Why SEO is important to build your business’ brand

If you are in business you need to have a solid, easily recognised brand. Your brand is what will carry your reputation, what will attract new customers, and what repeat customers will feel loyalty to. Building that brand is crucial, but we are experts in helping businesses build their brands through excellent Search Engine Optimisation and we have ten top tips to help you get your SEO right!

1. Optimise for Mobile

As a top SEO agency in Birmingham, we frequently assist clients who have neglected to take into account the requirements of users of mobile devices for internet searches. The screen on a smart phone is considerably different from the one on a standard computer monitor. In general, it is viewed in a different orientation, is a different size, and has a different aspect ratio. In other words, a web page that looks great and is simple to use when presented on a laptop screen is clunky and challenging to reach on a smart phone.

Businesses in the UK frequently believe that all they need to do to succeed with SEO is to grab the attention of the top search engines. But, it is useless to attract visitors to your website if they do not find it to be user-friendly once they are there. This is a crucial piece of advice to keep in mind because smart phone optimisation is not a particularly challenging prospect if you incorporate it into the design of your site from the start.

2. Optimise for Voice

In many ways this relates to our first tip. It is important to remember that a conventional QUERTY keyboard is no longer the only way for customers to interact with the internet. Many people now use smart speakers which do not have keyboards or screens to search for goods and services online. If your website can only deliver information to people with eyes on a screen you are cutting yourself off from a large number of potential customers and making appear as though your brand does not care about them. Make sure there is coherent and informative easily accessible content on your site for Smart Speakers to read out.

3. Make sure your content is interesting and useful

When businesses turn to us for SEO, we help them realise that if a website’s content is uninteresting or irrelevant, it doesn’t matter how many people visit it. Nobody wants to slog through pages of pointless information, so everything on your website must be relevant to the search that brought them there.

Such content also needs to be interesting. Your online presence is the first interaction many new customers will have with your brand. You do not want that experience to be boring because if it is customers are likely to form a negative impression of your brand.

4. Make sure your content is easy to read

This is a difficult line to walk, but getting it right is crucial. You do not want to patronise your customers, but equally you cannot assume that they all have detailed post-graduate level knowledge of the field in which your business works.

You need to have identified the type of person you customer is likely to be, and have a good idea regarding their level of knowledge. For example, if you sell plumbing supplies and your main customers are people who work in plumbing you can afford to use a high degree of jargon which is specific to that industry. If, however, your main client base will be people who do not have expertise in the field you will have to either keep your language more simple or explain what terms mean as you go.

5. Select images carefully

A website that contains only text is a dull, unattractive thing and is unlikely to spark the interest of potential customers. But peppering your web pages with random images is equally unattractive. When you design a web page you need to ensure that images are striking, well composed, well placed and relevant to the topic of the page.

Being a top SEO agency in Birmingham, we typically advise that photographs on a website should only be used to show how customers will utilise your products and services, your facilities, or your staff.

6. Control loading times

There was a time, back in the early days of the internet when people had the patience to wait for a web page to load. That time ended when broadband became readily available. Now people expect a web page to load instantly – if your page takes more than two seconds to load the chances are that a potential customer will have moved on before they ever see it. It is not that this creates a negative impression of your brand, it is that the customer will probably not remember you at all.

When we discuss SEO with them The answer is actually fairly simple: “Keep it Simple.” Birmingham businesses frequently ask us how they can improve page loading times. A page’s visitor gets diverted from the content when it is overloaded with graphics, effects, and animations, and thus slows down page loading time. Something to keep in mind when you’re designing.

7. Have a clear “Call to Action”

Good SEO will allow people to find your website, but then what? What do you want your visitors to do? If you want them to buy something, make that easy. If you want them to make an appointment, have that be something your site encourages them to do. But make sure your message is clear and easily understood, and that whatever action you want site visitors to take is easy for them to do.

8. Make sure your site looks professional

Your website is the public face of your business, and it must project an image of professionalism. Being a reputed SEO agency in Birmingham, we have observed a lot of websites that have failed to meet the expectations of the company due of their amateurish appearance, unkempt appearance, or inconsistent branding. To make a good impression whenever someone clicks their way to see you, you need to make sure that your website is as clever and well presented as your real location.

9. Make sure your site is easy to navigate

Once more, increasing traffic to your website is of little use if users can’t navigate it. We as a leading SEO agency in the UK, frequently hear from businesses that one of the reasons they rely on acquiring online clients is because fewer and fewer people want to visit a business in person because they want to avoid negotiating the city’s increasingly difficult traffic system.

People search online because they want convenience. If they cannot find what they are looking for on your site easily they will quickly look elsewhere – so take care that your site does not have broken links or other obstacles to good navigation and talk to your web designer about the route you want people to take through your website.

10. Make sure site visitors can find your Social Media

Always remember that your website is not your only online presence. One of the best ways to build your brand and grow your business is by cultivation an active community of customers through good use of social media. Make sure that links to your various Social Media accounts are obvious and easy to follow.