Personal branding is no new fad or trend - it has become an essential part of building a foundation for your business, especially for marketing and network purposes. In fact, personal branding is only going to increase in popularity and importance over the next few years. You may be wondering: is personal branding important? Well, here's your answer...

What is Personal Branding?

Personal branding is a tool that entrepreneurs use to cultivate trust and respect within their chosen field.

It's all about creating a brand identity for yourself, as a business owner or entrepreneur. This is a way to show your target audience who you are, what your values are, and how your USPs differ from your competitors. 

What Can Personal Branding Do for My Business?

Personal branding is quite a bit different to business marketing. Instead of having a marketing team on hand, you, as the business owner, will be at the forefront of your personal brand. 

It's all about showing off what you know to be influential within your industry and community - not to be cocky, but to have a positive effect on your target audience. 

By doing so, you will easily be able to establish a respected personal brand that will gain the confidence and trust of your peers and customers. 

Why is Personal Branding Important?

Truthfully, it is hard to engage people in the 21st century. With an endless stream of short-form content such as Instagram Reels and TikTok videos, it can often be hard to make a lasting impression on anyone over social media. 

Nevertheless, it is still incredibly important. More important than ever before, in fact. 

If you manage to get your brand identity to stick in the mind of your target audience, your brand identity will become solid and memorable to them, putting you ahead of your competitors. 

5 Reasons to Trust Personal Branding for Your Business

1. It's an opportunity to set your business apart from the crowd

2. It will open business and networking opportunities

3. You will gain your target audience's trust and respect

4. You control your own narrative as the business owner 

5. You can give yourself the credit you deserve as a business owner, whilst educating others! 

Our Favourite Examples of Personal Branding: 

• Charlie Marie: Designer, Writer and Content Creator

• Gary Vaynerchuk: E-commerce Giant

• Roberto Blake: Creative Entrepreneur
  

Give it a Go...

If you don’t feel confident enough to start your personal branding journey just yet, or need some advice and guidance, get in touch to see how we can help you make your online presence more prominent with personal branding for business.

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SEO for ecommerce websites can be a challenging feat. Building a long lasting SEO strategy that delivers results for your online business requires a lot of constant work and it can be daunting even to the most experienced of ecommerce websites. It's especially challenging when you consider that every ecommerce site is trying to improve SEO rankings for all of their products too. It's even more daunting when you consider your competitors are implementing the same ecommerce SEO tips to grab customers. Thankfully, there's a reason for this; following these tips all work! 

Ranking on page 1 of Google or Bing is not as simple as it might sound - especially if your products are very popular e.g. mobile phones. Improving your website's SEO ranking may seem impossible, but with a little work and effort, you should hopefully see your website grow and get more traffic. 

The fundamental requirements to rank well are a high-quality, user-friendly, very fast and mobile-friendly website. Once you have these in order, you can then utilise the following techniques to improve your ecommerce website SEO. With that being said, let's dive into our SEO tips for ecommerce websites:

If your website is built on an old platform, loads slowly or is not secure, then you need to address these issues before wasting time trying to optimise your site any further. Here are some tools for testing the quality of your website:

• Mobile Friendly Test

• Page Speed Insights

• Mobile Page Speed Test

• Website Speed Test

Now, let’s go ahead and assume you have a good quality ecommerce website and you just want to focus on the further optimisations. Below you will find our ecommerce SEO tips that will help improve your SEO ranking. 

Research and use unique keywords per page

You can and should research keywords for your industry, products, services, etc. Find out how your potential customer searches for your products or service by utilising tools like:

• Keyword Planner

• Google Trends

• Answer the Public (for long-tail keywords) 

Once you have your list of keywords it’s a good idea to map each keyword phrase to a specific page on your eCommerce website. For this, we would recommend that you use a spreadsheet as it can get lengthy and disorganised unless in some sort of manageable order. 

Now, a big no-no in the world of optimisation is duplication, whether that’s duplicate paragraphs or just duplicate keywords. If you’re targeting the same keyword with multiple pages then Google will likely choose to only display one of those pages in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), which may mean you miss out on opportunities to be seen. Look for unique opportunities to target search terms. Targeting unique and specific phrases is an easy way to avoid duplicates and improve your ecommerce SEO.  

For example, let’s say that you have an ecommerce website that sells safety harnesses. You could just label all of the products a “safety harness” and still be factually correct, but the chances are you likely have a “Climbing Harness”, a “Rescue Harness”, a “Fall Arrest Harness” and so forth. Therefore, in order to capitalise on a wider number of searches, you should first find out how your customers search for safety harnesses. Look at how they phrase their search and even the types of questions they ask surrounding that product. The next step is to make sure you address each of those searches with a page for that product, using the keyword phrase that you’ve identified. 

I know the question you’re about to ask... in those examples, isn’t the word harness repeated? Well-spotted. Yes, it is, but rest assured that Google is not that pedantic and will be able to tell the difference in your meaning (they’re quite clever in that way). Duplication is usually picked up from repetition of the same words in the same format. So, if you try to rank 2 pages for the keyword “Rescue Safety Harness” then you would be better off setting the copy on one page as “Confined Space Harness” and the other as “Rescue Safety Harness”. This way, Google will see the difference and potentially rank both pages, whereas if both are just set as the latter then it is highly likely that only 1 of those pages will be indexed. Not only do you avoid duplication, but you also give your customers more accurate search terms. Google and Bing prioritise accurate web-pages that fulfill the searcher's needs, so by providing specific pages without duplication is a great way to improve SEO rankings and keep your customers happy! 

Ecommerce websites quite often have hundreds of pages for each of their products, so this may seem like a tedious task. However, you should see this as an opportunity to rank for hundreds of different keywords. If you optimise your copy well enough, you may find your website reaches first page positions for a wide range of searches, which will result in much higher volumes of traffic.

Depending on the amount of copy on the page, it is usually recommended to stick to just one keyword per product page. This will allow you to target that keyword more efficiently, than if you were attempting to target multiple keywords at once. If you are instead writing a category page or a home page which usually has more content, you can try to target 2 or 3 keywords if you feel it’s necessary.

Ensure every page has a unique title tag/meta description

When looking at the SERPs, your title tag is your first opportunity to get your consumers attention. The meta description is then the snippet of information which will convince your consumers to click through to the website. This is why it is so important to get these aspects right to improve ecommerce SEO. 

Google specifies that it is ‘important to have distinct, descriptive titles for each page of your site’. This is because it needs to be clear to the consumer what that page entails and shouldn’t be too similar to a page displaying an entirely different product. It is also important to try and include your chosen keyword in your page title and meta tag as this will clearly show Google what your page is about. 

Google recommends branding your titles with your company name, but this is optional and certainly doesn’t have to be done on every page. We recommend including this at the end of the title if you have enough space for it (we recommend no more than 63 characters including spaces), and also separate it with a delimiter such as a hyphen, colon or pipe. This means a good title tag will look something like this:

SEO Tips for Ecommerce Websites | Designer Websites

Your meta description also needs to clearly explain what your page is about in a couple of sentences. In previous years, meta descriptions were only allowed to be around 160 characters before they were truncated by Google. Now, new SERP changes mean meta descriptions can now be displayed up to 278 characters. This should be more than enough length to include at least one instance of your keyword and create a unique and concise description of the contents of the page. 

Utilise an integrated blog to improve your SEO rankings

A blog on your e-commerce website is not only good for keeping your customers updated, it’s a great way to target more keywords. When you’re planning each page of your website and choosing unique keywords, there are sure to be a few that don’t make the cut. These can be targeted with blog posts. Blogs are also ideal for responding to trending topics such as news stories without updating the whole of your website. It's important to note search engines particularly respond well to accurate and recent data. Do not underestimate how much keeping a blog for your eCommerce site and improve your website's SEO ranking. 

Plan ahead and write blog posts around these keywords in an attempt to bring more users through to the website. Try to provide informative content which will help your customers in some respect. This will not only help bring customers to the website, it will also create a level of trust between your company and the consumer. Trust is a great way to improve SEO rankings of web-pages. The more reliably you can answer a customer's query, the more trust and authority your web-page will get, which will improve your SEO ranking. We know it's a lot to produce weekly, even daily content on a blog, but there's a reason it's a tried and tested way to improve eCommerce SEO. 

Another way blog posts can be utilised is to try and achieve the ‘featured snippet’ on the Google SERPs. Even if you’ve not heard of featured snippets before, you’ve most likely come across one. This is the result that usually appears at the top when you ask google a question.

Here’s an example:

To achieve a featured snippet, you need to answer the question better than anyone else. It needs to be clear to Google that you have answered the question as accurately and concisely as possible. That means getting straight to the point and no filler writing (or keyword stuffing).

Featured snippets have been referred to as search position #0 as they come above the search position #1. It has also been found that achieving the featured snippet can increase traffic to your ecommerce website by as much as 500%, in some cases.

Utilising your blog to target keywords and attempt to achieve the featured snippet is a great way of increasing traffic to your website and improving your SEO ranking.

We hope these SEO tips for ecommerce websites have helped you plan your next steps in the digital marketing world. If you are looking for professional help with your ecommerce website, then please get in touch anytime. 

Silver Fern Therapy provide a variety of services across England and Wales, including:

• Locum wheelchair therapists for clinics, nursing homes, etc.
• Wheelchair assessments to help wheelchair users get the right chair for their requirements
• Ergonomic consultants to help companies design and manufacture people-friendly products

Silver Fern recently contacted us because they needed a functional, professional-looking brochure website through which to advertise these services. That website - designed, developed and optimised by the team here at Designer Websites - went live earlier this week, and you can view it here: www.silverferntherapy.co.uk

In addition to the responsive design that we created for Silver Fern Therapy, we also provided the following:

• Enquiry forms that make it easy for visitors to enquire about the company's various services
• CV upload option that allows therapists to apply for work
• Blog engine, allowing the Silver Fern team to publish news and updates with ease
• Search engine optimisation, targeting a range of relevant keywords

Do you need a user-friendly website for your business? Click here to request a quote from Designer Websites.

by Alana Spencer, Ridiculously Rich founder and BBC Apprentice winner 2016

Many inspirational business success stories start with humble beginnings, and my handmade cake business is a textbook example of how something small can grow into something huge.

Ridiculously Rich (or Narna's Cakes, as it was known in the early days) started in the kitchen of my parents' home in Aberystwyth. Inspired by a chocolate-making book given to me by my mum, I began whipping up my own sweet treats when I was still in my teens, and after some early success selling homemade cakes and chocolates to my friends I felt compelled to take things further. I would make all sorts of tray bakes - brownies, rocky road, that kind of thing - and sell them at local markets and other events in Ceredigion and the nearby area. This proved to be a good way of making money, and people seemed to like what I was offering - so much so, in fact, that I was eventually asked to supply a couple of local shops with goodies to sell!

From there, my business grew and grew. As you may be aware, Ridiculously Rich is now co-owned by Lord Sugar, who invested £250,000 to help grow the company into a nationwide success. When I became the latest BBC Apprentice winner, I think a lot of people were surprised by Lord Sugar's decision to invest in what began as a small homemade cake business, but his faith in me is already paying off, and with our regional ambassadors now representing the Ridiculously Rich brand all over the UK there are even bigger and better things still to come.

While Narna's Cakes started out as a grassroots, do-it-yourself sort of enterprise with little to no online visibility, the Internet has been crucial in getting the business to its current level, and our online efforts will continue to form a very important part of Ridiculously Rich's future success. Modern technology - the hyper-connectedness, via the Internet, of everyone and everything - makes it easier than ever to grow a small business into a big success; no matter where you live or what sort of niche you occupy, there are all kinds of opportunities now available to people who know how to seize them.

I hope that these tips will inspire you and help your business (whatever that might be) to reach new heights online.

1. Start with a winning website.

Your website is the foundation - the hub, if you like - for all your online marketing efforts, so it's important to get it properly spot-on before attempting to score big wins elsewhere. Things like Wordpress make it easy for IT novices to create nice-looking websites nowadays, but there's still a lot to be said for going to a bespoke web development agency and working with them to create a truly professional site for your business. An experienced pro will know how to:

• Create a fast-loading, smooth-functioning website that users will love (and you'll find a doddle to manage)
• Represent you and your brand in the best possible way online
• Get your pages ranked highly on Google and other search engines

2. Think carefully about keywords.

The Internet runs on keywords.  If you want people to find your website on Google, Bing, and other search sites, you need to think very carefully about the words and phrases that you want to show up for. One good approach is to make a big list of all the search terms that you think are relevant to your business - my own version of that list, for example, might look something like this:

• handmade cakes
• salted caramel slice
• buy chocolate brownies online
• baked goods

And so on. Once you've got a list of keywords covering every aspect of your business (every product you sell, every service you provide, all the different words people might use, etc.), paste that list into a tool like Google's Keyword Planner to find out how popular each keyword is. Use the most searched-for phrases on appropriate pages of your website, ensuring that each keyword is represented on one page only - if done properly, this will get your site showing as a result for each of the terms you targeted.

This is another area where it's a good idea to consult a professional web developer - they will have a good grasp of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and know exactly how to fine-tune your website in order to maximise your chance of ranking highly within Google's results. Beware, however - many of the companies out there claiming to be optimisation experts are actually just salespeople looking to make easy money. Make sure you ask them for examples of times where they improved a client's traffic and sales, and don't be afraid to ask for a reference from the customers they name.

3. Be seen on social media!

Google isn't the only tool people use to find things on the Internet - social media, too, can be a huge driver of leads, purchases, and brand awareness. There are many different social media platforms to choose from (Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest...) and while some people manage to do well across all of them, it's generally a better idea to pick the handful of social platforms that best suit your business and focus your energy on them.

For instance, if you sell very aesthetically appealing products, it might be a good idea to promote them on Pinterest, whereas a less visual business may do better by joining conversations on Twitter and advertising their professional credentials on LinkedIn. Snapchat and Instagram are good for sharing photos/videos of the inner workings of your company, while Facebook pages are great for collecting customer reviews and interacting with your audience via messages and comments.

Whichever social site you choose, be sure to stay active once you've set your account up. If a potential customer searches for your business and finds a Twitter feed that hasn't been updated for months - or a Facebook page on which people's questions are going unanswered - this may damage that customer's perception of your organisation.

4. Think outside the box

But OK - all of your competitors have websites, all of them are on Twitter, and all of them are going after more or less the same Google keywords. What can you do to really distinguish yourself from the other businesses in your industry?

Once you've established your business online, there are all kinds of different ways to grow your business. All you need is an idea! This could be an unusual, attention-grabbing social media campaign that portrays your brand in a good light, or it could be a huge business initiative that leverages the Internet's ability to connect people across huge distances. Whatever you come up with, the infrastructure to do it almost certainly already exists online. You may need some help from your web developer to turn your ideas into realities, but don't worry - a good developer will always be up to the challenges you set them!

Here's one example. As mentioned above, Lord Sugar and I recently started selecting regional ambassadors to represent the Ridiculously Rich brand at food festivals, farmers' markets, and other local events across the UK. Would-be ambassadors apply online, and if they're selected, we send them everything they'll need to set up their very own Ridiculously Rich stall and sell our cakes in their area. By promoting this money-making opportunity online, we're able to reach eager cake lovers in every corner of the country, and each approved ambassador gets their own dashboard on the Ridiculously Rich website to help them manage everything. This initiative has already proved hugely popular, and it looks set to grow even more over the coming months!

5. Provide the best possible service at all times.

While it is possible for businesses to achieve massive growth via online marketing avenues, that growth is often accompanied by a decline in quality. When you've got a bricks-and-mortar shop that only serves people who walk through the door, it's relatively easy to ensure that each customer has a good experience; when you're serving thousands of people online and sending your products all over the world, it's far harder to maintain that high standard.

As your business gets bigger, you'll inevitably have to accept that some things are simply out of your hands. However, there are a few things you can do to ensure that your reputation doesn't suffer as everything else builds up:

• Keep an eye on your website. If people are interacting with your website instead of an actual company representative, it's up to you to ensure that your site is doing a good job. Be sure to look at the site on a regular basis to make sure that nothing has gone wrong; you may also want to register your site with Google Search Console, as this will inform you if there are any issues that may affect user experience and/or Google rankings.
  
  
• Choose your courier wisely. Do you send products to your customers through the post? If so, it's crucial to select a courier / delivery service that will do you proud. Above all, the two factors that will most affect the customer's lasting impression of your business are 1) whether their order arrived on time, and 2) whether it arrived in good condition. This is partially up to you, of course - you're responsible for ensuring that everything is packaged properly and posted promptly - but all your hard work may be spoiled if you leave the final stage of the ordering process in the hands of someone who's happy to let your customers down. Be sure to do your research - other companies will have left reviews online to help you avoid shoddy services.
  
  
• Handle any complaints in a speedy, polite, and helpful manner. Just about every business gets the occasional complaint or bad review - it's not the end of the world. In fact, it's possible to turn a negative comment into something positive if you (or the person you've appointed to interact with customers) handle the situation properly. Be polite and apologetic and do your best to resolve the problem in any way you can. Your aim should be to make the unhappy person happy, but if you can't do that, you can at least demonstrate to other people who read the bad review that you take customer satisfaction seriously and don't take complaints lying down.

The team at Designer Websites, who I've been working with recently, gave me a lot of great insight into the world of doing business online and how to do it properly. If you're keen to grow your business online, I would definitely recommend them!