The Differences Between Branding, Identity, And Logos

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You know how sometimes a group of words are thrown around together so much their meaning becomes blurry? If you don’t understand what I mean, think about how you understand brand, identity, and logo. Almost any article about logo design will intrinsically link these three words together without clarifying where the line between each one is. I’m as guilty of this as anyone else.

Jacob Cass from Just Creative noticed this and put it upon himself to clarify the differences between brand, identity, and logo, and what each does. Breaking it down simply:

  • Brand is the “perceived emotional corporate image” of the business all together.
  • Identity combines all of the visual aspects that form a brand.
  • Logos identify a business in the simplest form by using icons.
It is a heirarchy in which a logo is part of the visual identity of a company, which helps mold the brand as a whole.

Branding

It is hard to write shortly about branding, as Cass even points out, but to summarize the concept, it is the audience’s idea of a service, product, or organization. Visual aspects of the brand including its marketing and logo can help mold it, but ultimately, the audience decides the shared perception overall. “A designer can’t make a brand […] a designer forms the foundation of the brand”, which the audience then builds upon with their reception of the product and marketing as a whole.

Identity Design

That foundation the brand is built on is it’s identity, or its image. Every business creates sets of visual devices they use to interact with their audience including color palettes, fonts, layouts, etc. Every visual aspect is considered part of the identity, even things like a web page design, and especially the logo.

Logos

I’ve talked quite a bit about logos before, but when it comes down to it, a logo identifies your brand. It becomes one of the most prevalent aspects of the image, and shapes how customers perceive your brand.
According to Cass, a logo doesn’t sell or describe a company, but that is the only aspect of his article with which I don’t completely agree. Once a business is established, their logo is understood by the quality of the company and product it represents. However, for young businesses trying to establish themselves, a quality logo is important in attracting companies by letting them quickly know what that company does and showing they care about how their audience feels about them.

Conclusion

The three are absolutely linked, but when writing about them we often make it unclear what each seperate part really is. Logos affect identities, which set the floor for a brand. All are important, but they are all unique to each other
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Why Do Some SEOs Still Gather Data Manually?

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SEO relies on data. That’s a pretty simple fact. Still, for some reason, some SEOs still do all their research by hand and manually track their performance, usually by making Excel charts that seem to stretch for days. I honestly don’t completely understand how they put the time into even trying to do this, at this point in SEO. So for this article I won’t be answering the question posed in the title, but instead showing why manual data gathering doesn’t make sense anymore.

To do well in SEO, you require fresh and accurate data to base your decisions upon. If you spend all your time and effort doing data gathering by hand, how do you have the time to make solid judgments and strategies for your customers?

SEO, of course, did start out with that exact manual strategy, but the reason it isn’t anymore is because this very problem I’m talking about. There is simply too much data, and data gathering can be easily automated, so doing it by hand is a waste of time and resources.

But, for those few SEOs out there still doing things the old fasioned way, there are pleny of ways to get all of your data gathering automated quickly. Myles Anderson from Search Engine Land gathered a quite a few tools you could use to get started, as well as answering just about any question about local SEO tools anyone has had ever.

It is a comprehensive guide, so if you just need the tools, head straight for that section, but if you need more convincing or don’t understand how the tools work or their benefits, Anderson makes a strong case with his explanations.

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Online Marketing Predictions for 2013

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As with any business, you not only need to keep up with current trends and updates in online marketing, but you also need to be looking ahead to attempt to predict some of the changes ahead.

To help with this task, Business2Community presents their predictions for the 2013 landscape of social media and search engine marketing. If you’ve stayed current with the trends of the past year, there aren’t any big surprises here. But, it’s nice to see a succinct list of things to keep an eye out for in the coming year.

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The Future of SEO [Infographic]

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As the year draws to a close, everyone of course looks to what the past year indicates for the one coming up. I’ve already covered one article of year end analysis, and now Search Engine Watch and Mavenlink have made an infographic covering what SEO professionals are saying about the state of SEO in 2012.

What is notable about both of these year-end opinions is that they are both extremely optimistic about the future of SEO. As the internet becomes somehow even more pervasive in our every day life, more and more opportunities for SEO to grow become apparent, and there is no sign of it slowing down.

Budgets are growing, companies are paying more attention, and SEO teams are getting bigger. SEO is finally even beginning to be seen as an entity seperate from regular marketing. Before long, SEO might be really known outside of the marketing community.

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Can You Pick Out What Clients Are Bad?

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Almost every designer has ended up working with a bad client. We all try to avoid it, but sure enough, eventually you end up with a client that will drive you up the wall. Wouldn’t it be great if you could easily pick out which clients are going to be more hassle than they are worth?

Justin Spencer has created a list of tell-tale signs at Designrfix that a client might not be worth the money. It is important to note, a bad client is not just one that doesn’t pay you on time. Slow payment, while highly frustrating, is not always the sign of a bad client, especially if they are a small company.

Instead, bad clients are those that create completely unnecessary problems as professionals. During negotiations to work with these types of clients, they will often do things like understating the difficulty of a project to lower fees. They could also try to get you to work at low prices by promising they will give you lots of work in the future.

Spencer has plenty more signs that will help clue you into a bad client. If you see more than one of these issues early on, seriously consider if the work you are going to put in for them will be worth the headaches later on.

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Content Marketing is Becoming Important Offline Too

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Content creation has long been at the top of SEO, but it is leaking from the internet into the real world. One of the front runners of this change in real-life marketing is Red Bull, who has begun publishing their own magazine, The Red Bulletin, which paints a picture of a world where there are no limits.

This isn’t an isolated case. According to a recent survey, 90% of marketers believe that content marketing will only become more essential in the next year. Ronn Torossian has predictions and other instances of how companies are using content creation to reach out to their customers directly, all at Search Engine Journal.

 

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Blogging and Local SEO: A Match Made in Heaven

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Many local businesses want a quick and easy way to boost their local rankings. The bad news is, there isn’t really a shortcut anyone can take to better local SEO. There isn’t any way to just make a one time change and suddenly be rocking the rankings.

The good news is, there is a simple method to improving rankings, it just requires consistent output of quality content or promotional activities. This usually equates to blogging, which takes consistent effort, but is highly rewarding.

Chris Silver Smith lists all of the reasons why starting to blog can seriously help local businesses at Search Engine Land.

 

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The Basics of Good Local SEO

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Every topic I cover can be as complicated as you let them be. With the focus on minute data and snippets of code, SEO could easily be intimidating for anyone trying to get started learning.

This is a problem for local SEO because most business owners aren’t experts. If they think of local SEO as a daunting field, rather than seeing the opportunities it could open up for them, they are likely to shy away.

With this in mind, I’d like to take us back to the basics. We haven’t covered local SEO here in depth, so this will serve as a great place to begin exploring the topic. But, the tips offered here are valuable for broader SEO as well.

For good local SEO, there are really three major rules.

  • Get your website up to standards
  • Spread your business details everywhere
  • Use social media to get your customers to do promotion for you

Getting your website up to standard

Google is beginning to combine regular and local search results, and your website quality helps decide where you will land in the local search results, as well as more broad searches. Making a quality site relies on you doing a few specific things. For one, your site should have a clear and functional structure with a set heirarchy of pages. This will help Google’s crawlers go where you want them too, and know what is most important.

Another, more basic step in making a good page is just filling your site to the brim with quality content. Your content makes your first impression to customers as well as search engines. Putting out continuous good content keeps bringing search crawlers back to your page, and generate backlinks to your site from other pages.

Spread your business details

This one is quick and easy, so I’m going to let Myles Anderson from Search Engine Land sum it up. “Having your correct business details widely available is positive for local SEO and sets you up nicely to take advantage of the mobile-boom. Many of the same data sources which feed the desktop internet also feed mobile sites and applications so even if your website isn’t mobile enabled your business will appear on popular mobile applications.”

This is especially true for local SEO because people are searching to be able to contact YOU. Make it easy for them. Google will reward you for it. But don’t get lazy once your information is out there. Remember where you have put it by keeping a record. If you ever move, or change phone numbers, you will need to go change it everywhere the old information is.

Be social!

Just like everywhere else online, Google is becoming more and more intertwined with social media. If you don’t have a social media account for your business, it is time to get one. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ are all very influential in your SEO status. From there, make it easy to share your content from your site with social media buttons prominently connected with content. Once you have a following, you will notice they share content for you. You still have to be proactive by sharing your content with them on social media in the first place, but if you connect with your followers, you will be shocked to see what they do for you.

Conclusion

Of course, there are a ton more things you can do to help give yourself a boost. It is high time you have a mobile optimized page for your site, and it is important to make sure you are listed on Google and Apple Maps. But, these first three rules will help you easily expand, and see what investing in local SEO can do for you.

 

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Targeting Your Audience Effectively Through Web Design

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Anytime you have an industry where creativity meets business, you face the conundrum of who to target with your work. Do you want to make something exciting and fun that other people interested in design will like, or do you want to make something consumers will enjoy?

The good news is that web designers can do both. If you have just a bit of marketing knowledge and some strategy, you can make a solid design that was as fun for you to make as it is for consumers to explore.  Any good designer should already be attracting their potential audience while making interesting designs. But what do you do if you aren’t?

The first step is to identify your target audience. If you can spot who your demographic is, everything else will fall into place.

Thankfully, identifying your audience has never been easier since you have tools like Google Analytics at your disposal. This isn’t to say this is a walk in the park, but pinpointing your customer base is much more simple and precise than it used to be.

By doing a keyword search in your analytics dashboard, you can also see what people are searching for, and what kind of people they are.

Another way to identify what your visitors like is by simply asking them questions. Blogs are a great platform for this, because you should already be trying to interact with your audience, and you can leverage to ask them what they think about different topics and to offer their opinions. It is also important to note, if you are struggling to interact with commenters because of spam overload, adding a simple Captcha is easy and rids you of most spam.

Social media also offers a huge opportunity to interact with your audience. It is easier to connect with readers on Facebook than it is to interact in the comments sections of articles. Taking advantage of social media also means your content is easier to share, which will attract more readers.

Once you know who you are designing for, you can find ways to make a great site they will enjoy, and you won’t hate making. Christian Vasile has great design tips if you’re having trouble getting started.

You don’t have to sell out and make boring websites because you are designing for a company. In fact, if you do, you are just making bad websites and your clients won’t be happy anyways.

 

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The 5 Most Common Mistakes on Landing Pages

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You can do a lot of different things with landing pages, be it selling something, encouraging visitors to subscribe to a newsletter, or trying to get people to sign a petition. No matter which of these goals you have, you are ultimately trying to get visitors to perform an action.

Making a great landing page seems like it should be easy, but it is more complex than you may think. This leads to poor sales because a landing page is only working if it is getting people to convert.

With that in mind, let’s examine the most common problems with landing pages.

  1. Mismatching Text Ad Copy and Landing Page Headline – There are numerous reasons you should make sure your Google AdWords text ads match your landing page headline. For users, the text ad creates an expectation, and you don’t want to confuse your visitors or make them feel mislead. The quality of your landing page also decides cost-per-click in AdWords, so if you raise your quality score, you will lower your cost-per-click.
  2. Poor Grammar and Misspelled Words – Throwing up a quick landing page is always a terrible idea because it leads to a ton of smaller problems. One of those is bad spelling and grammar. This is one of those mistakes that just shouldn’t be allowed to happen. Your visitors will take any reason you give them to not convert, and this one is a big reason to leave.
  3. No Trust Signals – To get visitors to convert, you have to establish trust. You can build this into your landing page in just a few ways. If you establish your brand’s popularity, people will view it as credible. You can also present your 3rd party certifications with organizations like Verisign or the Better Business Bureau. You can also establish trust by making positive mentions of your brand in the press easily available on the landing page.
  4. Lack of Good Call-to-Actions – You’re call to actions are important to help make people convert. They should also be compelling, with practical language, and solid, consistent design. You should also keep it short, between 90 and 150 characters. You need to make it clear what you want the visitor to do, but short enough to keep their attention.
  5. Poor Quality Videos or Images – Videos on your landing page can help boost conversion rates by about 80%. Images don’t raise conversions that much, but they still have their own positive effect on visitor activity. This doesn’t mean you can just toss up any image or video you want however. Poor quality images or videos will actually lower conversion rates rather than improve them.

Eric Siu from Unbounce has even more common mistakes, but these will help get you started with making sure users are converting. Remember, if users aren’t converting, your landing page has problems.

 

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