How to Improve Your Branding With SEO?

5 Ways to Improve Branding with SEO

1. Find Branded Keywords

No SEO campaign can start without keyword analysis. If you want to increase brand recognition, then when conducting keyword research you should primarily focus on queries that contain the name of your brand (even if it is not correct, however, I will explain it in more detail below).

Users enter branded keywords in Google in different ways when identifying keywords on which you want to target your SEO activities, consider the following choices:

• ROPO (Research Online, Purchase Offline) queries – the user has chosen your brand, now he/she is looking for more information about it, e.g. “Delante reviews”,
• comparing your brand to your competitors – user has probably already heard great things about your brand, but now he/she wants to compare it with the competition and then make the final decision, e.g. “Microsoft Azure vs Amazon Web Services”;
• high intent keywords – add your service or product with the highest conversion potential to your brand name, e.g. “Delante international SEO”.
  (source: keap.com)

As I have already mentioned above, when making branded keyword analysis, focus also on phrases with some errors or typos. You have no idea how often users type brands with errors, especially those in foreign languages or consisting of a few words (users often type just part of their names).

Take a look at this simple example of a clothing brand known worldwide: Pull&Bear. Users enter this name in the search engine in many different ways, e.g. “Pull & Bear”, “Pull And Bear”, “Pull Bear” or even “Pull Berr” – to succeed with branded keywords all variants should be taken into account.

2. Plan High-Quality Link Building Process

Link building is by far one of the most important SEO activities off-site that can support your branding. However, it must be well planned and perfectly thought out. Many people insist that when it comes to the link building process, only the number of backlinks matters… well, they can’t be more wrong! Sometimes a small number of backlinks leading from trusted domains with great parameters and high web traffic can do wonders.

If you want your link building process to be effective and increase brand visibility, you should keep the following rules in mind:

1. select only domains trusted by Google and users – if your business is mentioned on reputable websites, you increase brand credibility,
2. add some visual content, such as infographics – it attracts users’ attention and makes a post about your brand more visible and eye-catching, what’s more, users are willing to share visual content in social media,
3. pay attention to the SEO parameters of domains – Domain Authority (DA) from MOZ and Domain Rating (DR) from Ahrefs are especially trustworthy,
4. conduct a competitive analysis and discover on which websites your strongest competitors have backlinks,
5. invest in sponsored articles – preferably from websites related to your industry,
6. ask your business partner or the company you cooperate with to add a link on their website – e.g. a link in the “Our Clients” section or in a case study.

Owing to the above-mentioned link building strategies, you can increase brand awareness first, and then brand credibility – all these activities will be appreciated by Google and your potential customers.

3. Promote Your Brand in Social Media

I guess there is no need to explain to anyone how great the power social media have. So if you want to increase brand awareness and connect with your target audience, you should follow the latest trends in social media and have accounts on at least a few platforms that have the greatest potential for your business. Users have much more trust in brands that are active in social media, i.e. they post regularly, organize contests, and answer questions in comments.

If you want your social media to account to really contribute to both SEO and branding, you must optimize it properly. How? Here are some ideas:

• describe your business and your values briefly (include the most important keyword),
• add a link to the home page,
• provide contact information: opening hours, phone number, e-mail, address,
• present your team – let the target audience know that there are real people behind your brand.

4. Focus on Local SEO

In 2018, Google revealed that as much as 46% of Google searches have local intent (source: seroundtable.com). This means that focusing your SEO campaign on the locality can effectively improve your branding, especially if you are, in fact, a local business.

Remember that local SEO is quite different from global campaigns. Do you think that SEO campaigns for businesses in each location will be the same? Well, no, they won’t! Whether you want to do local SEO for a beauty salon or a dentist in a big urban area like Berlin or Paris, or in a small town like Verona or Salzburg, really matters! Local businesses in big cities have much stronger competition, so it’s really harder to reach out to a potential customer.

If you want to improve branding with local SEO, you must remember the following things:

• create a Google My Business account, so users will find out more easily than they are running local business nearby,
• create an Apple Map listing – especially useful for iPhone users,
• add your business to local NAPs,
• monitor user reviews – respond to their comments and reviews,
• optimize your website for local SEO:
  • add a city to your local business in keywords, e.g. “Delante Krakow”
  • create a local landing page,
  • optimize your home page using local keywords (in the particular title tag, meta description, and H1 heading).

5. Create Content Tailored to Your Target Audience

Focus on creating great descriptions of categories, products, or services – provide users with all the necessary information, this will make them more convinced that it is your brand they should choose. What’s more, owing to the high-quality content, users will spend much more time on your website, reducing the bounce rate.

Follow these rules and your content will definitely contribute to the improvement of your branding:

• create content tailored to the demands and expectations of your target audience – come up with some blog post ideas that will gain their interest,
• conduct a comparative analysis of the content of your strong competitors – check the weak and strong points of your content, what stands out from your competitors,
• your content should be supportive and understandable to all users – this will create positive relations with your potential customers (besides, the more relevant information you provide on the site, the fewer customers will contact you directly with some questions or doubts),
• remember that not only words but also design and typography matter – content on your website should be visually consistent, use always the same fonts, colors, illustrative elements,
• add internal links to the most important categories or products – this will boost even more traffic,
• create content that is engaging, catchy and natural – nobody likes to read content stuffed with keywords,
• if you have a company blog (and you really should have), post articles regularly, at least several times a month,
• add crucial elements to schema – publication date, author’s name, reviews.

Conclusions

If you want your brand to be discovered by potential customers, you need to appear high in the search results. Without this, you have very little chance of success. And that’s why SEO comes into play. With the right strategies, you will increase brand awareness among your target audience, connect with your future customers, and build positive relations with them. Whether it is content, user experience, reviews, activity in social media, SEO will certainly give you added value.

If you want to improve your brand, an SEO campaign will certainly make it happen! Contact us and our SEO experts will prepare long-term strategies for you – owing to reliable and transparent SEO activities, our clients’ brands gain the trust of customers and Google.