Startups in UK: 18 months’ journey to build a thriving brand with digital marketing

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Startups in UK: 18 months’ journey to build a thriving brand with digital marketing

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Around half a million companies are registered yearly in the UK. Many of them get dissolved and see their dreams crushed and it’s not a surprise. Many startups in the UK are not willing to endure the long term process and the realities of building a brand.

18 months to build a brand

If someone told a business executive it will take 18 months to build a brand 30 years ago, the executive would have laughed and fired the champ who told him this. In 2016 however, we have the option of doing things incredibly quickly due to the internet, including building businesses.

In fact, the perception of how quickly things can be done has changed completely to that of 30 years ago and many people are now the complete opposite – being naive on the time scales it takes to succeed online. It’s not just the inexperienced startup founder, plenty of small business owners that have been in business for decades expect to rank on Google in a months time, too.

The issue is in the perception of the internet. While things can be done quickly and businesses can scale at incredible speeds, it’s also one of the most competitive fields ever seen in business. The entry barriers are simply too low – anyone can set up a shop online.

starting-internet-business-is-easyCombine all the players on the internet with 10 years of black hat SEO’rs spamming the internet and ranking useless sites on Google and you will find that Google has to take measures in their own hands to protect their massive empire by making ranking tough – so that just the most legit and honest sites rank.

And that is the way to rank any business on Google in 2016 – being honest and legit. While there are still methods one can utilize to rank quickly (and fall off after), ranking for the long term is the only way in 2016 and it takes enormous amounts of effort and time. But the rewards of ranking are also better than ever – once you are “honest and legit” you will find yourself with just a few competitors around.

The timetables of building a digital brand

We have broken down the 18 months into 6 quarters to give you an idea of what to expect and the steps to take.

Q1 – getting started

When just starting, it’s important to get your website up to date. This also means developing one if you don’t have it. The site has to be up-to-date with the latest on-page tactics, good contents, and the technical elements sorted.

Depending on how technically complex your site is, you should expect it to be done in this period and you can move into driving some initial paid traffic, which will be the main goal in Q2.

Q2 – determinate keywords & start with PPC

So you got the site up, now’s the time to figure out which exact keywords you want to target. This is usually done even before the project is taken on, but you really must dig into details at this point.

You start by creating the landing pages for each of these keywords and then send PPC traffic to them. On the side, your SEO agency is creating a detailed plan of how we will rank for these keywords so that you can save the monthly PPC bill.

Q3 – Authority & social signals

Now is the time to start blogging on the site. You should aim to have a minimum of 1 article per week on your site, but in a perfect world, it would be 1 every day.

You want to promote each article on your social media channels. If you don’t have many Facebook or Twitter followers, spend money, even the minimum £5 on Facebook to boost your posts.

Q4 – Q5 – organic rankings should be coming in

At this point, you have been:

  • Advertising on PPC monthly
  • Uploaded new contents weekly or daily
  • Seen your site shared, liked and talked about on social media due the post boosts

But on the side, your SEO agency has also been doing their best to rank you with the off-page methods. Hundreds of backlinks have been created – all linking to your site. You can see how all these things combined makes your site incredibly strong and an authority in the sector. Google reward that, so you should already be seeing

Google rewards that, so you should already be seeing results on the search engine result pages. You might already be getting enough organic traffic and stopped some of the PPC traffic. Just remember to keep going strong at all these things to keep the momentum up.

Q6 – organic is taking over

Congrats! After 15 months of building the authority, promoting the site on social media and having had many good testimonials from the PPC sales, you should start seeing massive amounts of organic traffic.

The beauty with this approach is that you’re also getting traffic from various other sources – testimonials, social media, and others.

organic-rankingThe ClickDo story

ClickDo went thought this exact story and we are now ranking on some of the toughest keywords seen on the internet in the SEO niche. This is a great way for us to show off our skills and the clients know they can trust us – we took 18 months of our lives to focus daily on ranking and building a digital brand.

And that’s what a digital brand can do for one’s business – rank, give organic traffic and give customers the confidence in you and your integrity.

Author Profile

Fernando BiZ
The Founder & CEO of ClickDo Ltd. Writes about digital marketing and SEO for local businesses in International corporation. You can read more on OM HQ blog for more of my writings.
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