Increase Your Online Brand Visibility

The vast majority of our clients come to Whizz Marketing because they want to get their businesses found online.

Many have established websites but find they don’t drive enough traffic or are not attracting the right audience.

Others have recently launched a new website and are struggling to get their business found, and some don’t have a website at all and are looking for ways to tap into the online marketplace and expand their reach.

Gaining high visibility in Google is not achieved overnight. Most business owners wants their business to be on Page 1 for popular search queries, however dependent upon the sector and the competition, it may take time, and you certainly have to earn your place at the top!

Google ranks sites based on authority, credibility, trust flow, usability and relevance. Improvements to usability and increasing relevance can be fairly easily addressed through the use of white hat on-site SEO techniques, but authority, credibility and trust flow are earned over a longer period of time, and it’s this element of SEO that requires a long-term strategy that includes content marketing to achieve brand authority. Achieve multi-channel brand authority and your site will gain higher visibility across the web.

Here are some Top Tips on how to increase your online brand visibility and authority:

1. Onsite SEO

Onsite SEO means optimising your site for popular search phrases which are relevant to your business as well as addressing technical issues such as mobile usability, site speed and poor navigation.

It is strongly recommended to conduct Keyword Research as a starting point as this will provide valuable insight, enabling you to make an informed decision on which keywords to optimise your site for. There is little point optimising a site for highly competitive terms where domains with high authority and kudos dominate Google Page 1 results. It is far better to opt for long tail keywords – keywords which are more specific and highly targeted to the products and services you offer.

Once you have analysed the findings and selected the keywords which are likely to give you the best results, these keywords can be integrated into the site meta tags, html titles, content and images to help improve relevance to these terms. Other technical issues which could be holding your site back should also be addressed at this time whilst also further developing the website to add more dynamic content such as a social media feed, a blog and video.

2. Adding New Content & Content Refresh

Adding content volume to your domain which is highly relevant to your products and services will help your site to gain more visibility in organic search.

The easiest way to add fresh content to a site on a regular basis is to run a blog on the domain. Uploading regular blog articles not only keeps the site fresh, triggering search crawlers to crawl the site more frequently, but it also adds more relevant content as you can use your target keywords in the articles, as well as the added bonus of being available to share across social channels, expanding your reach even further.

We suggest undertaking some blog research initially to see what type of content people engage with for the products and/or services in your sector. Once you have a better idea of the type of content to produce, we recommend creating a series of articles in advance so you have a bank of content in which to upload and share over a period of time.

Others ways to add more content is through customer reviews, case studies and advice/tip guides. Updating your static pages and giving the site content a refresh each year is also highly recommended, not just to keep the search engines re-crawling the site, but also to maintain consumer interest and engagement.

3. Link Building/Citations

Google analyses the quality and quantity of your back links and citations to measure domain trust and credibility, so it’s really important to build good quality, relevant links and citations across the web, but the key to success is continuity. Its really important to ensure that your company profile, including the way your name, address and telephone number is presented is replicated in exactly the same way. For example if your company is a limited company, ensure you always use ‘Ltd’ or ‘Limited’ but don’t use both.

Adding new links and citations over time is the best approach, and gaining reciprocal links from trusted, credible sites will also help to improve your ranking. Links can also be generated through article submissions, social media, NAP citations and images as well as directly through directories and industry related sites. If you are targeting a local audience, linking to local community sites and business directories will help increase your local online prominence.

Engaging with your target audience across social channels is a ranking factor, but not as important as those detailed above. We do recommend that you have at least one social media profile that you are regularly active on as it will help you to better connect with your prospects and existing customer base.

Facebook: Over 665 million active daily users. You can create a business page alongside your personal profile and people can visit your page, leave messages and reviews, browse through company photos and chat with you online. Facebook is fantastic for businesses that are selling products directly to consumers, allowing you to share interesting content every day to interested viewers.

Twitter: Twitter comes in a close second in terms of size, with over 50million users tweeting every day and 215 million active users. Twitter is full of people with interesting things to say, and you can follow and get involved in every conversation. With a 140 character word limit, you need to make sure your message is succinct and targeting the right people. A fantastic platform for B2B and B2C businesses.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a network filled with professional people eager to do business daily. From your profile you can join groups, start discussions and promote your products in an attentive and serious B2B environment.

Google+: Acting as a combination of Twitter and Facebook, Google+ lets you share and promote content through Google’s own platform. Recent changes to the G+ platform has separated G+ from You Tube and the focus for G+ users is on interests and the joining of communities with shared topic interests.

Pinterest: A visual networking site based entirely around sharing pictures and links. The majority of its users are women, and is the perfect network for anyone in visual industries such as weddings, fashion, art or food.

Instagram: Owned by Facebook, Instagram is one the fastest growing social channels that enables mobile users to take photos and videos and share them on a variety of social platforms. If you are wanting to reach a younger audience and your services or products have visual appeal, Instagram will be a great platform for your business.

Engaging across social channels takes time and effort and it will really depend on what type of service or product you offer as to which social media channel is likely to be most effective in achieving your goals. We recommend investing in a combination of organic and paid social media marketing to help you to generate more brand awareness and engagement on the Web.

5. Create a Google Maps and Bing Maps Listing

For local Google search visibility it will be beneficial to add your business to Google maps through the Google My Business interface.

As Bing is the default search engine for all Microsoft laptops and phones, and a proportion of Bing’s search results are now being powered by Google, it is recommended to get your business listed on Bing Maps.

6. Get Creative with Video

You Tube is the 2nd largest search engine, attracting more than 1 billion users every month and over 4 billion video views per day. Video is not only great for increasing engagement, but if you generate interest and achieve a captive audience of subscribers to your You Tube channel, this will greatly enhance your SEO.

If you can put some of your marketing budget into video production then you are guaranteed to make a captivating statement about your brand. Whether you want to showcase your impressive client portfolio in an engaging and imaginative way, communicate your service offering through animation, provide advice, educate or simply want to entertain your audience, using video is the medium of the future.

7. Paid Advertising Options

Targeted Online Advertising: Capture an audience actively searching for your products and services as well as generating brand awareness to people who may not have come across your brand before.
Online Guest Articles: This is a great way to reach new audiences, gain credibility and achieve more links to your site. Many community sites and consumer sites accept guest articles from credible sources.
Digital Display Banners: Placing a digital display ad on a third party website is like buying billboard space on a busy road. Choose your sites wisely to ensure they will reinforce your brand and direct targeted traffic to your site.
Mobile Ads: There are various ways to reach a mobile audience, either through paid search text ads, Call Only ads, video ads, in-app ads.
Google Adwords Pay Per Click: Advertising on Google Search and Display networks, either text ads or image ads. Billed on a cost per click basis. Great for brand awareness, and driving traffic to your site if you don’t have high organic visibility in natural search.
Social Media Ads: Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and Instagram all offer paid advertising placements and to help expand your reach from your existing network to reach new followers, so showing your ad on newsfeeds of people who match your target criteria. Ideal to increase brand awareness, generate Likes and Follows, encourage Email sign up, drive traffic to your site or to run a promotional campaign.

So thats online marketing in a nutshell! We hope this has given you some useful guidance on what is required in order to achieve higher online visibility across the digital marketplace. If you would like to find out more about how Whizz Marketing can help you to achieve this, please call Louise on 01252 622129 or visit whizzmarketing.co.uk to view the full range of SEO and online marketing services and support options.