Does your industry provide standard website templates for you to use? In many cases, real estate agents, retail florists, and a host of other small business owners rely on pre-built templates for their websites because they’re usually free and typically do not require much maintenance.

Unfortunately, you get what you pay for when dealing with these websites and the more you look, the more you realize that your site probably promotes the company you work for more than it promotes you and your personal brand. What happens if you change jobs to work for a different company? Do you get to keep your site? Where will clients and customers look to try to find you?

Focus on YOUR brand

In the example above, a Sarasota-based real estate agent built a strong base of loyal customers but then found herself with a opportunity to advance her career with a new company. The opportunity was too good to pass up, but the price she had to pay was losing her website - and therefore her entire web presence - when she left her old company because they owned her site and all of her assets.

No matter which industry you work in, you have probably spent countless hours forming relationships and building a valuable base of customers and clients who enjoy working or doing business with you. Some of those customers may be there simply because of the company you work for, but many other may likely be customers you worked hard to earn. Those customers are there for YOUR brand and would likely follow you in any new endeavors you undertake - so long as they can find you.

Instead of relying on her new company’s website template (and risk losing everything again if she takes another job somewhere else), she decided to take control and focus on her own brand. Now when her clients try to find her, they know exactly where to look - no matter who she is working for at the time.

The Importance of Citations

No matter what industry you are in. You want to bring attention to the use of your name/brand as much as possible.In the floral industry, Teleflora turns out beautiful websites for florists, but if the florist doesn't understand the value of citations, the credit goes to Teleflora while the retail florist is selling under their brand. Understanding this the responsibility of the retail florist.

Teleflora is a partner of the retail florist but also a competitor. It's important that retail florists understand how to best handle this. In the example below, you can see that Teleflora’s products all appear with Teleflora in the name - that’s great for Teleflora, but not for the shop trying to promote themselves.

YOU are the shop designing and delivering all those beautiful flowers - make sure everyone knows it!! Something as simple as changing the generic product names to feature the name of you shop will not only go a long way towards helping your SEO, but it will also help you build YOUR BRAND instead of Teleflora.

These are just a few tips to help you grow your business, but it’s not the only advice we have to offer! If you need help with branding, citations, Google My Business, websites, social media, or any other ways to promote your business, give us a call today at (941) 806-1911 or leave us a comment below.