Without an adequately calibrated SEO effort, small brands find themselves at a huge disadvantage. If your brand does not attempt to compete with a given set of niches for dominance in search results, then it is bound to be hidden to a large number of people who would otherwise value what it has to say or offer. While some niches – particularly local small businesses – may have an easier time at being automatically seen by Google and others, brands that do not have a natural and small geographic relevance will struggle if their efforts are not refined. Because of this, it’s important to avoid the most obvious of mistakes. We’ll talk about these mistakes below so that you can avoid making them.

Using Weak Content

New small businesses and brands with a web presence that needs to be grown have to invest carefully and substantially into content creation. In years past, thin content was acceptable so long as it had the proper amount of keywords and other optimization tactics embedded within it. Google now carefully analyses content not just for quantity but also for quality, meaning that any content that doesn’t provide inherent value to the user will be seen as irrelevant. This, in turn, will affect your rankings. Google and other search engines also monitor elements such as bounce rates (how many people leave your site quickly), which may be indicative of irrelevant or poorly-constructed content in their eyes.

Incorrect Contact Information

The contact information distributed about you across the web can help make it easier for people to find you, or make it more difficult by conflicting with other sources. Name, address and phone number (often referred to as NAP) will inevitably propagate across the web in a variety of ways. You will have it listed on your website and on social media profiles, and from there, it will be spread by crawlers and bots that are pinging links to a variety of other directories and websites. Whenever your information changes, you must be proactive in ensuring it is updated across all platforms. In addition, not having this information listed on your website or in social media profiles will seriously hamper other people’s ability to find you or contact you through other means (it will also hurt your local SEO efforts).

Failing to Promote Reviews

You are not allowed to obligate your customers or visitors to leave reviews for you on other sites, but you can be sure to encourage they do so! Failing to promote review options to your visitors and customers will weaken your long-term position in search, as businesses and brands with reviews feature more prominently in search. Through sites like Google Plus, Foursquare, Yelp and others, you can build a reputation for your brand as one that can be trusted and embraced by conscious consumers, readers and subscribers alike.

Conclusion

In order to get the most out of your brand’s potential, you need to be sure to avoid pitfalls that may arise during its development. By pinging links in the form of reviews to search engines, providing and/or correcting contact information and using solid content in your website’s structure, you’ll avoid three of the several major mistakes that brands all too often make.