Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important factor for boosting your brand identity. In years gone by, SEO comprised little more than mentioning a brand name repeatedly on any landing page. Search engine algorithms have since evolved into complex, smart tools that deliver enhanced search result ranking and brand awareness.
A skilled brand manager and marketer should know how to fuse SEO into branding by creating actionable SEO proposal deliverables. Effective reporting will include provable results, such as conducting a backlink audit or benchmarking the business against its competitors. The bottom-line benchmarks for efficacy will be increased online visibility and improved brand awareness.
Using SEO to build your brand keeps your business ranked higher where more online users are likely to find it. Prominent placement results in increased traffic and more leads in an extremely competitive environment. To help make the most of SEO in boosting your brand identity, make sure you’ve considered all five strategies listed below.
1. The Link-Building Strategy
This strategy is useful for growing brand awareness by increasing the number of inbound links to your site. Search engines trust that your brand is authentic, credible, and useful to users if you get a lot of backlinks. The more backlinks, the higher your site will be ranked by search engines. The higher you appear on search pages, the more traffic is likely to be driven to your site.
Prominent placement for specific keywords directly impacts your brand identity. As a result, effective link building should be part of any brand identity strategy. The best way to accomplish this is to create engaging and visually appealing content that’s helpful to your target audience.
Your content should provide helpful information to readers and other websites in a related niche. Reliable, regularly updated content can serve as a point of reference, too. Automatically, your brand identity becomes linked to great content quality and useful information. To facilitate a successful link-building strategy, be sure to address the following four categories:
- Usefulness: Content needs to be high quality, relevant, and useful to the target audience.
- Credibility: Your brand needs to command authority and engender trust.
- Searchability: Through SEO, you’ll be able to ensure that users don’t struggle to find the content they’re looking for.
- Appeal: Your web design and content should appeal to the audience you intend to reach. Strive to create a memorable image that they relate to your brand at first glance.
2. Keyword Optimization to Increase Traction
Marketing your content holds great potential for drawing attention to your brand. To enable you to reach the desired key performance indicator (KPI) on brand awareness, your organic visibility on search engines is vital. When you don’t attain prominent visibility, another brand will grab it and lower your chances of being identified with your product or service.
As with link building, content should be valuable to a user by providing satisfactory and up-to-date information. If you’ve done your job right, you’ll attract the website crawlers that rank sites. The desired result is to rank high on search engines and have your brand identified with a target keyword phrase. Think of your preferred keyword as something a typical person might type into a search bar if he or she were looking for your business.
If you’re able to identify the needs of your target audience through keywords, your chances of being found on the web will increase. Ranking high on search engine results pages (SERPs) establishes your credibility. This in turn establishes trust with your audience and search engines. Higher rankings increase click-overs to your site, generating traction for your content and boosting your brand’s identity. If you optimize the right keywords, your overall online brand visibility will significantly improve.
3. Targeting an Audience with Niche-Sensitive Keywords
By creating niche-specific keywords, you increase your chances of reaching new customers. A targeted niche is more likely to already be interested in your content and what you have to offer. Niche keywords need to be specific to your brand, site, and business. Here are a few steps to help you find and adopt niche-fitting keywords:
- Define Your Niche: Identify who you are, which industry you belong to, and what problems you can solve for your target market.
- Conduct Keyword Research: This process helps you recognize and pick relevant keywords and phrases specific to your niche. There are numerous free keyword research tools online you can use to find the right keywords.
- Refine Your Niche Keyword List: After picking potential niche keywords, develop a method to effectively trim your list down to what’s helpful for driving traffic.
- Measure the Competitiveness of Your Niche Keywords: Evaluate the difficulty of each keyword’s ranking to see how it will perform in real-world searches.
After you have completed the steps above, remember to regularly monitor and tweak keywords. The best keywords should help you reach people looking for products or services in your niche.
4. Using Long-Tail Over Short-Tail Keywords
Generally, keywords help online searchers narrow their search down to relevant results. The differences between keywords aren’t only in the number of words, but also in the impact.
While short-tail keywords consist of fewer words, they also generate very broad searches. These may result in users having a hard time finding what they’re looking for. For the best experience in boosting your brand with SEO keywords, long-tail keywords work best. These will return narrowed results, making it easier for anyone to find exactly what they’re searching for. Here’s how long-tail keywords work to boost your brand reach and, eventually, your brand identity:
- Long-tail keywords help outrank your competitors by giving user-specific answers to search strings.
- Most users search using specific, long-tail keywords. Simply adding a specific word to your keyword phrase can lead to a traffic increase on your website.
- Long-tail keywords help provide context around your content and brand.
- Long-tail keywords have better conversion rates when compared to short-tail keywords.
For your brand’s enhanced identity, optimize your content by using more specific and longer keywords/phrases. Specificity is more likely to drive a customer to your website. Potential customers will identify that specific phrase with your brand. This in turn will give you the identity boost your brand needs.
5. Engaging With Your Audience On Social Media Platforms
Social media platforms are no longer just places for meeting new people and making friends. That may have been the case a few years ago. Nowadays, there are many emerging alternative social media platforms for content marketing. These newer platforms are among the best places to engage with your customers. These platforms specialize in providing relatable content that connects audiences effectively with your brand identity.
Search engines also index all forms of social media content. Aim to create SEO-ready content that’s relevant and can be positively identified with your brand. The best way to get identified in this setting is by using your brand logo and name in every piece of shared content. Your social media posts should create a lasting impact such that people can always refer back to them.
Content promotion is directly related to how far and how long your messages circulate. Create procedures for posting follow-up content and asking for feedback on each post. Creating a brand identity on social media platforms is a long-term venture. As such, every step you take should focus on keeping your content consistently relevant and timeless for as long as possible.
Remember, your brand identity is there to stay. You want the content you post today to be relevant in the years to come. Applying SEO strategies to your online content will boost your website traffic and performance, increasing the pool of those who can easily identify your brand.
Final Thoughts
The means discussed above should help you increase your brand visibility. The goal is to understand how SEO can help put your brand in the limelight. If you can make your brand rank higher in search engines, you become more identifiable. Consistent use of a logo or content that people associate with you is critical.
Also, keep in mind that branding practices, SEO tools, and associated technologies evolve over time. Be on the lookout for changes and remain flexible. You’ll want to move with the times as new developments can shift how SEO boosts brand identity. For now, focus on integrating SEO into your branding if you haven’t done so already.
