SEO and Branding: How They Work Together

If you're putting zero effort into SEO, then you're surely losing out on tons of business opportunities. if you're putting zero effort into branding too, you're also losing out on conversions.

Business owners often think of SEO and Branding as two separate entities, but this should not be so.

SEO and branding build on top of each other and the truth is if you're leaving one out, you're going to limit your growth if there's any.

As a business owner, in this article, you will discover all you need to know about SEO and branding, branding vs SEO, and how they work together.

Branding vs SEO

As stated earlier, branding and SEO are not meant to compete with each other. Let's look at them instead as two entities complimenting each other, where one is unable to thrive without the other or simply as one; SEO Branding. But first, what is branding? What is SEO?

What Is Branding?

Branding is creating an ideal and strong perception or image of a business, company, or entity and the products or services they offer in the mind of their customers through a combination of elements which include a mission statement, logo design, and colors throughout their marketing communications.

The main benefits of branding include but are not limited to:

• Building a brand helps businesses to differentiate themselves from their competition and build loyal customers.
• Branding gives a business advantage over its competitors and helps them get and keep customers at lower costs.
• Strategically constructing stories, marketing messages, relationships, and visuals (which are all aspects of branding) help in shaping the expectations of customers and creating a unique bond that goes beyond the relationship of buying and selling.
  

• SEO increases the organic discovery of a website and improves the quality of traffic directed to that website.
• A well-organized SEO campaign improves credibility and trust.
• A large audience or marketing funnel can be targeted with SEO
• SEO improves pay-per-click success
• And it helps attract prospective customers to your business and keep the existing ones.

Branding and SEO: How They Work Together For Your Strategy

Branding and SEO have the same target- building customer loyalty and trust, increasing brand awareness and optimizing the cost of acquiring a new customer. Here is how branding helps SEO and vice-versa:

1. Branding Helps You Keep Your SEO Traffic

While both SEO and branding aim at increasing sales, SEO does this by mainly bringing in traffic.

If proper SEO is implemented on your website, your website will appear on the search engine result page, when a prospect or an existing customer enters a search term that contains your target keyword. This means that the higher your website ranks, the more leads you're likely to get.

When a visitor visits your website, the image or perception that they get about your brand is referred to as brand awareness. If your brand awareness is poor, they are not likely to take a desired action such as to make a purchase, to engage on a post, to make a call, or visit your brand's website again.

This is where branding comes in. Branding is what helps carve that awareness in the mind of the customer. It doesn't just tell people about the product or service you offer, it can also change the way people see your business and how they perceive your business. The effect of this is that affinity for your brand is increased and loyalty is built.

2. SEO helps you appear on terms related to your industry, increasing brand awareness

SEO involves organic ranking, which means that you do not have to pay to rank or make your website appear in search results. To further break it down, it involves taking a web page that has been created online and optimizing it for search engines (i.e Google) to display at the top of the search results page when someone enters a query.

For example, someone types in chocolate vanilla into Google. They are likely in search of a recipe, ingredients, cake, ice cream, or even details about both chocolate and vanilla. If you write content about chocolate vanilla, you will want people to see what you have written. However, for people to see what you have written, you must rank above other websites that have also written about chocolate vanilla.

Ranking above others on this page means people are more likely to click what you have written about and go ahead to see what your brand is all about. This is what I mean by increasing brand awareness, the more people see your recipe or content on chocolate vanilla, the more your brand is known. The more people visit your website, the more it appears in search results because search engines begin to see it as trustworthy and authoritative. Personal branding SEO is important for the awareness of your brand.

3. Branding Increases Your SEO Conversions

It is easier to sell your products and services to your target audience online when they are already aware of what you offer, and are fascinated by what you put out there. By building a strong online presence (which is basically the function of branding), you will have easy access to acquiring more qualified traffic that can easily be converted into leads and sales.

Building a strong presence online allows you to easily communicate with your target audience which can also help in how you persuade them to purchase what you offer. While SEO will bring in lots of visitors to your website, branding is what will convert and keep them.

4. Building a Brand increases your SEO rankings in the long term

Branding is designed to make people purchase more, pay more, make faster decisions about purchase e, and stick with the company. Branding builds trust between you and your customers and customers will only purchase from whoever they trust.

Having a strong brand will not only impact a person's impulse to look for a category of your business or products, but also specific goods, products, and services.  

Branding affects awareness and awareness impacts the level of driven search. Search in turn influences website traffic and the more traffic you get, the more authority you build in that niche.

Authority is simply the importance given to a page relative to a given search query which increases SEO rankings in the long run.

5. Branding helps you get branded SEO traffic

Branded traffic is the website traffic that comes from people who search for keywords that include your brand; for instance your name or tagline. The significance of branded traffic is that it is representative of the people who has heard about your business from other sources apart from keyword searches. It is often referred to as a "customer's second exposure to your brand".

In most cases, you are not likely to get branded traffic if a customer has not heard about your brand or an extension of its products and services from other sources. This is what branding does for you, by constantly creating brand awareness and knowing how to optimize for your own branded search, you build a kind of consciousness that can impact a customer's search term whenever they are querying anything in your niche.

6. SEO is how you optimize what people see when they search your business or industry terms up

SEO consists of positioning your brand in search engine results. This involves reaching online spots with high levels of visibility, with content that is helpful to people, and showing ways your brand can help people through what it offers.

This way, you can control the image that people see about your brand, reinforce your branding and gain awareness. Controlling your brand image affects how people perceive your brand and keeps your business ranking online. If people have a positive perception of your brand, they are more likely to purchase what you offer which means you can thrive in a very competitive environment.

SEO is a Key Component of a Brand Strategy

It has been established that SEO and branding must go hand in hand for you to achieve maximum and best results for your brand growth and increase sales.

Part of brand building strategy includes creating awareness and converting leads, aspects that SEO will help attain much faster and better. SEO rankings are also very important for brand building and online visibility, it is the way you present what you offer to people when they come across your brand online.

Trust and authority are also two important factors for brand building, and while branding will help implement these factors, SEO will help achieve the results.

Guerilla Marketing: Frequently Asked Questions

How Do Brands Use SEO?

SEO relies on both external and internal factors to achieve its aim. The following are the ways brands can use SEO:

• Content Marketing - This refers to the process of creating, publishing and distributing useful content on the brand's website or other authoritative websites.
• Constant Link Building Strategy - This involves the strategic building of relevant links to increase a website authority.
• Bid on branded terms - Bidding on branded terms on authoritative websites is an effective way for you to build your brand.
• Accurate measurement of branded search traffi - Beyond bidding on branded terms, it is important for you to frequently measure and track the performance of the terms you are bidding for so that you won’t be wasting your resources on the wrong terms