The more search engines evolve, the more the available known channels for online marketing become a single component of an entire strategy, ensuring integration is the most efficient way to drive visitors, to build a solid brand, and to generate sales to your business.
Securing and maintaining an online business these days is very much attainable if it has a marketing campaign that is focused on building a strong brand.
So what is brand building basically?
Brand building is the process of shaping a customer’s emotions, feelings, memories, and opinions associated with your brand through a strategy-driven plan that stands the test of time and people.
So when you launch your brand and your website, you shouldn’t leave search engine optimization for later, because SEO is all about improving the user experience and that’s why Google cares about a site’s speed, web design, high-quality content, mobile-friendliness, etc. building a brand and providing a great user experience should be a priority.
So why is brand marketing important in search?
- It improves your business lead generation, because it’s much easier to sell a service or product when you’re a trusted brand.
- Higher success rates from acquiring links naturally or through sending out requests to other webmasters.
- Search engines favor brands that rank on search result pages. This increases your site’s chances of getting higher search rankings for difficult keywords, which leads to more targeted traffic.
SEO influences different aspects of the user experience and your brand image is a reflection of how your users feel about you.
To make your users feel good about your brand, focus on the different user experience factors such as:
- Usefulness: Your content should be high quality, useful, and relevant.
- Usability: Your site should be easy to navigate.
- Desirability: Your design should appeal to your target audience.
- Accessibility: Your site should be mindful of people with disabilities.
- Credibility: Your brand must show signs of authority and prompt trust.
Since the above attributes are trademarks of an ideal user experience, you should think about them when you’re building the brand awareness for your business.
Most of these attributes map directly to SEO as search engines gauge the overall user experience and decide if your site is the best result to show.
Strategies that you can implement to improve brand awareness as well as your search visibility through brand-centric methodologies:
1. Optimize for User experience
Making everything in your website easy for your visitors to use from knowing what your website is all about to make your visitors absorb what your business value proposition is, establishes better user engagement, and eventually develops brand awareness.
Your site is your brand’s online touchpoint. You have to deliver a great user experience every time. While there are many things that contribute to user experience, the following three matter the most:
- Responsiveness
- Navigation
- Speed
2. Target a Niche Audience
In recent times brands have more chances to interact with their consumer base, so instead of just communicating with this audience, they can get this audience to help build your brand.
Here’s how targeting niche audiences can help you build your brand
- Narrowing down keywords to a niche.
- Connecting with new customers.
- Communicating with your existing customers.
- Successfully targeting your offers.
3. Long-Tail Keywords
The basic logic behind keywords is the consumer’s intent when performing a search. Long-tail keywords give a brand the ability to reach very specific audiences, which are almost impossible to reach otherwise. The intent of a customer could be any of the following:
- Navigational
- Transactional
- Informational
- Commercial
4. Link Building
Building brand awareness is basically increasing the recognition and acknowledgment of a brand. Now imagine the virtual sphere where SEO reigns. This is where strategic link building comes into play.
Using tactics like broken link building, creating infographics, or participating actively on social media networks can help build some strong backlinks.
If you get some serious traction on places like Tumblr, Reddit, etc your brand awareness will go through the roof, and naturally, backlinks follow. In the end, both the branding and the SEO start benefiting organically.
5. Brand Optimized Content
Content marketing is the cornerstone of internet marketing for successfully building up your brand or your company.
Optimizing your content for the right keywords is your first step to boosting your brand image and becoming more visible to search engines.
Here are a few points to keep in mind while writing high-quality content that’s both user and search engine friendly:
- Use keyword phrases.
- Optimize tags of the following:
- Title
- Meta Description
- URL
- Work on the headline.
- Provide new and relevant information.
6. Brand reputation and SEO
Along with proactively seeking reviews, an effective SEO strategy also combats negative SEO by closely monitoring a brand’s mentions.
3 to-dos to create a stellar online reputation:
- Ask for reviews
Making sure that you offer really good customer experiences can motivate customers to leave a review. - Fight negative SEO
Your competitors can resort to black hat SEO practices to damage your online reputation. If you notice that your brand is being targeted on social media by fake profiles or if you start seeing incoming links from spammy sites, it could be a sign of negative SEO. Staying alert is the best defense. - Monitor Brand Mentions
The best way to keep a handle on your brand’s online mentions is to set up Google alerts. With Google Alerts, every time your brand is mentioned, you will receive an email notification which will help you stay informed.
7. Promote Brand Image
The final step in creating brand awareness through SEO is controlling your brand image. If you can successfully build a positive brand image, you can see a serious increase in profits. SEO helps you assert more control over the perception of your brand by optimizing your content for keywords that you want your brand to be associated with the most and by aligning your keyword strategy with your brand strategy.
Conclusion
As a brand, you don’t just want people to just identify with your logo or trademarks. You also want them to find and connect with you. Appearing relevant to search engines is the key to getting discovered and SEO helps.
It doesn’t matter whether your business is online and offline, using SEO as a business building block will 100% help you connect with your target audience.
