A strong brand strengthens marketing efforts. From being just another supplier, it transforms you into a business your audience wants to buy from.
You might not think about the relationship of branding to organic search. After all, the main goal of SEO is to get brands to rank high on Google for non-brand search terms.
Let’s look at the relationship between SEO and branding and how they benefit your business.
1. Rankings
The goal of SEO is audience generation. In general, SEO builds audiences of people who may not know you yet.
Through content, SEO aims to know searchers where they are, solve their problems and nurture them for conversion.
Audience generation requires significant effort. You’ll probably need a well-built and optimized site and a solid content strategy to do well.
Don’t panic. SEO has combined benefits that will serve your brand as long as your site can maintain its rank. In less competitive industries, this could take years.
Likewise, the more well-written and strategic your posts, the easier it is to rank.
The more positions you get to the top positions, the more clicks you get. Therefore, more people will know who you are.
To this extent, SEO build brand awareness.
2. Brand recognition
If your brand doesn’t rank for a desirable keyword, someone else (a competitor) will.
Even the most well-known brands should take SEO seriously and claim places at the top of the SERPs.
Of course, you’re going to rank for your brand anyway, but what about all the other questions, queries, and issues related to your product or service?
A strong brand equals trust, which will likely improve your click-through rate (CTR). But you can only grab your share of clicks and traffic if you’ve made the necessary efforts to rank.
When people see your brand in the SERPs for an unbranded keyword, you want people to click through to your website instead of a competitor.
If you’re not there, you’re losing valuable traffic, giving it away to a competitor who appeared when the search engine needed it most.
Don’t rest on your laurels when it comes to your brand. It only takes one brand to constantly pop up when you don’t want to capture traffic that could have been yours.
3. Control the brand narrative
Without a proper SEO strategy, you could be losing clicks for searches that include your brand name.
If your brand is building new audiences (as it should be), it’s best to address user queries throughout the decision-making process.
It is the role of SEO to ensure that keywords related to the brand rank well. And if they aren’t, the SEO needs to develop a plan to make that happen.
In general, you will easily rank for your brand name, but search terms like “[brand name] comments” or “is [brand name] reliable?” is there anyone to take.
You could lose clicks to review websites or social networks. This matters, even if it’s your accounts.
On your site, you can set up pages designed to meet search intent and funnel traffic accordingly based on what they’re searching for. You don’t have that same agility with social networks, for example.
What’s worse than your reviews or ranking on your social media platforms for brand keywords is the potential for a complaint or published letter that unfairly criticizes your brand.
Or, a well-intentioned advocate who hasn’t done your brand justice when they respond, “Can [brand name] be trustworthy?”
If you haven’t done the work to show up in the SERPs, then it’s open for others to take that spot.
4. Traffic
As mentioned, the better you rank, the more traffic you will get.
For most brands, it’s not enough to make a lucky rank eight or even a rank four on the first page. Your brand should be working towards these top spots.
Kevin Indig shares the importance of click curves and how to find yours. From the chart below, Indig shows how clicks are reduced with rankings.
It should come as no surprise that Rank 1, Page 1 has the highest clicks with a CTR close to 25% on mobile. CTR drops rapidly by rank.
When a page ranks 4th, the CTR is less than 10%. The chart below shows that position six or beyond can expect a CTR of less than 5%.
In a study of 4 million Google search results, Backlinko found that, on average, moving a site up in search results increase CTR by 2.8%. It pays to develop a strong SERP presence.
5. Trusted brands attract links
In this article, I have already linked to two sources, Indig and Backlinko.
To find the research, I had to do a Google search and sift through the results until I found a source I would trust to include in this article.
This is a perfect example of how trusted brands attract links.
If your brand is known for being a credible source of information, it’s more likely to get backlinks naturally.
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6. Conversions
Often, when someone finds your site through search engines, it will be their first point of contact with your brand.
If your SEO and content have done their job well, the traffic your site finds is qualified, which means they’re likely to convert.
And if the site is serving good traffic, there’s every chance you can convert the user, maybe within that session.
The initial search may not be branded. This puts the user on your site for the first time.
Later, satisfied with your service through the website and inspired by your offer, they search for your brand and return to the site.
Given your credibility, the second search is more likely to convert.
People buy from brands they trust, so whether your audience is booking an appointment, requesting a demo, or signing up for a newsletter, SEO is all about attracting qualified traffic that can convert later on
SEO helps traffic solve problems and presents them to your brand so you can capture a conversion through search or other marketing channels.
7. Income and profits
Traffic and conversions are great, but businesses need more revenue and profit.
A solid SEO strategy provides answers and support to users throughout the marketing funnel. Your content and website architecture should allow your brand to continue to appear in relevant search queries.
You need a core audience/customers to have a brand that grows and thrives. Through SEO and content, you can demonstrate your expertise, support your consumers, and build an ongoing relationship with them.
Once a brand is trusted, sales will begin to increase.
The role of trust and branding is very obvious when looking at the analysis of e-commerce sites. Pages with the most brand searches will have the highest conversion rates.
A search like “[brand name] + [product name]” is more likely to convert than a search like “How to solve [problem]?” You need a known brand before you can get this brand name, product name search.
You need to answer those keywords that don’t convert, like “how to fix this [problem]?” before you can build enough trust to get the sale.
8. Loyalty/Retention
Even better than a unique customer or passive subscriber is a repeat customer or an audience that engages with your emails or other marketing efforts like social media.
Your qualified audiences who found you once through a Google search can transform into your most loyal followers and advocates.
This loyalty and retention is another good example of combined SEO efforts. Here, you can start reviewing customer lifetime value (CLV) to really understand the benefits of these early ranks.
9. Incidence
Advocates are perhaps your most valuable consumer. Your advocates are your loyal and loyal customers first.
As you continue to nurture them, they will become your online champions, advocates or brand ambassadors. you want these Advocates share your content and recommend you to others.
While advocacy isn’t the easiest thing to measure, SEO does indirectly affect it.
Advocates had to discover you and receive a level of service (even if it was in your content) to build enough trust to cover, buy and become loyal and loyal customers.
Where possible, the defense should be considered in the CLV. If you can encourage customer advocacy and each customer tells three friends who also convert, it increases CLV. This is one of the motivations behind refer-a-friend schemes and the like.
10. More own data
Assuming you execute SEO and brand relations well, you’ll have more growth and valuable first-party data.
With larger data sets comes better analysis that you can use to make decisions to continue growing and fueling your SEO. The data provided by SEO can also be transferred to many forms of marketing.
If you know people are searching for content on Google, chances are they’re also searching for it on other search engines.
A well-placed social media post with your customers’ exact pain points (which you know from SEO) will likely stop a scroll and encourage engagement with your band in other forms of marketing.
SEO and branding go hand in hand
Your best chance to keep your brand discovered by new and old audiences is to build brand awareness and SEO at the same time.
Branding helps all your marketing channels, as does the data your SEO efforts provide.
Without SEO, your brand runs the risk of ranking for its brand name alone, which is useless for audience generation.
Likewise, without SEO, you’ll lose visibility for some brand-related searches, which could give your audience away to competitors.
If you want a solid business, it’s best to double down on brand awareness and audience building, and SEO is the key to that success.
Without SEO, building audiences and staying relevant on the biggest search engine, it will only take one competitor to show up where you haven’t and better serve your potential customers.
Be strong with your brand and get it in front of as many people as you can, you deserve the traffic and your audience will be very happy to meet you in the SERPs.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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