Developing a strong brand and visual identity is important if you want to stand out from the crowd, reach the right people, and make as many sales as possible. In this post, I am going to show you 6 ways branding and design can affect your content and SEO efforts. Read on to find out more.
Professional and relevant branding will show you’re trustworthy
If your branding looks professional and reflects what your business does, you’ll find it much easier to earn the trust of website visitors and search engines. Professional branding can also reduce your website’s bounce rate, as people are more likely to stay on a site that looks legitimate.
Plus, search engines like Google put a lot of focus on E-A-T — expertise, authority, and especially trustworthiness — which means having quality branding can boost your search engine rankings.
The first step towards ensuring your branding looks professional and relevant to your business is to clearly define who you are and what you stand for. You want to consider key factors like your values, mission, brand personality, and tone of voice. Once you have these all figured out, it will make it easier for you to select design elements for your brand.
These design elements will affect your logo, packaging, web design, social media graphics, and any visible content created by your brand. Your logo design should be simple, visually appealing, and able to communicate who you are as a brand.
Here are some examples of companies that have professional and strong branding, which you can take some inspiration from.
Thiessen Law Firm provides a wide range of legal services and helps people with family law, child custody, DWI, criminal, and personal injury cases.
The brand’s logo features two gavels, which you would see a judge use in a courtroom, so it immediately makes it clear that you’ve arrived on the website of a law firm. Plus, they’ve used a serif font, which you typically see used in more formal settings, giving an air of professionalism.
They have also used a simple but professional color palette, which includes colors like white, red, and black, which gives the sense that they’re serious about their work. All of this plays a part in ensuring that people view them as a professional and capable brand that can help with any legal issues their prospective customers might be having.
As a business owner, there’s a lot you can learn from them. If you provide services that are more on the serious side, consider using a strong but simple color palette, professional-looking fonts, and a brand logo that really reflects what you do. It’s subtle, but it can help to establish your business as a trustworthy and professional brand.
Let’s also check out the branding of Best Value Schools, a website that helps prospective students to find their next course and university.
What makes their branding great is how relevant it is to their industry. For their logo, they’ve used the colors blue and orange, which are often associated with education and even seen on the graduation caps and gowns of graduates. Also, their branding and website have a clean and simple design, which gives off a professional feel and is sure to help earn the trust of their target audience. This is incredibly important, as their aim is to help prospective students choose their next step in life, which is always a huge decision.
Let’s also take a look at the branding of FreshBooks, an online accounting software provider that helps small businesses to manage their ingoings and outgoings.
On their free invoice templates page, the first thing you’ll spot is the industry-appropriate brand colors that they’ve chosen to use. The color blue is commonly used in the financial world as it is associated with values such as integrity, trust, and stability. FreshBooks has used this colour in their simple logo and on their website as well. This helps maintain consistency and makes the company’s branding more recognizable.
If you are trying to do the same for your business, then you should pay attention to their simple and minimalist design that makes it easy for users to find what they are looking for. Also, the consistent use of a professional brand colour can help align your business with your industry.
Consistent branding will make your content more recognizable
When people spot a piece of content, whether it’s a social media post, an infographic, or an excerpt of a blog post, you want them to be able to recognize it’s yours straight away. One of the most powerful ways to ensure this is with consistent branding.
When you’re devising your branding, the first thing you need to consider is your brand colors. Not only will choosing the right ones help to differentiate your brand from all the others, but it can also evoke strong emotions from your target audience, so you’ll want to choose wisely. For instance, red stands for passion and energy, yellow is usually associated with excitement, and green means prosperity or growth.
Your fonts should also be legible and consistent. Try to keep it simple by choosing just two or three that you love and will use for everything.
Lastly, you need to decide on your brand’s tone of voice. This refers to the distinct personality that your business adopts in its communications. Some brands make use of a professional and mellow tone, while others tend to be more upbeat. It all depends on the type of business you are running and how you want customers to perceive you.
It is important that you keep your branding consistent across all platforms, as this can help make your content more recognizable. To do this, you want to create brand guidelines for your marketing department and any other team members so your content stays consistent regardless of who is creating it. These guidelines should contain marketing assets like logos, product images, social media templates, and color guides.
More awareness of your brand will boost your authority and SEO
Increasing awareness of your brand will help you to establish authority in your field. Not only will this help you to earn the trust of your target audience, but it can also give your SEO a boost. Remember that Google uses E-A-T as a ranking factor, so having authority in your field can help to ensure search engines rank your products, services, and content higher.
One way you can improve your brand awareness is with your logo or branding. You can do this by adding your logo to everything you do as a brand. For instance, if you build a partnership with another brand, you should ensure that your logo is placed on their website with a hyperlink back to your site. You can also add your logo to content you publish on your social media and ensure your email content displays your branding.
The more you can get your logo and branding out there, the better, so make sure you incorporate them into everything you do to raise awareness of what you do.
Strong branding will make your content more engaging
Incorporating your branding into your website content can make it a lot more engaging. Making your content more engaging holds many benefits for your business. It can make your content more shareable, which could lead to backlinks that will boost your SEO. It will also motivate people to spend more time on your website, which will signal to search engines that you’re a good source of information. Lastly, people will have a better experience on your website if you create engaging content, and this could lead to more sales. SEO professionals emphasize that a strong brand presence not only builds authority but also enhances your website’s visibility in search engine results.
Some tips for making your content more engaging with your branding are:
- Use a tone of voice that matches your brand’s personality and identity
- Think about who your customers are and the type of branding elements that can attract and retain their attention
- Use catchy and lively colours that can attract your audience
Providing a good UX with your web design will benefit your SEO
If people don’t have a great user experience when they land on your website, they won’t stay for long and this could cause you to miss out on leads and potential sales.
Plus, search engines only want to send their users to websites they will enjoy using, so a good UX can also have an impact on your SEO. Here are some tips to ensure that people have a great experience on your site:
- Ensure you have created a clean and easy-to-use navigation
- Make sure your site loads quickly
- Keep your website design clean and simple
- Use complementary colors that people will enjoy looking at
- Make appropriate use of white space to improve scannability
Eye-catching visuals can boost your social media shares (and your SEO)
Social media posts that have strong visuals tend to get more shares, so it’s good to include attractive visuals in posts where you’re linking to your website content.
Plus, according to OptinMonster, there’s also evidence to suggest content that receives a lot of social shares also performs particularly well on the search engine results pages. So, while social media activity might not be a direct ranking factor, it does appear that gaining attention in this area could support your SEO efforts.
So, it’s important that you make use of strong visuals in your social media posts. You can do this by:
- Making use of a wide color palette to create attractive graphics
- Creating eye-catching infographics or image carousels to engage your audience.
- Using diagrams, illustrations, or GIFs
One thing to note is that you should avoid using stock photos and instead focus on using original images because they are unique and will help customers see the authenticity of you and your business.
Summary
Having an intentional branding and design strategy is important for any business looking to achieve success with its content and SEO efforts.
You should focus on providing your website visitors with a good UX, being consistent with your branding, and making use of high-quality visuals to boost your social media shares and search engine optimization. It won’t be long before you start to see results.
Adam Steele is the COO at Loganix, an SEO fulfillment partner for agencies and marketers. We build easy-to-use SEO services that help businesses scale. If you liked this article, please check out our SEO guides and templates on the Loganix blog.