5 tips to improve your branding

Branding is an essential aspect of your marketing strategy. If you develop an awesome branding strategy, people will get to know your brand, your company, and your website. In this post, I will first explain what branding is and why it can help you with your SEO. After that, I’ll give 5 practical tips you can use to improve your own branding strategy.

What is branding?

Branding is the process of creating a clear, unique image of your product or your company. Your audience should be able to recognize your brand. Whether it is a post on Facebook, your newsletter or the product section on your website, the image of your brand should be uniform.

Branding is hard. In order to set up a successful branding strategy, you should first have a clear vision in mind what your brand is about: What is your mission? What values are important? Which style fits your brand (formal/informal)? What does your preferred audience look like?

Why is branding important for SEO?

If you set up a high-quality branding strategy, optimizing your site for search engines will become much easier. It increases the chances that your preferred audience will get to know your brand name. Your brand name could then become an incentive to click on your link in the search results (even if you’re not in the top three!). And, if you do your branding really well, people will start searching for your brand as well. It’ll be far easier to rank for your brand, than for a lot of other search terms.

In order to help you to set up a successful branding strategy yourself, I will share 5 practical tips:

Tip 1: Stay consistent

The most important thing when it comes to branding is to stay consistent. Develop a certain style and stick with it! Design a logo, and stick with it! Phrase your mission and stick with it! If you are consistent in the way you present your brand to your audience,  people will eventually start to remember and to recognize your brand.

Tip 2: Phrase a tagline and make it visible

Your tagline phrases the most important message about your brand or your product in a single sentence. Make sure it stands out on your website. You can, for instance, place a tagline below your brand name. The tagline of Yoast is: SEO for everyone.

If possible, try to make your taglines clear and appealing, and have a clear picture of your audience as you’re deciding on your tagline. Use a few words to clearly describe what your site’s all about. It can help to use verbs and sentences that imply an action for the visitor, to activate them. Depending on your site and business, you could also decide to show your personality in your tagline, for instance using wordplay or a pun to make it catchy (keep it clear and don’t overdo it, though).

Tip 3: Use images

Images are a very important aspect of your branding strategy. You can use pictures and illustrations on your website, in your newsletter, on Facebook or in (printed) advertisements.  Of course, you should make sure your images fit your brand. If you sell ballet shoes, you should probably not use pictures of wild animals in the jungle. You’ll want to use pictures that express elegance and grace.

If you consistently pick illustrations and photos that fit your brand, your audience will eventually recognize and remember your brand from simply looking at your pictures. At Yoast, we work with two illustrators in order to make unique illustrations that give the Yoast feel to our audience.

If you use your own photos, you could try to develop a consistent style. You can, for instance, make sure all your pictures have the same dimensions, use a similar way of editing or use similar pictures. For example, when sharing posts on Facebook, we always put a text bar on our images. We include the title of our post and the Yoast writer of the post author. That ensures consistency for all of our Facebook posts.

Tip 4: Use your brand name

Make sure your brand name will become familiar to your audience. That means you should use that brand name! Perhaps you can use your brand name in one of your products like we do in Yoast SEO. Make sure to use your brand name in your newsletter and in your (Facebook) posts. People should hear and read your brand name regularly!

Your logo is of great importance to your branding strategy. Branding is more than designing an awesome logo, though (that’s why this is the final tip and not the first one I share). Ideally, your logo should stand out. It should be something people recognize without any context. Designing a logo doesn’t have to be too expensive. Go check out 99designs or Looka for instance!

Once you have a kickass logo, make sure to use it! Present it to your audience: on your website, in your newsletter, on Facebook: everywhere! Don’t forget to use it as favicon for your website. A while ago, Google added favicons to mobile search results. It has been experimenting with showing them for desktop results, too. You can imagine it’s good for your visibility if your logo is included in the results pages, as favicon.

The colors you choose for your logo are of great importance as well. Make sure to use these colors consistently: in your newsletter, on your website, in images. If you use the same colors everywhere, they’ll become part of your brand. People will recognize your brand simply by looking at the colors in your newsletter or in your Facebook post.

Conclusion

If you develop a successful branding strategy, people will remember and recognize your brand. In the long run, your logo or brand name will be something that immediately evokes (positive) emotions. As people get more familiar with your brand, your SEO will get easier as well. Therefore, combining your SEO strategy with an awesome branding strategy is the way to go!

Read more: Positioning your shop in the online market »

Coming up next!


21 Responses to 5 tips to improve your branding

  1. Ishan
    Ishan  • 5 years ago

    staying consistent with beautiful images and videos can create good brand image. Thanks for this info Yoast.

  2. Raj Singh
    Raj Singh  • 5 years ago

    Really great article and awesome guide. Branding is one of the most important factors for SEO. I am improving some aspects of that such as using my brand name everywhere. Anyways thanks for sharing such a piece of great information.

    • Willemien Hallebeek
      Willemien Hallebeek  • 5 years ago

      You’re welcome, Raj! Good to hear you’re working on your branding, good luck!

  3. Ben Yola
    Ben Yola  • 5 years ago

    Branding is a unique selling proposition that makes you different from your competitors. It gives memorable impressions to your customers what they expect from your products or service offered. It has a long term effect on your overall online marketing strategies.

    In addition, branding helps you discover, learn, grow, get attention, build trust and attract long shot customers. I have learned this idea through my 5 years of experience in Digital marketing. truth to be told, it’s essential for every business.

    Ben – Adimpact.com.au

    • Willemien Hallebeek
      Willemien Hallebeek  • 5 years ago

      Well said, Ben!

  4. Brynt C Barney
    Brynt C Barney  • 5 years ago

    Awesome info, getting a website seen in the ocean of the internet is a challenge. Thanks!

  5. Jack Shawn
    Jack Shawn  • 5 years ago

    I think images and videos are very important for marketing. Customers are attracted mainly by images and catchy videos. They are very important for your branding as well.

  6. Alessio
    Alessio  • 5 years ago

    Couldn’t agree more, branding is definitely important and often undervalued with websites.

  7. Jyoti
    Jyoti  • 5 years ago

    Well written content. For branding, I am following these tips that has helped me build recognition for my blog. However, I want to add another point to this Blog. Using brand name and logo helps you maintain your clean image on the internet as someone can easily impersonate your brand, in your absence.

    • Willemien Hallebeek
      Willemien Hallebeek  • 5 years ago

      Good point, Jyoti, thanks!

  8. Best Nepal Trek
    Best Nepal Trek  • 5 years ago

    This is the great news I like Yost SEO so I just made my own company website and using free SEO but I am thinking about the premium packages which can help my business.
    Thanks to know us Yost everything.
    Best Nepal Trek

  9. Mandy
    Mandy  • 5 years ago

    WHAT… AN… AWESOME… POST! Well done ?

    I plan to start a company and this post has definitely helped me.

    Thank you for your hard work.

    Mandy

    • Hanneke
      Hanneke  • 5 years ago

      Thank you, Mandy! Great to hear that it helped you. Good luck with your company!

  10. Zola Johnson
    Zola Johnson  • 5 years ago

    Thank you for touching on this point for our online business. Branding is something I’ve been working on, since I started my own blog. However, I sometimes stumble to focus on what’s important to develop a strong branding. But now, I am improving some aspects of that such as using my brand name everywhere. There is always room for improvement. Thanks again! This article was very useful.

  11. Joseph Mwangi
    Joseph Mwangi  • 5 years ago

    Marieke you are very clear in you articles, you simplify the technical details in a way beginners understand easily. I have failed in maintaining consistency in promoting my brand especially the use of my logo. I appreciate what Yoast has been to me in my SEO. Most of what I know largely I have learnt from Yoast. Yoast has been of great help in optimizing my website. I use Yoast Premium which has made my work very easy.

  12. Friedrich Hans
    Friedrich Hans  • 5 years ago

    Really great guide. right now I’m doing SEO for a website but I’m planning on starting my own leather products site. I was planning on the logo extra carefully because I know that it has great importance in representing your products. After reading this article I’m certain now. This guide was helpful in both situations (Current & Future) for me. Thanks! :)

  13. Jades
    Jades  • 5 years ago

    Really an amazing and helpful blog dear sir. I am new in the field of SEO and i must say that your blogs are helping me a lot. Can you please share some tips for me as a fresher. Thanking you in advance.

    • Iporich
      Iporich  • 5 years ago

      Thanks for this, the main issue am having is that I hardly find my website on Google page, mean while, all my Yoast SEO post are green and good, still doesn’t find my post on Google search, and by the way, I have indexed it with Google search Console and also submitted site map..
      How can you help me?

    • Hanneke
      Hanneke  • 5 years ago

      Hi Jades,
      Here you can find anything about the SEO basics: https://yoast.com/tag/seo-basics/
      Good luck