Chapter 10

Branding in the Digital Age

In This Chapter

Planning and activating your brand’s online presence

Building site that looks great on any size screen

Getting found online by search engines and customers

The Internet is the most-traveled route to your business offerings. It’s the starting point for finding directions to and information about your business and for evaluating and considering your products and services. It’s where many if not most people form their first impression of your brand. It’s also where small-scale brands can level the playing field when competing with the best-funded big-brand marketers. Online, no one knows how big your office or budget is, because your business fills the same screen as that filled by the pages of your biggest competitor. This chapter helps you make the most of your online opportunity.

Pulling People to Your Brand Online

Your brand has to be online. That’s all there is to it. To anyone with a website, that first sentence sounds like a no-brainer, and yet small-business owners lead the list of people who think they can develop brands with no or only haphazard web presence. If you’re among the great many freelancers or super-small businesses without web pages you own and control, flip back to Chapter 4 for a tutorial on building personal and one-person business brands and where web presence fits into the success strategy.

Online, a strong, well-managed brand tips the balance between success and failure for two very different reasons.

• If you use the web as a sales channel, strong brand management is necessary for sales success. Unlike in a bricks-and-mortar outlet, web users can’t touch or try your product, and no one’s there to personally explain and reinforce your promise. More than in any other distribution channel, when customers reach you online they need to either arrive confident in your brand’s quality and promise or they need to develop confidence practically at a glance. Whether they’re on your site, on a review site, on a page where you’re featured, or on the first page of search results, if your brand doesn’t show up quickly and well, you’re out of luck. The branding process helps you do the advance work that results in the confidence and trust necessary to prompt positive customer decisions online.
• If you use the web to provide customers with information, service, or interaction, strong brand management is necessary to make your page and posts familiar and recognizable while also making a visit to your site a seamless extension of your overall brand experience. Whether people meet up with your brand online or offline, you must always deliver a consistent message, tone, look, character, and promise. This consistency leads to a single, positive experience regardless of where or how customers reach you.

To a good portion of your target audience, online contact is the first and most frequently visited approach to your brand. What they see on your website or when they see your name mentioned online becomes your brand image in their minds. Brand management ups the odds that the impression they get is the one you want them to have.

The open-and-shut case for building your brand’s online presence

The stats tell the story. Web activity influences half of all retail sales. At least a billion people search for names of people, products, and businesses online daily. American homes have more Internet-connected devices than they have people. And, according to Google research, worldwide more people have access to a mobile phone than have access to a toothbrush.

All that digital connection comes with some high expectations:

• People expect to find you online. They expect to find you through searches, on social-media networks, on review and rating sites, and at your own website, which they expect will give them quick access to information and one-click directions and connection to your business from any sized screen. Count on this chapter for site-building advice.
• People expect prompt interaction. The days of waiting for responses to questions, concerns, or even compliments are history. If people mention you in a Tweet, post, or review, they expect you’ll see their comments and that you’ll react — quickly. With this chapter you get your social-media presence started, and Chapter 11 gets your social-media involvement kicked into high gear.
• People expect to control what they see and when they see it. They don’t want to be bugged and bothered by ads. They want to access information when they’re ready for it by using web searches, social-media networks, favorite sites or apps, and links provided by trusted friends or resources. That’s part of the value of branding. It builds an emotional connection that turns your brand into a trusted friend whose posts and links get noticed, followed, and shared far and wide.

Today’s customers block, ignore, or are annoyed by most marketing messages that are pushed at them. They want to be pulled to your brand and to access your information on their terms rather than on your terms.

Capitalizing on the difference between push marketing and pull marketing

Pre-Internet, marketers successfully pushed messages to their target audiences using ads and other one-way communications in an effort to, quoting from the very useful marketing site Hubspot.com, “buy, beg, or bug their way in” to customer minds.

Digital communication changed everything. It empowered people and gave them control over how and when they receive information. Today, pull marketing reigns over push marketing because customers prefer it by a mile and also because it costs two-thirds less per lead generated than the old tried-and-no-longer-true approach of push marketing. Here’s what the terms mean:

• Push marketing interrupts customers with one-way communications that involve the marketer talking and the customer (hopefully) reading or listening and (ideally) taking whatever action the message is intended to inspire. Push marketing usually involves mass-media ads, direct mail, online banner ads, and cold calls to prospective customers. Fact is, people actually pay extra or take extra steps to avoid push marketing when they can. Online, push marketing is called outbound marketing.
• Pull marketing engages customers with two-way communication. It begins when the marketer delivers nonintrusive and useful, entertaining, or educational information, called content, which customers encounter primarily through web searches, social media, blogs, or online sharing. Upon finding and taking interest in the content, the customer initiates contact with the marketer by using embedded links or contact directions that pull to the marketer’s business or website where the leads are captured, information is delivered, and sales are made. Online, pull marketing is called inbound marketing.

Pull marketing isn’t new. Half-off promotions pull customer interest, as do promotional events. The difference is that digital communication makes pull marketing inexpensive, customizable, interactive, and sharable from customer-to-customer at a level that can climb to viral proportions. What’s not to like?

Ego-Surfing to Benchmark Your Brand’s Online Footprint

If you’ve already established a brand — a personal, business, or product brand — when was the last time you opened a search engine, typed in your name, and studied the results? If you’re among the rare few who have never gone ego-surfing, as self-searching is sometimes called, or if it’s been awhile, do it now. See what others learn about you and your brand when you’re nowhere in sight. Check out the sidebar “Self-sleuth to see how your brand looks online” for advice on avoiding skewed results by closing out of your Google account or by entering an incognito or private search to obtain results that aren’t influenced by your location or search history.

Then study the results. Here’s what to look for:

• Do you own the all-important first result? When you enter your brand name the way you think others will search for it, does the first result lead to your website, blog, major social-media page, or to another page you control and keep updated with current, positive, accurate information?
• Do you dominate the entire first page of results, with links to positive content all the way down the page? This is the mark of a great online brand. You get it by building your own website (with a domain name featuring your brand name plus .com or .org), brand pages on all the major, high-ranking social-media networks, a blog (WordPress ranks highest of all blogging platforms), and a broad array of positive publicity or mentions on major sites that help optimize your presence in search results.
• Does an accurate, positive link to information about your brand appear at least once on the first-screen of results? The first page is as far as nine of ten web users go, so that’s the very least you’re aiming to achieve.
• Have you managed to avoid a single negative or brand-damaging result on the first screen of results? Also, go deeper in search results to check for embarrassing entries in the top results for your brand in news, video, and photo results. If what you see doesn’t match the brand image you want to develop, you have double your resolve to set online branding objectives that force you to accelerate your efforts in an effort to bury the offending results under a heap of positive, findable brand pages.

Use your ego-surfing findings as the benchmark for how your brand appears to online users today. Also, use it as the starting point for boosting your brand’s online presence, engagement, and interaction, which are the keys to sales, loyalty, and valuable customer-to-customer sharing.

Paving the Way for Your Online Presence

Few brand owners question the need for broader online presence, but many question where to start, what to do, and how to best invest their efforts. Recommendation: Take the following four steps, in order, once and for all. After that, it’ll be a matter of staying active online, which is the topic of Chapter 11.

Set your online branding objectives

Based on what you learn through an online self-search for your brand name, match your findings to one or more of these online branding objectives:

• Increase awareness: If you’re launching a brand or if your established brand is practically invisible in search results, set an objective to develop online presence and awareness by launching a website or blog and creating profiles on major social-media networks. At the very least, establish a Google presence for your business, for free, at www.google.com/business (see the sidebar, “Get your business on Google for free”).
• Enhance credibility: If search results for your brand name are weak, inaccurate, irrelevant, or inconsistent with the brand image you want to establish (for example, bad reviews, bad photos, or bad publicity), improve credibility by generating new links to favorable information about your brand including publicity, referrals from other sites, blog posts, useful brand-generated content, and social-media profiles and pages that you can keep updated with current, positive information. The new links, especially if they’re on high-traffic sites, will dilute the impact of unfavorable links by pushing them from first-page results to subsequent, less-visited screens.
• Develop engagement and interaction: After your brand presence is broad and accurate, set an objective to build on your strength by developing connections and communication with your online audience, realizing that interaction leads to preference and loyalty for your brand and its offerings. Turn to Chapter 11 for steps to follow.
• Generate sales: Before setting an online objective to increase sales, flip back to the section in this chapter on push versus pull marketing. Online, more than anywhere else, people detest intrusive and pushy sales pitches. Sales occur as a result of your brand’s success at developing online awareness, credibility, and interaction that pulls people to the point of purchase through useful, interesting content and easy-to-follow directions and links. Online, make friends, and then make sales. In that order.

Establish your brand name across your digital channels

In the same way that your brand name is the key that unlocks your brand image in the mind of consumers, your domain name (the string of characters web users type into a browser to reach your site, such as www.yourbrandname.com), and your social-media handles or monikers are the keys that unlock your brand online.

Ideally, your domain name is comprised of your brand name plus .com or .org, depending on whether your brand represents a commercial business or a nonprofit organization. When it comes to establishing a domain name, though, the Internet isn’t an ideal world. For one thing, it’s populated with millions of websites accessed by domain names that tie up most of the words in the English language. Beyond that, it’s a world where cyber-squatters camp on attractive unclaimed domain names, registering and tying them up until someone pays what can feel like a ransom to free them for use.

If you have or can claim the domain name featuring your brand name, hold a celebration and move on to Step 3 in this list. Otherwise, get ready to jump through some hoops. This section can help you get through relatively unscathed.

Landing on your website’s domain name

By a mile, making your brand name the centerpiece of your domain name is the quickest route to establishing your online identity, and here’s why: A good portion of web traffic takes the form of type-in traffic, a term that describes users who bypass search engines and simply type the name of the company they’re looking for, followed by .com, in the address bar of the web browser. By making your brand name the basis of your domain name, you capture visits from this group of web users.

• If you’re developing a new brand, don’t settle on a brand name until you’ve checked it out at a domain name registry to confirm it’s available as a domain name. Research availability on registry sites like www.GoDaddy.com, www.NameCheap.com, or www.NetworkSolutions.com. The advance effort will help eliminate the grief of settling on a brand name that you later discover isn’t available for online use. Plus, it will help you end up with the same name on your physical establishment and on your website, a vital first step in creating a strong brand identity.

  To shortcut the process, avoid choosing a brand name that’s straight out of the dictionary. Nearly every entry in the English dictionary is already part of a registered domain name and therefore likely unavailable for your online use. You can preempt a ton of frustration by coining a word that you can use in both your brand and domain names. Chapter 7 is packed with advice on creating brand names, including how to fabricate syllables or words into great brand and domain names. Microsoft, DreamWorks, Netflix, and Firefox are just a few examples.

• If your brand name isn’t available as a domain name, try these Plan B approaches:
  • Come up with a tagline or slogan that becomes a major part of your brand identity and the basis for your domain name. For example, if you type in www.wetryharder.com, you’re taken to the Avis website. Type in www.justdoit.com and you land on the Nike site.
  • Look into purchasing your top-choice domain name from its current owner. This process can be costly and time-consuming, but if you plan to build a valuable brand, it can be worth the investment. Many domain name registrars offer assistance with this step; go to www.internic.net/regist.html for a complete list of registrars.

Following is a lineup of domain-name selection advice, including a few things not to do when you resort to a Plan B brand name:

Domain name advice

As you plan your domain name, consider the following points:

• Keep your domain name short and easy to remember. Some of the best-known web addresses provide good examples: www.aol.com, www.ebay.com, www.google.com, www.yahoo.com, www.amazon.com. Each one is short and just about impossible to forget or misspell.
• If your brand name plus .com or .org is taken, don’t try to end-run the system by using your brand name plus .net. If web users instinctively type .com, they’ll go straight to someone else’s site.
• Don’t get clever by adding hyphens or making unusual alterations to your brand name. For instance, a domain name like www.cookeezncream.com may be available, but the chances that most users will remember and instinctively type it correctly are slim.
• Don’t invent an abbreviation for a long brand name unless you’re sure it will be easy to memorize and recall. For example, the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau can be reached by typing www.hvcb.org, but they don’t ask you to remember the lineup of initials. Instead, they market the domain name www.gohawaii.com, which offers an easy-to-recall address and a desirable remedy to the mid-winter blues.
• Think globally. If your business plan calls for international presence, register your name with international codes to specify your global offices. For example, www.microsoft.com/en-gb is the address for information about Microsoft in the United Kingdom.

Registering your domain name

When you find the domain name you want, register it immediately. Most registration services charge somewhere between $25 and $75 for a three-year period of domain name ownership.

When registering your name, consider this advice:

• The first domain name you need to register is your site name, as in www.yourbrandname.com.
• Consider also registering your site with various extensions, such as .net, .org, .info, or .biz so others can’t later grab the alternative addresses. Should online users type in one of the alternates, you can redirect the traffic to your main address, following information in the sidebar, “Redirecting online traffic.”
• Consider registering versions of your domain name that people are likely to type when trying to find your brand online. For example:
  • Register your tagline as a domain name so people who forget your brand name but remember your slogan can reach your site.
  • Register your brand name with misspellings. For instance, if you type www.googel.com, you’re redirected to www.google.com. Or if you type www.fordummies.com, you arrive at www.dummies.com. Use a similar error-capture program in your strategy by thinking of ways people may mistype your domain name and registering each version.
  • Register additional domain names as you discover new user-error tendencies. After your website is up and running, regularly check error logs to see what kinds of mistakes people are making when trying to reach your site. And ask those who deal with customers to pass along pronunciation or spelling mistakes that they see or hear so that you can work the errors into your URL-forwarding strategy.

  Creating a multiple-domain-name strategy costs very little. The registration fee on each name is nominal, and you can use a process called URL redirection to point all traffic to the website that carries your primary domain name, incurring no additional site building or hosting fees. (See the sidebar “Redirecting online traffic” for more information.)

Registering your social-media name

Chapter 11 is all about social media, but right now, while you’re choosing and registering your domain name, register your name across social-media networks as well. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, online real estate moves fast.

When deciding how to present your name, follow this advice:

• Decide on a social-media moniker that’s short and memorable. Twitter limits names to 15 characters, and even shorter names are better because they take up fewer characters in online mentions and retweets. To achieve brand continuity, apply Twitter’s 15-character limit to the name you use on all networks.
• If your brand name is available, use it as both your domain name and your social-media handle. For example, if your domain name is www.ourbrandname.com, aim to use “ourbrandname” as your name across social media. For free and in seconds you go to a social-media name registration site to see if the social-media name you want is available. Sites such as knowem.com, checkusernames.com, or namechk.com will tell you on-the-spot whether the name you want is taken on various networks. If it’s available, click to claim and protect it.
• If your brand name isn’t available on the social-media networks you want to use, consider this advice:
  • Avoid adding odd hyphenation or characters that people are apt to forget or mistype. While adding your area code, Zip code, or, for a personal brand, your birth year, may make sense to you, it’s likely to lack meaning and recall for others.
  • Invent a version of your name by combining your name with a word that describes or reflects your brand promise, business arena, or niche. For example, Johnson & Johnson is too long for Twitter’s name-length limits. Instead, the brand uses a lineup of well-branded monikers for different audiences, including J&JCares, J&JNews, J&JStories, to name a few.
  • Use one name on all networks to build brand awareness. Reserve your name on the networks you plan to use immediately or in the future for across-the-board continuity in how you present yourself in online. The only exception is on sites such as LinkedIn that require use of your personal rather than your business name. In those cases, settle on a single presentation of your own name and always include your business brand name in your personal description. Chapter 4 has more information on cross-promoting your business and personal brands.

Establish your brand’s digital home base

Here are three words of advice for anyone trying to build a brand without a website: Get a website. This section is especially aimed at freelancers and solopreneurs, who comprise the surprisingly large percentage of businesses with no controllable online presence. In today’s screen-obsessed world, building a brand and building a website go hand-in-hand. Here’s what you need:

• A site you control: A listing in regional or industry directories isn’t enough. You need a place where people can learn current business facts and news, a sense of your reputation and brand promise, and how to access your business, preferably with a single click. The gold standard is a website with a domain name featuring your brand name. A blog is a good alternative, and Facebook and LinkedIn business pages are necessary complements that can also serve as surrogate sites so long as keep them current and use them for ongoing interaction. For personal brands, consider establishing a free page on About.me, from where you can link people to all your content on the web.
• A site findable by a search for your brand name: People may search for your business name, your product name, your personal name if you’re building a personal brand, or both your personal and business names if you’re the primary force in a very small business (in which case, flip to Chapter 4 for information on cross-promoting the two). In any case, their search needs to lead to a page you control and keep updated.
• A site you can easily update: Commit to keeping it current and interesting.
• A site that loads quickly and looks great on any size screen: Insist on what’s called a responsive site that shows well whether on the smallest phone or a wall-sized monitor.

The following sections guide your website-building plans.

Planning your website

Give early thought to the kind of people who will want to reach you online, the kind of information they’ll be seeking, and what you want to achieve through your online presence. Answer the following questions:

• Who is likely to visit your site? Will it be visited primarily by current customers? By those doing price or product comparisons? By job seekers, suppliers, reporters, bloggers, editors, or other people seeking information about your business?
• How will people use your site? Will they want information about your location, open hours, and products? Will they want answers to frequently asked questions about your offerings? Will they want to learn about your background, experience, or product details? Will they want to request quotes or to study customization options? Will they want to buy online? Will job seekers want to search open positions or apply online? By knowing what people will want from your site, you can design its features and functions accordingly.
• What do you want your site to do for your brand? Every site should advance the brand image. Beyond that, do you want to generate leads, capture online sales, develop relationships, develop credibility, provide customer support, showcase work, deliver information about your business, or stay in frequent contact with customers and brand followers? Your answers help you weigh site development approaches and costs.
• What do you want people to do on your site? Buy a single product? Review and choose from an array of products? Join a mailing list or become part of your following? Request an appointment or estimate? Learn more as part of the decision-making and purchase process? As part of your answer to this question, also consider how you’ll measure success, so you’re prepared to establish a site that leads to the results you seek.
• What information does your site need to convey? It needs to present your brand identity, for sure. Beyond that, you need to plan content to support your site’s objectives. Biographies, testimonials, and announcements of awards and recognition develop credibility and trust. A news center with publicity, backgrounders, photos, graphics, and quotable material supports publicity goals. Pricing, scheduling, and delivery information, along with secure payment options, encourage sales. A schedule of events, video clips, and FAQs enhance interaction goals. One-click arrival directions, phone contact, and mailing-list invitations develop customers.

Settling on the right type of site

Most websites fall into one of the following categories:

• Contact sites: Easy and economical to build and maintain, these sites are like online business cards that present your brand name and image, descriptions of products, services, open hours, and information for reaching you by email and at your physical location, preferably with access to a single-click map or phone contact.
• Brochure sites: These sites are online cousins to print brochures. Your site needs to advance your brand image while inspiring interest and confidence in your brand, background, products, and services.
• Support sites: This category of site deepens customer relationships by providing customer service and communication, including information about product usage, installation, troubleshooting, updates, and news. They’re useful when many web-connected customers have similar questions or service needs that you’re prepared to address and promptly respond to.
• Ecommerce sites: Exactly as you’d think, these sites sell goods online. They let customers view products, make choices, place orders, submit secure payments, and, often, track delivery. Because of the complexity of the functions required, these are the most expensive sites to build and maintain.
• Mobile sites: Designed specifically for viewing on smartphones and tablets, these sites are quickly being replaced by responsive sites that display effectively on screens from tiny to huge. Going the responsive-site approach makes a ton of sense for two reasons. One, it saves you site-building effort. Two, and even more important, it improves your search-engine optimization. Mobile sites require their own domain names, with a subdomain of .m, creating a second URL for you to manage and optimize. That’s why Bing and Google recommend one URL, one site, everywhere your brand goes.

  One way or the other, you absolutely, positively have to be sure your site looks great on a small screen, which is where most people will view it. Whether you decide on a mobile site or a responsive site, remember that especially online, people want to save precious time, spend idle time, or make quick connections. Plan accordingly and make your site suitable for small-screen viewing with:

  • A clean and simple design
  • Large, easy-to-read type
  • Important information high on the screen — especially your brand identification, click-to-access phone number, arrival directions, and information your customers are most likely to be seeking, such as open hours, prices, product descriptions, and links to additional information
  • Useful links with buttons that are easy to see and large enough for fat fingers to use

Test your site on various phones to be sure it loads quickly, is easy to view and navigate, and is free of details or functions that intrude on the mobile customer’s interest in immediate gratification.

Site-building tools and tips

You can create your website from scratch or with a website-building template.

• From-scratch website: Unless you have great design and technical expertise, plan to hire a pro and invest time and money to end up with a site that presents your unique brand image and supports your brand and business growth goals.
• Site from a template: To create this kind of site, either work with a web designer or turn to one of the many do-it-yourself site-building resources, which keep growing in number and getting better in terms of functions, themes, and ease-of-use. A search for “Build your own website” will lead to plenty of options, with Web.com, WordPress.org, Weebly.com, Wix.com, GoDaddy.com, and Yola.com among the frequently cited services. As you study the options, keep these tips and cautions in mind:
  • Most site-building services offer free and paid levels (as well as free trial periods). The free levels usually include site-builder logos or ads that only go away if you upgrade to a premium service level. Check out the visibility and placement of the ads and the price of upgrading before making your choice.
  • Services with drag-and-drop designs are easiest to use on your own to create a site within days. Other services offer a greater range of complex functions but also require more time and either a greater investment of your own time or the expertise of a site-building professional.
  • Some services allow you to change templates if you want to overhaul your design in the future; others require you to basically start your site building from scratch if you want a new look.
  • Most services offer website hosting, but not all allow you to later export your site to a different host. Before committing, look into whether you can back up and basically take your site with you at some point in the future. Also, be aware that your site will share the service’s hosting servers, possibly resulting in slower load speeds for pages with large image files.

Conduct an online search for the term “Compare DIY website builders” to reach and study analyses of various services, options, and benefits. For expert help, turn to these two books: Do-It-Yourself Websites For Dummies by Janine Warner (Wiley) and WordPress For Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson and Matt Mullenweg (Wiley).

Optimize your site

Announcing a new website is a lot like opening the doors to a new business location or getting a new phone number. It only matters if you promote the news, gain interest in the offering, give people a reason to be in touch, and prompt them to take action.

The process of building your brand’s online visibility starts by showing up in search-engine results, but it can’t stop there. It also includes a heavy dose of self-promotion to develop awareness of and engagement with your brand within your target audience so they’ll type your domain name or click on links to reach your site directly.

As you develop your traffic-generation strategy, here are terms to know. They also happen to be the terms used by Google Analytics when it reports on your site’s user acquisition statistics:

• Organic traffic: Users who reach your site by clicking on an unpaid link (not an ad) that shows up in search-engine results. You generate organic traffic by building a website full of quality content that matches the interests of those conducting web searches (including good use of keywords that match terms people are apt to use when searching for you, your business, or your offerings) and by developing unpaid placements of your URL link in high-traffic sites that help optimize or improve your site’s visibility with search engine crawlers.
• Direct traffic: Users who reach your website by typing its domain name into a browser address bar or by clicking on a link to your site in an email, newsletter, or some other document you’ve provided.
• Referral traffic: People who reach your website by clicking on a link in another website, whether the link was included in an unpaid mention of your site address, left by you in a blog post, comment, or online profile, or included in a pay-per-click ad (for more on ads, see Chapter 13).
• Social traffic: People who reach your site from links on social networks.

Generating organic traffic through search engines

Improving the chances that your website gets discovered by people using search engines is a never-ending process. Success results when search-engine crawlers find your site on their own or by following links to your site on other high-traffic sites. Any website owner knows the term search-engine optimization because every website owner wants to rank high in search-engine and directory results. Here are key terms:

• Search engines like Google or Bing collect information by using a program called a crawler or spider to read and index websites, sending keywords from the sites back to the search engine index. Each time a user searches for keywords, the engine goes to its database, finds sites with words that match the request, and provides a list of results.
• Directories like BOTW (Best of the Web) and DMOZ (the Open Directory Project) include lists that are categorized and indexed information for access by users.

To get your site found by search engines and directories, follow these steps:

1. Register your site at Open Directory (www.dmoz.org/add.html).

   The Open Directory Project is the web’s largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory. It powers the core searches of the largest and most popular search engines. As soon as you’re on this free directory, you’re likely to be listed by the other major search engines as well. Submit your site address for free, wait three weeks, check to see if your site is in the directory, and resubmit it if it hasn’t been picked up.

2. Build a site that search engines can find.

   Search engines crawl the web looking for content. Speed the process of getting found by following the tips in Table 10-1.

Table 10-1 Website Search-Engine Optimization Tips

Finding your keywords

What words are people going use when searching for information that matches the content on your site? Using those words in your titles and in the photo tags, link descriptions, navigation icons, and site text is how you give your site a fighting chance of appearing in the search results.

Choosing the right keywords is a necessity and an art. Follow these tips to get it right:

• Match the interests of your target audience. If your target is someone getting ready to remodel a kitchen, the word “kitchen” is necessary, but alone it probably casts too wide a net. Get specific by using phrases, called long-tail keywords, such as “kitchen remodeling ideas,” “kitchen remodel estimator,” or “kitchen remodel on a budget.” You’ll better target decision-ready customers and your site will land higher results, because fewer sites compete for more precise and highly relevant search terms.
• Include your location. Obviously, someone wanting to remodel a kitchen isn’t seeking a contractor who is a plane ride or long drive away. If your business serves a geographic area, feature your location as a keyword. For example, “kitchen remodel on a budget in Seattle.”
• Get specific about your product or service. Instead of building your site around a term like “car repair,” build it around “Toyota car repair” to pull your target audience.

Luckily, free online tools help you out — especially these two from Google:

• Google Analytics: This free service through google.com/analytics provides an extensive look at your website traffic and traffic sources, including which terms are driving traffic to your site. Apply the findings as you plan site revisions and expansions.
• The Google Adwords Keyword Planner: This free tool shows the search popularity of keywords you’re considering. Just create a Google AdWords account at adwords.google.com (you don’t have to buy ads, just create an account), select “Tools and Analysis,” click “Keyword Planner,” click “Search for keyword and ad group ideas,” and follow the prompts to receive suggestions for key terms and phrases based on the word or term you entered. In a Google-provided example, a keyword search for “low-carb diet plan” leads to the terms “carb-free foods,” “low-carb diets,” low-calorie recipes,” Mediterranean diet plans,” and “low-carbohydrate dietary program.” This information is useful whether the site owner is creating content or selecting keywords for pay-per-click ads. (A web search for “using keyword planner” leads to all kinds of tips and advice.)

Self-promote your site

Don’t sit around waiting for people to find your website through search. Use every resource available to lead people to your site, beginning with the following approaches:

• Include your web address on business cards, letterhead, envelopes, note cards, invoices, order forms, estimates, and all other printed products.
• Include an invitation (and a reason) to visit your website in all your ads, brochures, news releases, presentations, displays, and also in your voicemail recording, on-hold messages, and email signature file.
• Feature your web address on your packaging and products.
• Post your website address on your business vehicles and signage.
• Link to your web address in all digital newsletters and content and include it in all news releases and contacts.
• Add a sharing function to your website to encourage visitor referrals.

The best way to self-promote your site is to get your site name, invitation, and reason to visit in front of those in your target audience. Chapter 11 is full of advice for interacting via social media, blogs, video, and content sharing. Chapter 12 is packed with information on getting the word out with advertising, direct mail and email, new and publicity, packaging, and promotions.