Author : Bharati Ahuja

In 2014 anyone serious about search and online presence needs to create an online persona and establish a brand online.

The way your brand presence is established is an offshoot of the SEO efforts put in by your SEO company.

We keep on analyzing the analytic reports and regularly focus on visits (Now Sessions) , unique visitors (Now called Users) , rankings, bounce rate, landing pages, search queries, etc to judge the SEO performance but SEO has another very important deliverable i.e ‘To Establish Your Brand Online’ with every footprint they help you create on the web.

The task of establishing the brand presence is not an independent task but is woven into the on-page, off-page and technical factors of the SEO deliverables.

Every little task performed by the SEO to make the SEO campaign successful helps to promote your brand or harms the brand presence.

10 Things To Check If Your SEO Is Establishing Your Brand Online

Do a brand name search and see the results. If the SEO campaign is in the right direction the search listings on the first page should be about the pages where your brand name is mentioned or is majorly correlated to. Many times it will show the social media pages of the company and of course the website/blog will be listed in SERPs

2. Use Google Alerts to monitor your brand.

Apply for Google Alerts for the brand name search and be notified whenever people mention the brand name on the web.

3. Check the analytics trend for branded search queries and keywords
Use the filter option in Google Analytics to find out the search queries and keywords which have the brand name included in.

 4. Check Sitelinks In SERPsDo a search for your brand name or your brand name + Your Country

If Google has allocated site links then the search results may be as above. The site links can be more in no. as seen below:

5. Schema For Logo And Address

Check if the logo schema has been added to the page . This helps in correlating the logo image of the company to the brand.

The code for logo should be as follows:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">
<a itemprop="url" href="http://www.example.com/">Home</a>
<img itemprop="logo" src="http://www.example.com/logo.png" />
</div>

The code for Address is as follows:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">

<span itemprop="name">Google Inc.</span>

P.O. Box<span itemprop="postOfficeBoxNumber">1234</span>

<span itemprop="addressLocality">Mountain View</span>,

<span itemprop="addressRegion">CA</span>

<span itemprop="postalCode">94043</span>

<span itemprop="addressCountry">United States</span>

</div>

6. Knowledge Graph

With the Knowledge Graph, Google is trying to make search more intelligent. The results are more relevant because the search engine understands these entities, and the nuances in their meaning, in the same way the user does. This makes the search engine "think" more like the user.
Knowledge Graph Example:

7. Local Search

Check if you have a presence on local search and for queries having a local intent. Search for your brand name or any targeted search query and your local area name and see if you have a presence on local search results.

8. Google Suggest Auto Complete

Check and see what the Google Auto Complete suggests for queries related to your brand. This reflects the reputation the brand is gathering and getting correlated to over a period of time on the web.

9. Publisher Markup

Publisher Markup should ideally be added to the home page of the blog and the Authorship Markup to the blog post pages. This gives due credit to the company and the authors of the blog.
This correlates the company logo and gets displayed in the SERPs when the home page URL of the blog is listed and the blog post pages when listed show the author image.Check this using the Rich Snippets Tool:

10. Social Media Account Page Designs

Check if the Social Media Account pages convey the brand message and display the logo clearly.Any genuine SEO will give priority to these aspects when working on the On-Page, Off-Page and Technical factors of SEO during an SEO Campaign and as a website owner your priority should be to check how your brand evolves on the web first and then check for other metrics.

Related Blog Posts :

In March 2011 we had written about The Importance Of Creating An Online Brand and in October 2013 we wrote about Content , Branding, Research and Strategy As The Root Of Any Internet Marketing Activity.

Author : Bharati Ahuja

If SEO , Social Media , Content Creation, hosting, etc. are all handled by different agencies with no clear strategic leader coordinating all these activities then there is a lot of confusion and chaos and the blame game begins when the ROI has to be calculated . Such a situation is not less than a catch22 situation.

In 2014 it is all the more challenging as each and every task is becoming more and more specialized and in order to run a decent size online business a team of minimum 3-5 people having specialized knowledge of design, development, SEO, online marketing and overall business sense is needed.

In order to chalk out a path of seamless customer online experience there are a no. of activities which need to work smoothly in the backend. The challenge lies in harnessing the benefits of all these activities so that it results in a cohesive force which will make the seamless customer experience run smoothly .

Businesses today are giving the importance to online presence and are also diverting existing staff to various functions to maintain the web presence but yet most of the businesses are doing so in bits and pieces.

The need of the hour is to manage all the activities for successful online presence in-house by having a dedicated team or outsource it to different specialized agencies by defining the scope of each agency very clearly and appointing a person in-house to co-ordinate with the different agencies to achieve holistic success or find a company which offers turnkey solutions and offers all these services under their hood.

Whoever is appointed to perform the tasks the focus should be on the execution, delivery and organizational transformation.

Today it is primarily necessary to:

· Fundamentally change the marketing operating model

· Build new skills internally

· Get aligned with the right set of partners

· Drive digital orientation throughout the enterprise

Its not only enough to develop a good website and hire SEO services but an overall online presence management is what is needed.

Wikipedia defines Internet Presence Management (IPM) and Online Presence Management (OPM) as follows:

Internet Presence Management (IPM) is comprehensive and progressive approach to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Social Media (SM), and other web based promotion methods. Internet Presence Management is the process of controlling or influencing the Web presence, or Internet-based channels of an organization or company, with the goal of increasing that entity's online presence and overall internet efficiency.

Online Presence Management is the process of presenting and drawing traffic to a personal or professional brand online. This process combines web design and development, blogging, search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, reputation management, directory listings, social media, link sharing, and other avenues to create a long-term positive presence for a person, organization, or product in search engines and on the web in general.

Whether you call it IPM or OPM being found by the people who are searching for the services offered by you plus reaching out to people who you think may need the services offered by you is the way to online success.

Just focusing on one activity is not enough and moreover the Online marketing scene keeps on changing at a very fast pace and every year we have new trends emerging unlike the traditional form of marketing where more than the trend it was the strategies which had to be kept on changing.The emerging online marketing trends are due to the technological changes and the improvements in the internet services which have reached even to the remote and not so developed places .

We have heard statements like Banner Ads. Are Dead, Email is Dead, SEO is Dead in the past years but despite all these claims we still see that these banner ads., email and SEO are still very much alive along with the fast emerging trends like social media.

So, when you have more no. of options available the right attitude, is to make the most of all that you are offered and wisely decide which method of marketing is more suitable for the kind of product or service your company offers.

Every form of marketing has got its strengths and weaknesses and the wise thing is to select a right mix for the best way to promote your product and protect your brand image.

The main challenge lies in integrating all types of media and working out a right strategy based on the location, mindset and the product or service concerned.

The major services required to have a digital presence today are:

1. Domain & Hosting Services

2. Web Design & Development Services

3. SEO – Organic Search & Local Search

4. PPC – Paid Search

5. Content Management

6. Web Analytics (Marketing Analytics & Customer insights/analytics)

7. Social Media Services (Execution & Monitoring)

8. Brand Strategy Development

9. Email Marketing (Especially for existing customer base)

10. Conversion Ratio Optimization (CRO)

11. Improving User Experience

12. Manage ROI

If all these services are offered by one company then minimum coordination is required but if all these services are offered by different companies and your business team has to coordinate with all these companies to achieve the desired online presence then it surely is a challenging task and many may result in a clash when the ROI from each service is calculated.

All the above mentioned activities are interconnected and directly or indirectly influence the search and overall web presence. Its not only about the marketing mix but the management of the marketing mix in such a way that the online and search presence are influenced in a positive way .

The business owner has to focus on the following to achieve the goal:

1. Collaborate with multiple partners/agencies

2. Ensure that the brand and business is understood by all these agencies correctly

3. The person appointed to coordinate and collaborate with all these agencies should have a technical and marketing background.

4. Claim the digital assets by having the login details and passwords created for digital presence

5. Should work on achieving integrated marketing effectiveness.

6. Should efficiently manage and allocate budgets for all the activities

7. Monitor the effective execution of all the activities.

8. Should take quick decisions whenever needed.

9. Effective communication during this coordination plays a key role in this whole scenario.

Needless to say that digital is here to stay and an effective web presence is undoubtedly going to lead to quality search presence. But, this turbulent webosphere along with the opportunities is also all the time posing challenges when it comes to managing it effectively to achieve the set goals.

These challenges faced while managing an optimum web presence is going to be the cause of a lot of frustration but the only solution is to keep pace with the ever changing nature of the web and face the turbulence by constantly updating yourself with the latest trends, creating and keeping in mind from the lessons learnt from the past mistakes made.