Online Marketing

This post is the second in a series of four. If you haven’t already, we would recommend you read our introductory post about why building trust in your business is important before continuing.

A key component for building trust online is being consistent. This works on multiple levels because both search engines and your audience will appreciate having consistent information being delivered. Just think about consistency for just a moment. Think about how great it is when something is predictable and the only true pressure you experience is based on your decision on whether or not you accept the information being delivered. You are in control!

From an audience perspective, being consistent eliminates confusion. An educated audience that carries little to no doubts about who you are and what you do is more likely to be involved with your company and — more importantly — purchasing the products or services you offer. In addition to making sure the message you deliver is consistent, you also need to be consistent in the way you broadcast that message. Your audience is made up of many individuals, all of whom have their own ways of finding information. You may have some individuals who prefer Facebook as their means of getting information, whereas others may be more likely to use Twitter or emails. You also have to consider the different types of learning styles (such as visual, textual, or audible) and make sure your message is as easily found throughout all of the channels and styles your audience is already using. Some members of your audience will use multiple channels, so always make sure your message is consistent.  For example, don’t offer a 15% discount through Facebook when you are only offering a 5% discount through Twitter.

From a search engine’s perspective, being consistent eliminates confusion. Search engines use consistent information as parts of their algorithms to rank websites in their search results. The more consistent data we can provide, the more impact you have on the results. As an example, we’ll go to the extreme and say you have two websites to represent your business. This immediately breaks your consistency and the search engines won’t know which website to promote in their search results because both websites should have different content but are both claiming to represent one business. Instead of trying to figure out why you have two websites and which one is most relevant, they will just move on to your competition that is providing them with consistency and promote them in their search results instead. Another reason multiple websites are not advised is that search engines also believe this strategy as an attempt to spam their search result pages. If they believe this was the purpose for having multiple websites they can de-index you from their database, meaning you won’t be found on any page of their search results.

Another way to build trust in your brand through consistency is to eliminate any confusion about who you are, where you are located and how to contact you. I’m referring to a common SEO tactic called N.A.P. or Name, Address, Phone Number. For those that this may be new to, it is as simple as it sounds. Identify the name of your business, the format of your address and phone number and try to make sure all your citations, or directory listings, match as they appear on your website; character for character, all the way down to the capitalization and punctuation.

As an example, check out how the Name, Address and Phone Number are listed on this website:

Then we have it listed in Yelp the same way:

And again in Google+ Local:

As you can see in the examples, wherever we have the business listed the address is always listed as 123 N Any Street New York City, NY 10001 

Some common examples of how you could technically have this same address listed but break your N.A.P. consistency would be:

• 123 North Any St. New York City, NY 10001 – Spelled out North and abbreviated Street
• 123 Any Street New York City, NY 10001 – Dropped the “N”
• 123 N. Any Street New York, NY 10001 – Put in the punctuation for “N” and omitted City from New York City