SEO and Branding: A Primer

Obviously one of the goals for your SEO is to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs) for decent phrases – and as many times as possible. But beyond that, you need to be thinking about WHAT appears when you appear. What messages your results are sending, what offers are being seen my searchers and what image you’re conveying.

In other words: Branding.

Overall Branding for SEO

One of the best ways to get your brand in front of searchers more often is to have lots of content. But, not just any content – you need quality content that lands you as close to the top of the SERPs as possible AND accomplishes your marketing goals.

In other words, that content needs to promote your brand AND be functional enough to serve as an entry point to convert your visitors – or at least get them on the path to conversion.

This can be tough for small companies who don’t have the resources to pump out daily, or even weekly, content. It can still be done, but it takes a long-term outlook and a tool such as a blog or forum to start generating (and keep generating) that quality content.

Optimizing Branded Searches

When people search for your brand, ideally you should own most (if not all) of the real estate on page one of the search results pages. This is the place to grab attention with offers for potential customers and open the door to your conversion path.

If you are a local business, your business listing should be coming up as the first result – if not, you need to figure out why. Get on Google and Yahoo and make sure your businesses have been submitted.

High-value Generic Searches

This is one area that takes a lot of work, but when it pays off, it pays off big time. With the right mix of branding, SEO, content and linking a generic search could bring up your domain in the #1 spot in the SERPs. What this means is that Google places so much value and trust in your site that it equates YOU with that generic search term or phrase.

If you’ve reached this point, you’ve come a long way. From here you can begin some other branding strategies that involve search engines to get your message out to your customers and potential customers.

In future posts, we’ll get into detail about things like personal branding, using social media to enhance and promote your brand as well as ways to protect your brand – like brand guidelines and monitoring tools.