Branding your website is a synonym of quality. It conveys a certain level of trust. Just think about the clothes you are wearing. If you buy a pair of Nike shoes, you know what quality you will get.
What I cover here is very basic and overlooked by a lot of website owners.
Google Loves Brands
Google loves brands and places them higher in their search results. In fact Google calls the internet a cesspool and says brands are the solution.
One reason is the trust level – trusted websites get ranked higher. The other reason is lack of spam – if someone owns a brand, they are very unlikely to mess it up with spam. You don’t get any spam from Apple, do you?
Name Recognition
Brands also carry a certain name recognition. There is a certain concept that comes into everyone’s mind when you mention a brand. This works for things other than products or services though. Just think about what comes in your mind when you hear the word Florida. You immediately think about sunshine, good weather, ocean, vacation. The Sunshine State. This becomes a standard solution when someone thinks about taking a vacation.
Now think about your niche for a moment. What is the site that has similar name recognition? The one that everyone knows? Branded websites also carry authority and a link from them can boost your search ranking.
This is what you need to achieve with your website. You need to brand it to get maximum benefits.
How To Brand Your Website
Domain Name
First of all you need a great domain name that is brandable. This may or may not have anything to do with your main keyword. Short and memorable are key.
Logo
You also need a good logo. Logos are attached to all great brands. You can get started without a logo, but eventually you will need one.
Your logo is one of the first things people notice when they visit a website and is a key part of your brand identity.
It pays to invest in a good logo design. You can use an online logo designer site or hire a Freelancer.
Tagline
Then you need to make up a concise sentence, a slogan that sums up what your website does.
It’s a good idea to have your logo with a tagline so that visitors know at a glance what your site is about.
It also needs to be catchy and best if it refers to a problem it solves, an advantage that immediately attracts its target audience.
For example, this website is the site where you can find out how to “Build A Profitable Sales Funnel”.
I invite you to work out a similar sentence, a slogan for your own website. You may not be immediately be able to do this, you may need to chew it a little bit until you get one that you are perfectly happy with.
Colors
We all know that colors are connected with certain emotions and behaviors by viewers.
Before you randomly select colors, think about your brand identity and values. Translate these to basic emotions (‘energetic’, ‘optimistic’, ‘serious’, etc.,). With those emotions in mind, find colors that transmit your values.
Values & Purpose
Your brand should come from your “Why”—meaning, why your company exists.
Along with conveying the values, your brand should communicate the benefits to your customers and your unique selling position.
Consistency
Have you ever seen WalMart change its slogan? Or GoDaddy selling something else than domains and hosting?
Who wants to give their money to a business that behaves shifty, unreliable? If a company does not seem to know its own purpose or identity, it won’t inspire trust in its prospects and customers. That’s why consistency is crucial when it comes to building a brand.
Promote Your Brand Everywhere
Once you have it, you start to promote this everywhere, even after you are completely sick of saying it. Have it in your emails, on your Facebook page, on Twitter, in your webinars, on other blogs where you put guest posts. You want everyone to remember you and your site by this one sentence. This way, when someone says, “I need to buy a nice domain, but they are so expensive,” the other guy will say, “Go to Expired.Domains.com, they have premium quality domains at the fraction of the price.” Do you see how this works? Such recommendations are the best source of your sales.
Branding Increases Your Site’s Value
Branding is one of the reasons a domain’s price can go sky high. It is a great way to increase your website’s value for the time you want to sell it.
Apple didn’t become Apple by accident. It became what it is by a planned marketing campaign. They shaped the audience’s opinion and you need to do the same with the opinion of your audience.
Of course this doesn’t happen overnight, but the first step is to create that sentence, put it on your site and promote it everywhere. But this is how eventually your site will become an authority site and this is how you will get laser targeted traffic that converts well.
Achieving Brand Awareness
The way you achieve awareness of your brand (and yourself) is by producing something extraordinary.
This can be a product, a software, but it can also be extremely high quality content.
Then you get this out through social media, and bit by bit, people will start to recognize you.
You will start to develop social authority.
People will start typing in your brand into search, and that is the point where Google will also know and will start to give you more exposure.
