Brand SEO or SEO Branding is the most effective way to increase brand recognition and generate leads in one neat little package.
Business owners who are serious about harnessing the power of search engine optimisation for increase brand awareness must understand the power of brand recognition in the context of SEO.
SEO and brand building are two crucial elements of growing a business online and are actually somewhat dependent on each other. For instance, an enormous component of search engine optimisation will cultivate and require brand building. Furthermore, a business will struggle to increase brand awareness without the implementation of SEO. Like it or not, performance and recognition of brand matters for SEO.
Too often, SEOs and marketers get stuck within the idea that they need to separate branded performance from conversions and traffic acquired from non-branded organic search. The traditional line of thinking is that SEO and branding are two different sectors of building a business. We know that these two factors may overlap, but very few marketers are giving SEO branding the attention it deserves. Many get trapped within a keyword obsession and rather than focusing on what SEO means as a whole, they’re too busy racing towards rankings for desired non-branded keywords.
Don’t get me wrong – those coveted non-branded keyword rankings are undoubtedly important. But let’s not get lost in the idea that they are everything. At its core, SEO is about growing a business through organic search results. Inevitably, an enormous part of this growth process is intertwined in building a brand.
The reality is, brand interest enormously affects search engine optimisation performance, and it’s very difficult to increase brand awareness without the help of SEO.
Branding and SEO are Deeply Intertwined
In this article, we’ll provide a deep dive into the many ways branding and SEO are inextricably connected and how you can measure and implement SEO branding tips.
“What is SEO Branding?” you may ask. SEO branding refers to a process in which the brand of your business or company becomes an important source of organic traffic. Think about the brands that you know and love, and how they compare to smaller, lesser-known competitors within the same niche.
Brands that have user recognition and Google’s trust thrive in search engine result pages.
SEO branding works to help to build and promote a company’s recognition and trust with both search engines and users. Much like link building, SEO branding focuses on building relevance, authority and trust within search engine results.
Brand Recognition & SEO
Have you ever heard of brand name SEO? Brand name SEO refers to optimising a website and a company’s name to enhance brand image and increase brand awareness, with the aim of having consumers recognise a company’s name or product.
Recent search studies have revealed in a survey that 70% of users admit that they look for brands they know when choosing which result to click on from search. Moreover, users are more inclined to select search engine results ranked further down the page if they recognise the brand, rather than choosing a website that they’ve never heard of that’s ranked number one or two. Over the last few years, brand recognition has become critical to getting clicks.
Consider this: in your local supermarket are you going to go for the home brand version of cola soft drink? Or are you going to purchase the brand that you immediately recognise, i.e. Coca-Cola? I would say that most of us would go with a brand that we recognise and trust; for the most part, we’re creatures of habit.
The same could be applied to search engine results. Whatever the product may be, users are inevitably going to be more attracted to brands they recognise than brands they have never heard of before. Brand recognition is a crucial element of increasing a website’s trust, authority, click-through-rate, customer connection and ultimately, conversion rate.
Branded Searches & Conversions
Branded searches are all of the searches made that make use of your brand name, including variations of the brand’s title. A perfect example of a branded search is if someone were to search “Nike shoes”. This is a branded search – the user is searching specifically for a product from Nike, the athletics brand.
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