In this competitive online environment, your brand needs to make some noise to make its presence felt. Here, SEO becomes more important than ever. Today, you need more than just creating a user-friendly website, gather a bunch of links, or improve SEO practices.
The most important work is to put all this together and develop an authoritative and trustworthy brand.
Your brand should provide valuable information to its target audience. To create a strong brand presence, you need to do well in organic search results, focusing on both SEO and branding as a part of your marketing strategy.
SEO and branding are the foundation stones of successful digital marketing. People are becoming fast in finding and purchasing a new product by simply searching it on the Internet or smartphones.
The real value of SEO and brand building are more contiguous and indispensable than we think. For effective brand building, you need to create an SEO strategy that will increase brand awareness in the long run.
Importance of Brand Building
Google gives brands preferential treatment wherein some known brands get good rankings with fewer links and better SERPs, while the small brands are never surfaced and left in the dust. This makes it important for small retailers to understand the importance of brand building and get ready for the big game!
- Prominently changing SERPs
Along with Google updates, you need to pay attention to the effect of layout adjustments that change user behavior.
For example- Featured snippets are the latest trends and have given marketers a chance to:
- boost conversions
- beat competitors
- bring good traffic
These featured snippets have been Google’s top buzzword with more than 11.3% of search results and aids in increasing CTRs, boost traffic, quality results, and give an attractive look to your site.
- Focus on yielding more clicks
Brand recognition is a great way to get more clicks. It is powerful enough to reach on Google’s top-ranking post and drive good revenues.
According to data, about 71% of consumers believe that it is important to recognize a brand before making a purchase.
If you have to choose between Nike or Champion, then your obvious choice would be Nike. Right?
Trust plays a major role in decision making. Just remember, stronger brand recognition, higher the clicks, and better revenues.
- SERP CTRs perform better than rankings
Don’t believe the ones saying that ranking first on Google will yield 30% clicks for an unbranded search. It’s not the case anymore!
Your content might be amazing, but if nobody knows you, then you won’t be able to generate these many organic clicks.
SERPs are likely to have an impact on rankings. Google is trying to analyze search queries and clicks to see what their users prefer and not the top piece content.
To produce better SEO results, branding is the only answer to all your queries. Head down for some great strategies that you might require to make yourself seen.
5 Strategies Involved in Brand Awareness
- Organize all your branded keywords
Performing a branded search means users are searching for your brand name in their search queries. Ensure to include branded keywords and their variations in your SEO activities as they help to grow your business.
Your product needs to have a solution that solves a problem. Do thorough research on your branded keywords to understand the purpose of your brand that forces people to buy it.
With this, your business can grow in various levels. The moment you increase your branded search volume, the rankings for your non-branded keywords will eventually increase.
In other words, when your brand appears in a high volume of searches with unbranded queries, Google will associate your brand with these keywords and make them relevant.
Your branded search should not revolve around branded search comprising of your business. Instead, there are several ways your customers are searching online. Keep a close eye with some of the following:
Branded ROPO queries – Users that type these keywords are always ready to buy. An example of it is brand name+reviews.
Competitors’ branded keywords – Herein, you compare your brand with your competitor’s brand name. Also, remember that these customers are the easiest to lose. It includes your brand name vs. your competitor’s name.
Navigational queries- Your website will show for both- top organic and paid search results. It is better if you buy these keywords as they intend to get clicks and conversations. Just include your brand name + contact or log in.
High intent keywords- You include your brand name along with a feature or product.
Pro Tip: Use the full name of your brand, along with brand typos. Something like this:
Even if your brand ranks No.1 on Google for all branded queries, pay attention to the blended search results like videos, images, products, or results that got featured for your branded keywords.
If No, then, it’s time to prepare a separate strategy for brand variations.
- Apply local SEO practices
Your brand needs local SEO practices for precise location targeting to drive branded traffic to your website.
A study reveals that the people who are searching for any product or service are searching with an intent to buy with a ratio of 46%. Customers who search for your product have a high commercial intent as they are aware of your brand or product.
While implementing the best SEO strategy, also consider geo-targeting to increase conversions. It is easier to rank well when you focus more on the relevancy of the keyword than the most popular keywords.
SEO is a competitive marketing tactic that requires frequent optimization and testing daily. Thus, it is advisable to conduct a detailed SEO website audit to increase your traffic, conversions, and sales.
Things to keep in mind while building a successful local SEO strategy:
- Make sure you verify and optimize all your local business listings on Google, along with newer sections like Google local posts, service list, booking button, and likewise. By doing this, you can drive traffic from local and map searches.
- Make sure you verify and optimize all your local business listings on Google, along with newer sections like Google local posts, service list, booking button, and likewise. By doing this, you can drive traffic from local and map searches.
- Optimize Alt tags and filenames for your brand name, images, and the names of your product or service. Add characteristics like size, color, model, or gender.
- Integrate local schema for your website
- Focus on developing a mobile-friendly website design
- Maximize your results by improving your page load speed
- Add branded keywords to your landing pages, business reviews, localized contents, and business descriptions.
- Aim for link building with high-quality websites in your local area and niche
- Make your online reviews work for your business
For maximum results, keep a close eye on what your customer is searching for. Stay equipped with trendy keywords and the latest pieces of information to keep your audience engaged.
- Get the most out of your branded terms
Why do you want to bid on brand keywords?
Simple.
Because your competitors are also doing the same. You don’t want them to get your traffic on their welcoming pages.
Just as in the above image, the branded ad takes the first position while the competitor is in second place. Thus, paying for your branded terms is a better option than getting them organically. With this, you are creating your territory to prevent all attempts of your competitors from invading into your kingdom.
With the help of paid ads, you can control your messaging and lure more customers to your website. Anyway, organic listings won’t lead your audience to your website landing page. Take advantage of your paid ads and force them to stay with creative ad formats like site links, product listing ads, etc.
- Contribute to high-quality websites
Publishing your content on high-quality websites helps in building credibility, awareness, and brings visibility to your page. Contributing your thoughts or ideas on relevant websites makes you an authoritative source of information and builds strong links to boost your organic search rankings.
Submitting guest blogs to authority websites will add content to your website content and demonstrate your expertise.
Before you send forth your content, make sure you know the domain authority of the desired website. Check if it gets high traffic volume and aligns with your brand values. If you do it right, then you are surely going to get good traffic and generate good revenue.
- Measure to understand your traffic
Keeping a track of your branded traffic will help to figure out what works out well for your brand and what doesn’t so that you know if you’re in the right direction.
To get this score, Google Analytics is widely used to monitor the number of people entering your landing page through brand terms, use browser bookmarks, SEO clicks and conversions per landing page for a specific period.
Track the volume of searches for your brand keywords and check whether your search volumes are increasing using Google keyword planner.
Branded searches are often underestimated. But remember one thing, without optimization for your organic and paid SEO, you are not going anywhere! Keep optimization as your key touchpoint and you will be able to improve brand awareness and provide a better user experience.
You never know what works best for you unless you test your capabilities. Just give it a shot and see the difference these effective SEO strategies will make to your brand.
Branding is the only hope for conducting better SEO
No branding, no differentiation. No differentiation, no profitability. This is an equation that every marketer needs to know.
Branded searches are indispensable and often overlooked. Without optimization for your organic and paid SEO for branded searches, you will probably lose a bunch of potential traffic, SERPs, and conversions.
Start optimizing to improve your brand awareness and user experience. We hope this is enough to kick start your SEO swag!
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