If a customer is looking for your brand by name, your website and business profiles should be the only things coming up in the search results. For instance, when someone searches for “Brick Marketing” in Google the first 10 results include the Brick Marketing website, social profiles, the company YouTube channel, online press releases and the company newsletter archives. Everything on that page is well branded and something that I have created on behalf of my company, meaning I have control over my online brand. Every time someone searches for your company by name, if your brand doesn’t dominate the SERPs it’s a wasted opportunity and a sign that your online brand is not as strong as it could be.

Here are 4 ways you can build a stronger online brand presence:

1. Bid on your top organic keywords in your PPC campaign.
Having both a high ranking organic listing AND a PPC ad on the same page can be very useful for your online marketing efforts. It gives your company an extra touch point in the search results and reinforces your brand in the minds of searchers. PPC ads are also a great way to start introducing your brand using new keywords. Since SEO is so long term, a PPC ad can get your business and online brand showing up higher in the SERPs before the organic SEO catches up.

2. Claim and optimize all your local business profiles.
If you don’t claim and optimize your local business profiles you run the risk of someone else doing it. You don’t want to give an angry customer or unscrupulous competitor the ability to edit your local business profiles. When you claim your local profiles, be sure to list as much information as that profile allows you to. In addition to your company contact information (phone, email, physical address, etc), add photos, videos, your company logo and so forth. The more information you can give a searcher the better—it helps cement your online brand and makes it easy for searchers to connect with you.

3. Update your blog regularly with fresh content.
Just like a website, a blog is crawled and indexed by the search engines. Each post has the ability to rank in the search engines, which is invaluable for your online brand. Blog posts are a great place to target long tail keywords and keyword variations that didn’t make it into your onsite content. The search engines love fresh content, so every new post that goes live gives the search spiders a reason to revisit your site and provides one more potential entry page for a searcher. Just make sure your blog is both branded and well connected to your website via an internal linking structure.

4. Make sure your social profiles are well branded.
Just like a local business profile, it’s important to make sure your social profiles are well branded and optimized. You want those profiles to rank in the search engines right alongside your company website and corporate blog.

It’s important to take control of your online brand whenever and wherever possible. The Internet is the great equalizer, where anyone can become a publisher. You don’t want user generated content to outrank your own, especially anything that might be negative! The more content you can create and brand the stronger your online brand will be.