Establishing a brand is difficult, but creating brand awareness and retaining it is even more difficult. With websites popping in everyday, there is a lot of competition and it becomes necessary to hold your ground, or else you will end up being one of those one-day wonder websites. Brand recognition plays a vital role when it comes to ranking. When people recognize your website by name and search your website for niche products, then you gain advantage in search engine rankings. Higher the search engine rankings, the more credible you are in the eyes of the customers.
So, how do you go about making your presence felt? The answer would be – SEO. Yes! SEO is the right way to take your brand to the height of online success. The common notion about SEO is that it is just about ranking keywords. But no, it is also about making your website easy for both search engine bots and users to understand.
Related: 5 SEO Factors That Are More Important Than Keywords
So, what is it that makes SEO an important method of creating brand awareness? Search engine robots are very sophisticated; however they do not decipher and understand a webpage as humans do. SEO steps in and helps the search engines understand what the web page is all about. So, you can use SEO to your advantage and boost your brands’ worth. SEO practices have evolved over the years along with the continuous change to search algorithms from Google. You have to keep updating and constantly improvising your SEO practices based on the preferences of online users. Here are a few SEO tips that you can work on to improve your brands’ visibility on search engines.
1. Run an SEO Audit on Your Website: Errors like 404 pages, broken links, redirects or sitemap errors can make your website lose its credibility. Therefore it is imperative to conduct regular SEO audits to fix such errors that might affect search engine rankings. You can make use of tools like Google Webmaster or just do manual investigation on your website to enhance the user interface.
2. Minor Changes Make a Major Difference: You have to constantly keep updating the information on your website, or else it might be deemed as outdated and old. For instance, the year on the copyright notice on your website footer might seem like an inconsequential thing. It appears in the footer of every single page of your website. And most often, many do not update the year in the copyright notice; which in turn lets search engines think that your site is old and out of date. So, the simplest of SEO change can make a huge difference.
3. Switch to Mobile-Friendly: With more and more people relying on mobile devices for online experiences, it becomes imperative to take your website or blog mobile-friendly. If your website is friendly to mobile users, Google will indicate your site to be mobile-friendly in the search results, giving you an upper hand.
4. Focused Content: With the online market exploding with tons of information, you have to rise above the clutter to capture your customers’ interest. The best way to do this is to make your content credible. Reliable references or outbound links are a great way to give credibility to your content. When you are passing juicy links to relevant and ranking sites, you are indirectly giving signals to search engines that your site is relevant to them. This increases your SEO value.
5. Give Importance to Images: Engaging content doesn’t mean just text. Relevant and engaging images play a vital role too. Make sure any image you use on your webpage or blog page is complete with the right title tags, meta descriptions and ALT texts. Such relevant images will not only make your page interesting to view and read, but will also decrease the bounce rate.
6. Approach Keywords Differently: Instead of just being a robot and sticking to exact keyword matches, think of meaningful words that will still convey the same meaning. Use long-tail keywords; keywords that are geographical location oriented or those that describe the current period of time. These tactics will help you reach your target audiences with ease.
