SEO brand marketing. The potential of SEO branding marketing is something that people often underestimate when considering their SERP ranking. An organizational branding strategy not only helps with recognition but can also boost your site rankings. In this article, I will show you how branding and SEO can work hand in hand.
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Is a Brand Awareness Important to a Website’s Ranking?
A brand is an asset that takes many years, in fact, decades, to establish. Branding is about having a reputation that foregoes your company. It generates positive associations before you even start to present your offer. A strong branding strategy will encompass your marketing efforts across all elements and media channels, including your logo, slogans, and news.
Here is the relationship between branding and SEO:
- It increases your business’ lead generation because it’s easier for customers to buy things from a trusted brand.
- It provides you with higher success rates from acquiring links organically or through sending out requests to influencers.
- Search engines are more to highlight brands when ranking pages on search results (because people simply trust them). This increases your site’s chances of getting higher search rankings for difficult keywords, which leads to more targeted traffic that is searching and probably in need of your business.
Therefore, brand mentions and SEO work together nicely.
SEO Branding Components
I will share my thoughts and discoveries about the core of the search engines.
What is the goal of all search engines?
Search engines were created to provide the best answer to a user’s request. “Best” in this case stands for the most credible, complete, and reliable. And the term “brand” is just about credibility and reliability.
A strong brand name inspires confidence and trust to the quality of each service or product that a company offers to customers.
If we divide the brand into SEO components, then it will contain:
- Type-in traffic – when users go directly to your site through the address bar of their browser. In fact, it means knowledge of your brand without any hint;
- Brand traffic – when your company is searched by the brand name in the search engines. Partially, this could be interpreted as a well brand recognition with a small hint; or just as a strong user’s habit to visit exactly your website?;
- Citation and co-citation — mentioning your brand (not necessary with links) on credible resources, as well as citing them along with other well-known brands, which can be interpreted as “brand pollination”. Some also call it link building without links.
You may use this tool that will help you increase the citation level of your brand and build a positive reputation with sponsored articles on reliable news platforms.
Build Positive Online Reputation & Remove Negative from SERP
- Backlinks from trusted traffic sites – are indeed one of the main indicators of brand credibility. Well, in this case, you may also get some help. This service will improve SEO rankings with high-quality backlinks to your website.
Why Your SEO Should Focus on Search Branding?
A level of brand awareness is very hard to measure. And, unfortunately, there is no one indicator. However, Google has refocused attention from inbound links towards branded queries. Such giants, as GM or BMW, both will have lots of inbound links. Or if a Coca-Cola brand is more expensive than a Pepsi brand, this doesn’t mean that the first one will rank higher.
To understand which site a particular SERP user likely wants to find, the Google algorithm will look at branded queries, as one of the steps. By looking at the number of people actively looking for a particular company, the search engine hopes to understand what users want to see and may use this knowledge to affect the order that the websites appear.
And if you look at the big picture, you’ll see a clear correlation between brand value and ranking. You can’t argue with the fact that brands are receiving more traffic than little-known business names.
SEO Branding Strategies
Let’s move closer to the daily practice. How to use all this knowledge?
Take a look at a few examples of SEO brand strategies to increase your brand value:
Build your brand for better rankings
This is exactly the example when it is easier said than done. If you want to persuade the client, ask yourself a question “How can we increase the value of our brand?” And try to find several answers.
Branding contains not only a logo, a slogan, or a user interface. Branding includes the experience your customers have learned with your business, this is how you make them think and feel about your products and services. And remember to double-check the results of your strategy and your current work, tracking clients’ reviews and information about your company. Check out this tool, that will help you to monitor mentions of your brand in the news. It’s crucial to track the mentions of the targeted keywords and not to miss messages from your competitors in the news flow around the world.
Monitor Brand Mentions in the News
Consider a competitor’s brand-level when analyzing niches
It often happens you look at the search results and have no idea why some websites are at the top. But when you’re looking at their branded traffic, the cause-and-effect relationship is becoming clear.
Competitor intelligence gives you the tools to differentiate the way you create your brand strategy from the rest. You should know your company’s unique value proposition before starting with your branding activities.
SEO brand marketing is diversification
Diversification makes it less sensitive and vulnerable to issues in any media channel. With the constant changes of SERP features, the slightest change of search objective can transform the whole list on the first page of results. If your site is filtered by the search engines, then branded traffic will still provide you with clicks.
Brand traffic improves consumer behavior
Emotionally or physically, brand strategies have an enormous effect on buying behavior, no matter how old they are. If you have loyalty to a certain company, then you will put more effort into buying or finding the answer to your question on this exact website. Brand recognition is a powerful thing. Powerful enough for you to skip on Google’s top-ranking post and find your favorite company. Powerful enough to make a more expensive purchase.
User experience
Making all elements and processes in your website easy for users provides better user engagement and eventually increases brand awareness.
Also, it takes away all barriers from sharing information about their experience to different social networks.
Publish content on the quality websites
The main idea of publishing information about your company is that you should add value to website content and demonstrate competence in your niche. Guest posts on credible websites like Fortune can drive people to learn more about a brand or a product, mentioned in the article.
You have a great opportunity to delegate this task to a reliable service for publishing quality content, which will empower your brand.
Social proof
Building a solid following base on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or ClubHouse is as important as building your targeted keywords’ rankings on search engines. It doesn’t just give you a big commercial opportunity, but also benefits in generating traffic and conversions as well.
Measure branded search traffic
Understanding what part of your branded traffic you’re receiving will help you find out what works for your reputation and what doesn’t, how much effort you should put into brand management, or just understand whether you have chosen the right direction or not.
Google Analytics allows you to monitor the number of people who entered your website through the brand terms, use a browser bookmark, SEO clicks, and conversions per page for specific periods.
Other SEO Brand Levers of Influence
But I have to remind you, SEO may become strong not by a brand alone. From this article, you might get the feeling that by increasing SEO brand marketing, you will immediately move to the top.
It’s not that simple. After all, we all know “You don’t bring a knife to a gunfight”, which means that there will be always a brand stronger than yours. In the world of SEO, there are lots of different levers of influence, that you can compete with other brands. Just remember not to neglect this factor.
Besides, the brand has another positive side, I mean its capitalization:
Content Marketing Platform
- 100,000+ media publications;
- get backlinks to your product;
- scale work with content distribution.
Bottom Line: SEO brand marketing
Understanding the power of SEO brand marketing can help you stand out from your competitors. Increasing brand awareness will not only encourage engagement and empower loyalty, but it can also improve your rankings on the SERPs.
What are your favorite SEO tactics? Let me know how you’ve used SEO to boost search branding metrics in the comments.
