to engage you and not your competitor down the road. Make them an offer they can’t refuse. Grab their attention. An effective strategy to increase website conversion is to provide a pricing strategy that changes the decision-making from a “yes/no” proposition to an “either/or” proposition.

Not every site visitor is ready to engage or make a purchase. As a result, it is important that you try to build trust and credibility immediately. There is no better way to reduce the barrier to engagement than to provide a testimonial, customer review or cast study relating to your products or services.

I am often surprised at how often I see a website that has very weak or very few strong calls to action. Your site should be focused on either driving an inquiry or sale. As a result, you should be telling site visitors exactly what action you would like them to take. Everywhere that you feature a product or service for sale asks for the order. Online video is engaging and is the perfect medium for communicating and educating prospective clients on your products and services. It is also an excellent way to boost brand awareness to new levels.

If you’ve been reading about all things SEO recently then you probably know Google is set to release a separate mobile index.

This may eventually become their primary index. Some say that the desktop index will continue to be maintained separately, but will not be as up to date as the mobile index and will not receive as much of a focus.Obviously this hasn’t been confirmed but it’s certainly plausible considering Google’s position over the last few years. So for everyday businesses what does this mean?

Well it means if you only have a desktop website, one that not optimised for mobile devices, you could see your rankings diminish. Google wants people to have a good user experience when they search on mobiles, so this change shows that Google no longer wants to upset users by giving them unfriendly desktop websites in rankings. If you already have a mobile friendly website, then you could find yourself gaining higher positions in Google from mobile searches, but of course just having a mobile site isn’t going to get you to the top of the rankings straight away. You will also need to populate your site with fresh, engaging content. To rank well in Google you have to take the time to understand what they want in a website and for years they’ve made it perfectly clear that you need to have a website that is interesting, easy to navigate and packed with valuable and relevant information. If you create a mobile site and start focusing more on your visitors and their needs, you’ll definitely make improvements.

So don’t fear the change accept it and embrace it. If you do this you’ll be one step close to having a brilliant website that Google, and the people searching Google love!

So many companies have multiple social media accounts and it tends to be the medium and large businesses. Why? Because they give complete trust to employees only for them to leave without handing the details over to the next person. If you’re signing up to social media accounts, then it’s important to make sure that they stay with the company, so email should be accounts that are assigned to the company. The Facebook page is different, as the main account needs to belong to an individual who acts as the administrator, and this should be the owner. He or she can then add in employees as editors as they wish, but it means the owner never has to lose control of the account. Having too many social media accounts can cause confusion and it may mean people are finding an old account rather than a new one. Make sure you get these passwords and emails organised from the offset, otherwise you could regret it in several months time.

Google+ may not be the most popular social media network by any means, its user base has nothing on Facebook or Twitter as an example, but it is the one many SEO agencies recommend, mainly because of its SEO advantages. With Google+ you can create a company page that people will find when they search for you in Google. Your Google+ page can include relevant information such as maps, product photos, interior photos, outside photos, reviews, telephone numbers and a quick link to your website. When there’s the opportunity to add more relevant information about your business to Google, you should take advantage of it. If you have professional photos, lots of people willing to review your products and services and plenty of information to share, you can create a Google+ page that sits highly in Google when people search for your business, so make sure it looks the part.

Google hasn’t made any major changes recently with regards to content requirements, but minor tweaks to the algorithm over the last few months have pushed companies with lots of high quality content to the top of rankings. There’s no doubt about it, the more engaging and lengthy your articles are, the better your website is likely to perform in search engines. A terrific 400 word article will easily be topped by a 1000+ word articles with visuals, bullet pint, infographics and videos. The more quality you’re giving your visitors, the more they’re likely to engage with your brand and spend time on your website. It’s not just quick tricks that will boost your traffic. Google rewards businesses that spend time producing high quality content for their visitors. If you can give Google content that’s fresh and filling, you’ll perform much better going forward. That at least seems to be the trend for now.

Many big brands have live chat options on their website and it can play a big role in improving enquiries, conversions and sales. While this may be a great tool for big companies, there can be some drawbacks for small to medium sized businesses.

If you only have a small number of people available to answer questions, you’ll only disappoint visitors who find your chat service too slow or offline too often. You can obviously combat this by outsourcing the chat services, but then you lose some of the technical knowledge that may be required to answer visitors’ questions properly.

Live chat may also be a massive time waster for smaller businesses. Your customers and people who are very interested will happily contact you via email or by phone, but half interested individuals may swamp your team on the live chat, and they could well be timewasters.

Far too many websites are completely over optimised for various keywords. This tactic used to work back in the day when Google wasn’t quite able to combat spam, but nowadays it’s a hindrance. Of course, there are no clear rules as to what constitutes as ‘over optimisation’, but if you have a keyword density of 30 or more for one particular phrase, such as ‘T-shirts for sale’; Google may mark you down for producing poor quality content. Google wants websites to be human friendly, so that means not having too much repetition for certain keywords. Try to pick similar words and create some sense of variety, otherwise you may bore your visitors, or worse, drop down in the Google rankings. There are many tools on the market that can help you check your keyword densities fast, and many of these come as free plugins for your browser.

As a web marketing consualtant, I often hear from small business owners that they don’t need SEO because their direct traffic is through the roof. My response is simply “it won’t stay like that for long”. You have to do a serious amount of advertising online and offline to continuously increase direct visits to your website and whilst that’s possible you should never forget organic visits. The great thing about organic traffic from Google, Yahoo and Bing is when you start to rank you’re getting tons of visitors for free. You’ll obviosuly have to pay your SEO agency a fee but you’ll be getting a much better return on investment for you businesses. If your organic traffic is on the way down and direct is on the way up it’s probably best you focus some attention on SEO because if you had the best of both worlds your business will be flying!