A well thought-out and carefully implemented SEO campaign can bring many benefits to a company. When used effectively, SEO can help boost brand awareness.
Do you brand or optimize for search?
At times, marketers can think in very boxed, exclusive categories, planning their branding and SEO efforts separately. This leads to a disconnect between a business’ SEO and brand strategy, leading to subpar results. By integrating branding and SEO, you can generate organic traffic from search engines to increase brand reach and improve brand image.
5 Ways SEO Can Help Boost Brand Awareness
1. Link Building
Let’s start with something obvious. Building brand awareness is basically increasing the recognition and acknowledgment of a brand, right? Now, imagine the virtual sphere where SEO reigns. This is where strategic link building comes into play.
Using tactics like broken link building, creating infographics or participating actively social media communities can really help you build some strong links.
By getting some serious traction on places like Reddit, your brand awareness can go through the roof and naturally backlinks follow. In the end, both the branding and the SEO benefit organically. This is one of the goals of link building, at the end, gaining a bigger audience and building your brand.
SEE ALSO: Link Building vs Link Earning. Which is Best?
2. Branding Optimized Content
Content marketing is one of the greatest ways of spreading the word about your company or brand. When SEO and branding are fused in the form of excellent content, enormous stopping power is created.
To achieve this result, the emphasis must be, first of all, on the content itself. There’s a two-pronged approach to creating excellent content – focus both on satisfying your audience’s hunger for fresh information, while keeping the search engine crawlers content. Follow good SEO practices and your brand only gets stronger.
SEE ALSO: How to Use Content Marketing to Build Your Digital Brand
3. Longtail Keywords
The basic logic behind keywords is the consumer’s intent when performing a search. These can be summarized as:
- Navigational – The intent here is to reach a particular site, person or brand. These are very specific and most look for a particular domain (Facebook, Nike, Coca Cola, etc.)
- Informational – These searches look for content, which is more general and is present on more than one web page (headache cure, laptop reviews, etc.)
- Transactional – The intent here is to find help in completing tasks (subscribe, get, buy, etc.)
- Commercial – This is your usual, run-of-the-mill search that precedes a purchase (price, description, etc.)
The rules of the game here are simple – long-tail keywords give a brand the ability to reach very specific audiences, which are almost impossible to reach otherwise.
If a business makes custom decorative boxes, it should focus on ranking high for “custom decorative boxes prices”, for example. The buck doesn’t stop there, given that any serious SEO campaign can target thousands of long-tail keywords, you can start building your own market, rather than existing in someone else’s.
4. Target Niche Audiences
The modern age allows brands to have more interactivity with their consumer base, and instead of just communicating with your audience, you can get your audience to help you build your brand.
Targeting a niche audience works particularly well for small businesses, which can use smart keyword research to gain an edge over the competition and create a hyper-focused brand for the big win.
Here’s how targeting niche audiences can help you build your brand – by narrowing down keywords to a niche, there is a much bigger chance of connecting with new customers, communicating with your existing customers, and successfully targeting your offers.
The mantra here is simple: a focused brand is a successful brand. Keyword research can help you dominate your chosen niche.
5. Promote Brand Image
The end boss in the game of brand awareness is controlling your brand image. If you can successfully build a positive brand image, you can see a serious increase in profits. But how can SEO help you assert more control over the perception of your brand?
Optimize your content for keywords that you want to be associated with your brand most. By aligning your keyword strategy with your brand strategy SEO can become a tool to shape brand perception.
Also, don’t forget to measure.
SEE ALSO: How to Measure Your Digital Branding Efforts
If you analyze the clicks, overall traffic and engagement and the conversion rate upon getting your strategy rolling, you can get a real-time insight into how your brand is doing.
What are your favorite SEO tactics? Let me know how you’ve used SEO to boost brand awareness in the comments.
