How To Create A Powerful Brand Website For Your Business

You win in business by being unique and engaging.

By being fundamentally different from your competition. And providing value for your audience.

Q. How do you showcase that difference and value?

A. Your brand website

What is a brand website?

A brand website is one that perfectly upholds the brand of its owner, whether personal or business.

It includes the brand logo, design, messaging, personality, information about the brand products/ services, and elements of thought leadership that highlight the expertise of the brand.

Why do you need a brand website?

In today’s world, there is no doubt that you need a website, especially if you have a small business with a zero or limited follower base.

The key reasons are that a website is important for:

• Brand awareness
• Visibility on search engines
• Information sharing
• Brand love and equity
• Credibility and trust
• 24 x 7 availability
• Endorsement
• Optimum use of resources
• Leads
• Opportunities and sales
• Professionalism
• Analytics
• Customer support
• Showcasing your value
• Personalization

Read the full post for details: The Importance of Websites for Small Businesses

Your specifically branded website, in particular:

• Establishes your brand online
• Makes you stand apart from your competition
• Builds your thought leadership
• Provides information and valuable content to your audience, which increases brand engagement

9 must-have elements of your small business brand website

1. Logo
2. Brand visual identity
3. Brand promise
4. Products/ service information
5. About page
6. Contact information
7. SEO friendly content
8. Call-to-actions
9. Privacy and consent elements

1. Brand logo

One of the most distinctive elements of your brand is your logo.

It is a design that people can remember easily as representing you, and that should be a key element of your brand.

It should be clearly visible on your site, ideally on every page.

It should ideally have a single neutral color background so it doesn’t get lost.

The best way to add your logo is on the top left corner of your website.

2. Brand visual identity

Besides your logo, another key brand attribute is your brand color(s) and other design elements that form a part of your brand’s visual identity.

Make sure your brand website includes only the relevant colors for your brand.

That means all graphics, forms, lead magnets, should adhere to your core brand color palette.

Do not use a multitude of colors (unless your brand itself has a zillion colors, which it should not), to try to make your website design look more attractive.

Stick to the colors of your palette and use them creatively.

Here is an example of how the brand colors (green, black, and white) are used effectively on the Quick Sprout website.

3. Brand promise

The attention span of consumers is 8 seconds, less than that of a goldfish.

So when someone visits the brand website of your small business, it should be immediately clear what you do. What you promise to deliver.

It should be clear, upfront, bold.

Your audience doesn’t have the time to search your website to hunt through your site to understand what your key brand message is.

It should not just be the first thing they see, like the homepage, your brand promise should be spread across in other subtle and indirect ways throughout your website.

See the homepage of this cleaning website. Its a small business in Netherlands.

It is not the best-looking website, for sure, but the brand promise is upfront and clear.

4. Product/ service information

Similar to your brand message, don’t let your audience work hard to find or understand your products/ services.

They should be very clearly detailed on your brand website.

Remember to always retain your brand tone of voice and other elements in your product information too.

5. About page

If you want to decide whether to be friends with someone or buy from them you want to know who they are, right?

How would you trust them otherwise?

It’s the same for your small business website. About pages are crucial for your brand website to have credibility and win the trust of your audience.

No matter what colors and products you add, especially as a small business, you need to let people know who you are.

What is it that drives you, what’s your purpose, your mission.

What do you intend to do with your business, what’s your story behind starting it.

You can just put all of this text up directly on your page, or get creative with it.

Here’s how an artist brand called Pigmentti does it.

First, they have the story on their website, along with pictures.

Then a detailed profile of both their artists.

Even if you put up information as basic as this, it’s fine. Just to let your audience know who you are.

And if you want to get creative with your about me pages, here are some examples.

6. Contact information

You can have a perfectly branded and attractive website.

But if people don’t know who you are and where you are based, they don’t contact you and you lose potential leads.

So give people a way to get in touch with you.

It is also always good to include your office address so that they know where you are based.

Pro tip:

It is better to just have a contact form on your website. You can complement that with a landline telephone number.

To prevent spam, it is best to avoid putting your email address and mobile phone number here.

Also remember to use anti-spam software, like a plugin on WordPress, to prevent emails from bots.

Akismet is a good one.

7. SEO-friendly content

You want your brand website to help grow your small business, right?

Then you have to help people find it so you can get more traffic.

Help your audience know about your brand and visit you repeatedly as you provide them tons of value.

Then you need content.

Not just any content, SEO-friendly content. Content that perfectly matches your brand, content that helps search engines find you and rank you for relevant searches done by your audience.

So besides your about page, contact page, and your offers, you also need other content.

At least a blog with regular blog posts.

You can also add videos and podcasts, but a blog may be the easiest to start with because it doesn’t need any additional resources like a camera or microphone.

Just remember to implement the SEO writing methods for your brand website.

Related: SEO Writing for Websites: The Definitive Guide

8. Call-to-actions

You always have to guide your website visitors to take an action.

It could be to buy products, download a lead magnet, subscribe to your email list, attend an event, share a piece of content…anything, as long as it drives them to engage and convert with you.

You have to help them through their journey on your website.

Otherwise, they just visit your site and leave, and those are all opportunities for leads that you lose.

9. Privacy and consent elements

You will grow your business best if the people who visit your brand website are your intended audience.

If they engage and convert.

So you need their data.

You also may use this data to understand your audience more and even target them for marketing campaigns.

So firstly, you need to create a privacy page letting your visitors know how their data is managed.

Secondly, you need to get their permission to store their data. This is also a regulation in the European Union (GDPR).

Pro tip:

Make your privacy page noindex and nofollow.

This means that search engines don’t have to waste their resources crawling this page because privacy pages don’t help in SEO.

How to build your brand website: step-by-step process

You cannot have a brand website if you don’t have a brand story or strategy.

You first need to know who you are and what you want to say. You need to know:

• What makes you different from your competition
• What you look and talk like
• Why your audience should choose you

Then you put that on your website.

Your brand is not your product. A brand website needs to state your story, engage your audience, and help grow your business.

Step 1: Create your brand story

There are 3 steps to creating your brand story:

1. Define your story
2. Design your brand
3. Craft your message

Get the full details and a brand story guide here: The Complete Guide to Creating a Powerful Brand Story in 2022

1. Define your story

In this part, you set up the core essential elements of your brand. So you develop:

1. Market understanding
2. Customer insights
3. Brand purpose
4. Brand mission statement
5. Brand vision
6. Unique value proposition
7. Brand personality
8. Brand promise
9. Brand values

2. Design your brand

Now that you know what your brand stands for, you move on to the next part, which is designing your brand.

So you develop:

1. Brand name
2. Look and feel: Logo, typography, design elements, colors, stationery, etc.
3. Brand tone of voice
4. Customer experience

You have 3 ways to build these design elements:

1. Hire a professional designer
2. Hire a freelancer from Fiverr
3. Create them yourself with the Canva Brand Kit

Pro tip:

If you have a limited budget, you can follow this route:

Hire a designer to design your logo as that is more permanent.

For the rest, get someone from Fiverr if you need it to be done fast.

If you want to create everything yourself and want to play around and experiment, try out Canva for 30 days. It is really easy and simple to create all brand kits through that platform.

Related: Canva Pro Pricing Review for Small Businesses: Is it Worth it?

3. Craft your message

The 3rd part of creating your brand story is to craft your brand messaging.

So you develop:

You can get a complete guide to creating your brand story for free through the form below.

Step 2: Design your brand website

Now that your brand is all designed and you know what communication you need to create, it is time to put all that on your website.

These are the steps you can follow:

1. Buy a domain name and hosting

Choose a branded domain name for your website. The cheapest prices are on Namecheap. Starts at 99 cents.

2. Set up your site with a website host.

For high-quality hosting, Siteground is better.

Bluehost also offers very good hosting options at much lower prices. It’s not comparable to Siteground in terms of quality and speed, but it is much cheaper.

3. Choose a content management system and theme for your brand website

If you are a beginner, you can try out Wix, Shopify, or WordPress.

If you like a lot of flexibility and customization options, WordPress would be the best.

Then just choose a theme (+ page builder) for your website.

Choose a theme that perfectly matches your brand needs.

Look at the available layouts and customization options, and choose one that suits your needs the best. Envato Elements have some very popular ones that offer a lot of customizations.

WordPress websites are relatively easier to build through page builders like Elementor and Divi.

4. Upload your brand identity

Once you have set up your brand website, you need to start customizing it.

The first step is to include your essential brand elements.

If you are using WordPress, go to Dashboard -> Appearance -> Customize-> Site identity.

And upload the following elements:

5. Assign your brand design to your website

Next up is to set a few basic templates for your website:

You can also add more default fonts and colors for all types of text.

So whenever you create text, links, etc., the default settings will automatically be applied.

This will also be found in your WordPress -> Appearance -> Customize menu.

If you use a page builder like Elementor, you can just go to the site settings and see all the customization options there.

6. Add your brand message and information

It is now time to upload all your brand content.

• Design the homepage with your brand story details like your brand promise and tagline
• Upload information about your products/ services
• Create all your other pages with your brand story like your about me page(s)

Step 3: Optimize your brand website

So by now, you have a nice website that reflects your brand.

The last step now, which is more of an ongoing step, really, is to optimize it with content creation and on-page SEO.

You can work on that by starting with a content strategy:

1. Set your content goals

Some common goals, especially for a new website, could be:

• Build brand awareness
• Get website traffic
• Generate leads
• Kickstart/ boost SEO

Know what exactly you want to achieve with your brand website, so you can upload content that helps you achieve them.

2. Identify your content topics

When we talk about content marketing and SEO, a common assumption is that we have to start with keywords.

Keywords are a second step.

First, decide which topics are most relevant for your brand.

Then identify all the keywords with a keyword tool like Semrush that would be relevant to those topics.

Create content for your brand website targeting those keywords.

Pro tip:

Follow the topic cluster model.

Create one pillar page of content with a more generic focus keyword, for a topic you want to rank for.

Create small pieces of content targeting more specific, long-tail keywords.

Link out your pillar page to all these specific posts.

This helps Google establish you as an expert on the topic you chose.

Which is the whole point of having a brand website, to rank high for your brand topic.

3. Post regular content

It is not so relevant if you publish one piece of content a week or three.

If you create one high-quality one, that’s also great. What matters is that you create it regularly.

Not like 3 a week then none for 3 months.

Take it slow, but be consistent.

Related: What to Blog About? 5 Quick Ways to Find Content Topics for High SERPs

4. Add internal links

One important aspect of boosting SEO is to add internal links within your website.

You can link between posts only, and also between posts and pages to help search engines find and rank your content.

A fantastic tool to help with this internal linking is Link Whisper. Saves me hundreds of hours!

Related: Link Whisper Review: Is it Worth the Money? + Discount $15

5. Distribute your content

As a final step, remember to share and distribute your content amply to get more visitors to your site.

Additionally, try to get backlinks from related websites as well.

But that is a time-consuming project.

Get started with your brand website first, then work on your backlink outreach.

6. Perfect your on-page SEO

Optimize all aspects of your small business website with on-page SEO tactics like adding meta tags, adding keywords in heading tags and alt text, etc.

Get a free content template to start creating content for your small business website.

Website branding tips

Here are some tips to design your perfect brand website:

1. Build a smooth site architecture

Before you build your website, get clear on your site navigation. The visitor should be able to move between different elements easily.

2. Create branded headers and footers

Create subdirectories whenever possible, for all your content, and arrange them neatly in your site menus.

Create different menus for your header and footer and brand the latter with your colors and fonts.

3. Create simple URL structures

Good SEO practice is to have short and direct URL structures. You can use categories and subcategories in your permalinks, but try to keep it as simple and easy as possible.

4. Ensure your website is responsive

Mobile may account for almost 50% of your web traffic, if not more.

So make sure your website displays properly across all devices.

5. Try to rank for topics, not keywords

As mentioned above, don’t get all hung up only on keywords. Think about topics related to your brand, and try to optimize your website for those.

6. Ensure brand consistency throughout the site

Your brand website should look the same on all pages and posts. It should have the same colors, fonts, and design elements.

That’s why defining the brand template before working on all website elements is helpful.

All your web content should also have the same tone of voice.

7. Prioritize user experience

Make your website user-friendly. No one wants to spend time on a website that loads slowly, is hard to navigate, or is full of ads.

Keep it simple and attractive.

8. Track your progress

Keep track of your website, content, and SEO with tools like Google Analytics. It will let you know which pages are doing well, and which could do better.

Related: How to Boost Your SEO with 7 Useful Google Analytics Metrics

Those were my tips on how to create a powerful brand website for your small business. Did you use these methods to create yours? Do you have any tips to add?

Would love to hear from you in the comments.

Get a free consultation about creating or optimizing your brand website.

Originally published at https://weignitegrowth.com on March 15, 2022.