Monday 15 June 2015

Search Engine Optimisation For Online Brand Marketing

Search engine optimization (SEO) is not just about ranking your business website to South Africa's top 10 rankings for a particular niche related keyword. It is also about Brand marketing where you increase awareness of your online potential customers or clients about your business. Search Engine optimisation techniques are implemented to create your business identity as you gain popularity in your niche market. It is very important also to maintain you brand image because it is like your business’ face to the public.

In this regard, one of the search engine optimisation services that could help your business trustworthiness is what we call online reputation management. Reputation management is a process where you build your brand and maintain the good reputation from other entities about your business, whether you are a big or a small company. Building your brand awareness online can only be attained through a rigid search engine optimisation campaign. It starts with proper planning on what you want your client to see about your business, and then you go on defining your vision and mission and company values as well. After that, it will boil down to implementation like web design and development, content management system (CMS) and web copywriting. But it doesn’t stop there; you need to track all your clients and your market regularly to achieve your online marketing success.

How does search engine optimisation fit in this complicated type of marketing?

During the 80's and 90's the leading type of marketing campaign were TV ads, radio ads and print ads and only big companies were able to do this because they had the money. Time has change where people now can’t live without an internet connection. What most businesses do is they rush to build a website without any knowledge about search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques and how to launch a campaign. Since the World Wide Web is so vast, the internet for many is like an abstract picture.

This is where search engine optimisation companies or SEO companies/firms were born to help businesses build their brand and online marketing campaigns that target relevant customers and convert them to loyal buyers with more economical cost than the tri-media offline marketing. I used economical not cheap because there are cheap SEO services floating around but they are using “black hat” search engine optimisation which is unethical and could ban your website in the long run in major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing (formerly called MSN). Always go for ethical SEO practices or white hat SEO.

The usual type of search engine optimisation technique employed by top SEO companies is called organic SEO services where you build your website to rank for certain keywords in an unpaid side of search engine result listing. The other side of search engine listing, usually on the right side, is the pay per click advertising where you have to pay the search engines for every click that you get from the search engine traffic.

In choosing the best search engine optimisation to build your online business brand, you need to be aware that not all kinds of search engine optimisation technique helps. Here are the top three SEO techniques for branding:

1. Organic Ethical Search Engine Optimization - this is a process where you rank your local business website organically in search engines to hook traffic to your website and more traffic to your website the more people will become aware of your business name, products and services and your location. Make sure that your website has a professional web design and have a good user experience to offer a good recall to your visitors. There are SEO strategies that lets target your local customers if you have a local business like a pizza restaurant or a plumbing service in a particular area. To find out more about this contact a SEO consultant.

2. Pay Per Click Services - Pay per click advertising is the other side of organic SEO where you have to pay either per click or per impression. Pay per click has two versions, one is search and second one is content. The search side is where you want your ad to show in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and the content is where you want your ads to show in the contents of related web pages like blogs, forums and social media. If you want to build your brand awareness through Pay Per Click (PPC), SEO companies advises that you go for the content side and choose image ads so that more people will see your logo or your company name. To find more about this you may call your search engine optimisation company.

3. Social Media Marketing (SMM) - this is where you join social networks related to your niche like LinkedIn, Facebook, Multiply, Friendster, and Twitter. You probably at least know one of them. Social media SEO is a great tool to build your brand awareness to like-minded people in your area. You can provide them free information to people connected to your network that you think will help them in their interests and slowly you build authority in your niche.

These three search engine optimization techniques have been proven to be effective. Case study after case study has been conducted and they never cease to produce results. These search engine optimization methods are however not that simple and could be overwhelming to many. In order to make search engine optimisation work, everything must be planned and measured to gain ranks against your competition. The internet could be your doorway to lower cost client acquisition for brand marketing campaigns but it could be very expensive if you have poor SEO strategy.