Whether you’re familiar with SEO or it’s a bit of an alien subject to you, brand visibility should be one of your core objectives, whether you’re a startup, fresh in your niche or a well-estblished brand.
Brand awareness is great for driving prospective customers right to your virtual doorstep and involves a plethora of different channels to achieve it. One of the key ways to build awareness and drive visibility is through a solid SEO strategy.
An SEO strategy which integrates brand activity can lead to a more joined-up approach and improves results. Integrating branding into your SEO activities can allow you to generate quality organic traffic and improve the trust and value associated with your company, product or service.
So how can you ensure that your SEO strategy is aligned with your brand?
Site relevance
If your site doesn’t represent your brand and show how great you are, why do you even have it? Establishing a brand image is vital to making you memorable and stand out from the crowd, moreover, it can actually increase your profits through associating value to your name and image.
So aesthetically, you should aim to have a great looking site that users will want to use and can use with ease. Which leads nicely onto user experience, which covers a range of elements including site structure, load speeds and page layout. Failure to consider how a user navigates your site can result in a reduced average session duration and higher bounce rates as people become fed-up or frustrated with the user journey.
Finally, on-site content should reflect your goals and be optimised to meet your search page ranking objectives. Once you’ve completed your keyword research and competitor analysis, you should write to meet these objectives but ensure that first and foremost, your text is written for humans. Be sure not to ‘keyword stuff’ or try and ‘please’ Google algorithms, and instead write and format in a way which makes sense and delivers on it desired purpose.
Position zero
Position zero or featured snippets are a great opportunity for brands to really position themselves as thought leaders in their fields. Although you, as a brand, have no control in if you appear as a featured snippet or not, it is possible, more so for specific terms relative to your offerings.
It’s not necessarily an easy feat to achieve but is something to consider when you’re creating regular content for your site. If there is a specific service that your company provides which is unique and is worth pushing as the core offering, then creating regular content for this for your site pushes you nearer to achieving that prime real estate at position zero.
Furthermore, this coveted spot is typically returned as the primary result during voice search. This means you’re able to expand your potential reach beyond the screen to the homes of your customers. In 2018, 20% of mobile queries were voice searches, with the anticipation of 50% of searches being undertaken via voice by 2020 – with this in mind, why wouldn’t you strive for that top spot of position zero as part of your SEO and brand strategy?
Links and content placement
Sometimes a dirty word in the SEO world, obtaining backlinks is something that needs to be done to build a healthy backlink profile. Although historically, some of the practices were questionable, many brands have established clever and fair methods of bolstering both their clout in the SERP’s and their brand visibility in one hit.
Working with external publications, such as industry news or interest sites to place your thought leadership article or professional low-down on a recent development in your industry offers both a valuable piece of content to the publication and often, they will add a link in to ensure that readers are able to find out more about the creator or product.
This works two-fold in that it positions your brand as a knowledgeable body in your field as well as trusted by the host publication, but it links do also pass value. They allow Google to make connections between the sites and topics which allows them to index pages more effectively and serve relevant content to its users.
It all comes down to brand
Ultimately, you will never be the only brand doing what you in your space, its the honest truth and is something that a lot of brands have yet to come to terms with. However, all is not lost to the global, blue-chip companies of the world, startups and SME’s still have a fighting chance.
Your brand is your differentiator and without it, you’ll never stand out from the crowd. If you haven’t estblished who your brand is and what it represents, chances are your competition has and will be using this will all their might to generate those click-throughs.
Remember, better brand strength is what will see users click through to your site in a sea of sites offering pretty much the same information. Getting into the SERP’s is one thing, but making sure your brand is the element that drives clicks relies on so much more work.
