How do you see Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Usually, as a strategy to boost organic traffic on your site or establish your online presence. But SEO is much more than that. SEO plays a vital role in raising your brand awareness and helps you to attract the right traffic to your website.
It consists of optimizing websites and web pages to uplifting the ranking of websites in search engine results and achieving a spot on the internet through higher visibility, authentic content, and showcasing what a particular brand has to offer. This way brands reinforce branding and gain recognition without spending a penny on media investments.
If you are wondering how to use SEO for company branding, there are various strategies you can apply to gain the audience’s attention. These are; extensive keyword research, infusing those in content, link-building for an industry-relevant domain, outreach campaign to news and industry-relevant publications, optimum use of local SEO, and developing a review campaign.
Along with these, you can also launch a brand awareness campaign via paid advertising, grow your social media presence organically, explore avenues like videos and podcasts and develop a referral program to spread a positive word about your company. One challenge of implementing SEO is finding the right keywords to target, but the good news is you can improve your search performance without entirely changing the brand keywords.
This is the primary strategy of SEO for brand awareness, but apart from this, there are other strategies worth implementing. Before you hop into it, know why SEO is important for raising brand awareness. This article briefs you on the importance of SEO and gives effective strategies to apply to your marketing funnel.
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Why is SEO important for brand awareness?
Branding means brand recognition from people who choose you over your competitors because of the quality of service or products you provide. This is done by generating awareness through social media campaigns, addressing consumer values, delivering promises and qualifications which in turn results in consumer retention. Aside from developing your brand on social media, it is imperative for SEO as well.
Google fosters business websites that along with valuable content has a strong business presence that even ranks better with fewer links. To rank well in organic search results, branding and SEO, collectively are the basis of your marketing strategy. You might be aware of Google’s increased push and algorithm update E-A-T (Expertise- Authority-Trustworthiness) which makes evident that branding matters. Branding and SEO are interdependent. The real value lies in combining these two strategies.
Brand awareness contributes a lot to SEO. Search engines prioritize them because they want to deliver reliable responses and quality content through consolidated brands. Brand awareness also strengthens SEO strategy in another way as renowned brands tend to attract more clicks in search results.
Good organic Click-through-rate (CTR) is a positive sign for the Google algorithm that favors page rankings. Searchers also think that big brands deliver more reliable content. SEO and brand awareness helps each other in securing a top position on Google. Every company’s brand awareness can be measured by similar organic metrics. Here are some strategies, to improve your brand awareness online.
Link building
Link building is getting web pages to link to each other by acquiring hyperlinks from other websites and applying them to your own site. This helps users navigate between different pages. Search engines use these links to crawl the web and individual pages of your website. Google favors this and pushes your content up in the search results. This increases the chances of additional traffic on your site. Just make sure that links are from relevant sites otherwise traffic will be of no use.
Create valuable content
To strengthen your brand awareness, you need to create content that resonates and adds value to the reader’s life. Address consumer needs and doubts and give an effective solution in a simple and comprehensive language. Create more informative and relevant posts consistently to engage with your readers. Your unique content will make you stand out from your competitors and help establish yourself digitally.
The hacks for good content creation are; storytelling, giving real-life examples, adding customer cases, lessons learned and sharing glimpses of your branding journey. This will help you stand out and engage more customers with your brand.
Optimize keywords
Search for the most relevant keywords of your niche and place them strategically in your content. Optimized keywords are the best way to target your brand and generate qualified traffic. Find the keywords through analysis and research of your industry and competitors. Once you analyze and short-list the popular keywords, you will get an idea of the traffic and accuracy of your website. These could be both; Short tail and long-tail keywords.
Also, focus on long-tail keywords more, short-tail keywords have higher search volumes, but their conversion rates are lower. Long-tail keywords are more specific, but they gradually drive more traffic to your site, resulting in higher conversion rates. Long-tail keywords target a specific niche of audience.
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Enhance user experience
User experience is crucial for Google rankings due to many digital creators competing online, but it strengthens brand awareness. A site that offers better usability wins over the trust. If a user lands on your website, navigates through different areas, and very easily finds what he is looking for without facing any troubles, they get a good perception of your website. The components that make a good user experience are; loading speed, responsiveness, site security, and button functionality. Sometimes the Google algorithm changes play a vital role in user experience and site performance.
Leverage social media
Social media presence is the route to reach the maximum audience, gain popularity and raise brand awareness. To build your social media presence come up with intriguing content in different forms; text, audio, video, and infographics that your audience finds resonating.
Focus on current topics and collate them with your particular niche. Use alluring visuals to grab the audience’s attention which can make your content stand out. Create content consistently, otherwise, you may lose your social media presence. Coming up with new ideas every day could be a tedious task. In such cases, you can create polls, organize contests to engage your audience. Schedule your content with the help of tools to gain maximum visibility and momentum.
Add brand personality to your site
Pay attention to minute details and polish them in a way it connects with your consumer. Design your website layout with the intent to associate it with your brand. The details to focus on are; colors, images, element combinations that shape your brand personality. Alongside, also pay attention to the language of your content. The texts need to be compelling, convincing, and comprehensible which can be grasped by readers quickly and form a positive brand image in the user’s mind.
Optimize content for more data and leads
Make your landing pages and blog posts mobile-friendly, optimize meta-descriptions, images and URLs. Whether you use long-tail keywords or location-based, the content should be authentic and updated. Repurpose and update your content timely as after some time the content might lose relevance which will no longer be valuable for the audience. To update your content, perform a content audit to have a look at what points to fix and what trends to follow for content marketing.
These are some of the strategies to raise your brand awareness online. Using these you can set up a huge client base and expect a spread of positive words about your business.
Benefits of SEO for brand awareness
The benefits of SEO are often overlooked, instead, strategies such as social media, paid advertising, branded content, and event sponsorships are prioritized over it. These strategies are expensive and laborious especially for the digital marketing of small businesses. For them, SEO is an economically effective solution and beneficial in many ways.
- SEO is an organic strategy. You do not have to pay Google for increasing visibility and clicks. As a small business, you can create an SEO strategy to compete with bigger brands.
- Brand awareness wants brands to be recognized by more people in the target audience. SEO is a powerful strategy to increase the range of brands. Through the strategic use of SEO, brands gain visibility within the public and show interest in what they offer.
- The brand ranking on the top delivers the best content response and user experience which makes those sites reliable for the audience. This associates authority with the brand and strengthens the image in the consumer’s mind.
- A page secures the first position only after delivering valuable content to users. These contents include solutions to the audience’s doubts and difficulties. When this content gets a decent spot in Google it gains visibility from a bigger audience.
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Final Words
Once you apply these strategies to your business it is important to monitor analytics and get insights into your brand performance. This will help you find out the unattended and struggling areas of your site and help you take steps to improve it.
You can restructure your website, change the placement of keywords, repurpose your content and deliver a completely new experience to your readers. This will result in higher traffic and will help you convey your purpose to your target audience. No matter what position you take in, without optimization you will lose a bunch of potential traffic and conversions. Once you start using SEO to the optimum, you will see a drastic rise in your brand awareness. So, why not use it to the fullest and achieve the goals you have set for your business.
This article is written by Lyuthar Jacob. Lyuthar is a content manager at Clickmatix digital marketing agency, where he gets to do what he loves doing- writing and managing content with smart digital marketers in the company.
