Are You Building a Brand or Building Confusion Amongst Consumers - Find Out!

A company’s brand, be it serious or downright silly, is fundamental and essential to its online and offline success. It’s how you leave a lasting impression on today’s busy consumers.

Brand consistency is crucial when a company enters the realm of content (aka permission) marketing. Sure, it seems like a simple concept, but you’d be surprised to learn that many businesses vary their brand names across their Web content. For some companies this means dropping “Inc.” from their names from time to time. For others it means using abridged versions of their five-partner law firm names.

These minor variations may seem innocuous enough, but they have the potential to create brand confusion amongst users. If you haven't given your brand too much thought until now, or feel as though you're fighting an uphill battle trying to maintain its integrity, don't fret. Listed below are the proactive measures you can take to build and maintain your company's brand.    

Customer Loyalty Comes From Branding

Name recognition and repetition are two of the most powerful influencers among consumers. It's no secret consumers favor brand names when making purchases. Companies put a lot of stock into their businesses’ names; so much so, that it can become a consumer-preferred name for a certain product. Think about it: When you want a refreshing summer dessert, do you ask for gelatin or Jell-O? Is that a box of Kleenex on your desk or a box of tissues? Do you store leftovers in Tupperware or a plastic food storage container?

As a company establishing a brand, it's best to pick your identity and stick with it, unless there's a substantial need for change. For example, Kentucky Fried Chicken proactively slimmed down their name to KFC when the word "fried" became a marketing turn-off. Luckily for the chicken chain, the acronym was already commonly used amongst its loyal diners and wasn't much of a detriment to their brand recognition. Excepting cases where such a change is needed, it’s typically best to stick to the tried-and-true.

Name consistency becomes even more complicated with online local business search. Business listings can originate from sources outside the company, which forces businesses to pay close attention to how and where their listings are cited.

Claiming Your Business Profiles is Crucial to Your Rankings

Google puts a lot of stock into businesses' names, especially when it comes to their local search results. Algorithms have become so advanced that as long as you allow them to access your geographic location, searching for a common business name like The Over Easy Café will "drop a pin" at the nearest location with that name.

Business directories like Google Places and Yelp aggregate information from hundreds of other, smaller directories on a monthly basis. This can be a challenge for marketers who must maintain a client’s business profile. Problems can arise when the aggregated information doesn't exactly match the information contained in the existing profiles. Two things can happen as a result: 1) the new information overrides the "owner verified" information; or 2) the new information creates multiple listings for one business on a single directory.

For optimal search engine ranking, businesses should focus their efforts on creating and maintaining a single profile on each of the major business directory sites, and ensuring all the content published by the company (articles, blogs, press releases, etc.) maintains a consistent name. If you're an attorney at a law firm with multiple partners, you may consider developing a brand attribution schedule. Meaning, some content you produce may be published under your name (remember, you're a brand too!), while other posts can be written on behalf of the firm as a whole.

Catch These Common Naming Issues Before They're a Problem

The topics of business name consistency and search results were discussed in a recent webinar sponsored by YP.com and featuring David Mihm of SEOMoz. “The important thing is that almost half of the algorithm ranking local businesses is related directly to local listings,” said Mihm. “The more times your business is mentioned across this local search ecosystem, the more times Google will pick  up this information and include it in its local algorithm. It’s almost like Google views all of these sites that list your information as voting for your business.”

Slight Variations

With a business name like The Over Easy Café, you probably won't encounter too many issues if at times your business name is altered with a hyphen between the words over and easy, or if an accent symbol is placed over the "e" in "café".

The real problems start when a business or professional occasionally decides to abbreviate its/his name. Whether it’s turning a lengthy law firm name into a slick acronym or dropping ones’ academic designation (i.e., LLC, MD, CPA), these actions can begin to chip away at your brand's value and affect your search engine rankings.

Misspellings

Another, more serious issue is a misspelling in your business name. User-generated content can unfortunately interfere with your brand’s consistency in this capacity. This is true even if all of your own Web content is proofread and double-checked.

For example, some online business directories such as Yelp and Merchant Circle, allow users to add businesses to their directories when an official (verified or claimed by the business owner) profile doesn't exist. If a user proceeds to add a business listing and misspells the company's name (The Ovr Easy Café), that's how it will appear in local search until the listing is claimed by the business owner and the name corrected.

Righting the Wrongs

Businesses should do everything in their power to ensure their listings are consistent across the Web. Doing so provides Google with multiple, authoritative "votes" for your business, and therefore, more opportunities to improve your ranking.

Luckily, there are services that help in policing your business's listings. At We Do Web Content we use Yext to maintain our -- and our clients -- business listings. Yext allows us to create one enhanced business listing and push it out to its participating sites. Yext's local advertising package, for example, has partnerships with over 40 business directory websites. The service offers a variety of listing packages, which means you decide what best suits your needs and budget.

Protecting Your Brand is Possible

Yes - establishing your brand can be tricky, and policing the way your name is displayed throughout the Web is just one of many steps you have to take to protect it.

In summary:

• Choose one name and establish the style in which it is to always be written;
• Perform an audit of your business listings every few months to catch listings you didn't add (remember, Yext is great for this!); and
• Establish a brand attribution schedule when authoring content.

With these three simple steps you can help maintain a single Web presence and work towards becoming "the name" in your local industry!