By definition, consistency is behaving in the same way, for business purposes we will define consistency as appearing the same way online. There are many reasons you want to demonstrate consistency when promoting yourself or promoting your organization. Building trust, projecting reliability, establishing expectations, and validating professionalism can all be realized with a consistent presence.
In this post, we are going to address the reason why you need to be consistent with your online presence and ways to achieve online consistency.
Start with a List:
Review everywhere you exist online. Company website, social media, search engines, etc. and have a list of everywhere that you or your business exists in the digital world. For individuals it is exceptionally important to review your personal and professional digital presence.
Once you have this list methodically go to each platform and check the following:
Individual or Company Name: this needs to be the same on all platforms right down to the punctuation. If it is not, update so that everything is identical.
Ex: John D Smith, Johnny Smith, JD Smith can be confusing to prospective employers.
Ex: My Business, My Business, Inc., My Business LLC all look very different to web crawlers & search engine bots. (more about this below)
Logo/Profile Image: this should be the same on every platform and if you have not added a description for the image add a description.
Alt tags, alt descriptions, and alt text should be added for any images you use online.
They have many uses including:
Appearing in place of an image if it fails to load
Describing images for the visually impaired
Allowing search engines to better evaluate and rank your website.
Ex: use your company name as the alt text for your logo
Contact Information: address, phone, email, etc. needs to be the same on all platforms. If you use a generic email for business communication be sure to use that email on all of your digital pages. Additionally, check your address to ensure that if abbreviations are used (ex: Ave vs. Avenue) that it is the same on all platforms. Individuals need to ensure consistency and professionalism in their contact information. You may love the beach but future employers won't appreciate the email address beachluvr4eva@fakeemail.com.
Specific for Businesses & Organizations:
Understanding Web Crawlers & Bots
Crawlers and bots review online information to learn determine the topic for individual webpages. Essentially, they are analyzing data across all webpages to determine "what your company does" to produce better results for users.
The reason crawlers and bots are important is because they determine what links will be generated when someone performs an internet search. As a business owner, you want to show up (ideally as high as possible), on internet searches to increase the likelihood of a user choosing your business over a competitor.
So the true question is...how does consistency help these web crawlers and search engine bots? The answer is indexing. Indexing uses the text that appears on the page and any associated metadata* to understand what your page (business) is about. When users perform an internet search, the search engine reviews its index of pages and generates results.
*Metadata, metatags, and meta descriptions are all content that is not see by the user but exists in the background to assist with indexing.
Summary:
Achieve professional or organizational growth by having a stronger online presence and using consistency on all digital platforms. This will allow individuals to perform better when job searching and organizations to rank higher in online searches.
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