As a small business owner and entrepreneur, you are likely keeping “a lot of plates spinning” – you have to be a small business generalist in a lot of ways to ensure that your business not only remains profitable, but sometimes even just functional!
Check Up On Your SEO
With the holiday shopping season fast approaching, you likely have more plates spinning than ever before. The last thing you may want to consider is how your online presence is currently affecting your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Optimizing your SEO as much as possible before the holiday shopping season may be the key to boosting your sales and revenue during one of the most crucial quarters of the year. Luckily the general concept of a “consistent brand voice”, at least when it comes to your online accounts and social media, is simple to both understand and apply.
The Key Is Consistency
Your brand voice is the consistent and deliberate expression of your brand, communicated through words. You already have a brand, with distinct and memorable brand elements, and through your brand voice you strive to effectively communicate your brand to your target market. Your brand voice encompasses more than just content marketing – it includes the way your content is presented as well. The key to an effective and memorable brand voice is consistency.
Maintaining Consistency Through Time
At first glance, the concept of a consistent brand voice appears simple, straightforward, and even easy. Yet striving to keep your brand voice consistent and actually doing so over the long term are two very different things. Whether you are composing lengthy blog posts or just short Twitter updates, you have to deliver content on a regular basis, and maintaining a consistent brand voice over the course of weeks, months, and even years can be very challenging. Chances are that your brand voice may not be fully consistent, but it’s not too late to fix many of the elements of your online presence to be more uniform, which will, in turn, give a boost to your SEO with many search engines, including Google. Search engine algorithms have become incredibly sophisticated, and it has become extremely difficult to take shortcuts to improve your SEO, but improving the consistency of your brand voice isn’t a shortcut. Instead, it’s a relatively simple and effective way to help search engines better identify your online presence.
Audit Your Online Properties For Consistency
The first step to boosting your brand voice online is to audit your online properties. Make a list of every website, blog, social media account, and online service that your business actively utilizes. Check each one to ensure that your brand is consistent, including the images that you are using as account avatars, cover images, background images, and the other design elements that you are able to customize with each service. If a service allows you to add a tagline or a short bio or description of your business, ensure that the copy and verbiage are as uniform as possible and that the tagline for your brand is prominently featured. Finally, review your recent content for consistency as well. Although it’s impossible to completely delete unwanted content from the Internet, deleting or removing content and updates that are inconsistent with your brand can often help in the mid- to long-term. By “cleaning up” your online properties before the holiday shopping season is in full swing, you can help present a more unified brand to search engines and subsequently your target market.