Companies use promotional material in the form of videos, social media campaigns, and paid advertising to build their brand. Any single click that provides a positive user experience is coveted. Most businesses believe that SEO is too tunnel-focused on search engines. Many believe these are losing market share gradually because of the rising prominence of social networks. To add to this, venue-focused search engines such as Yelp and Trivago are making things worse for them.
SEO has not died yet. It just became a little more technical. New algorithms introduced by Google and copied by other search engines have just made things harder. But still, SEO can also build your brand for you — here are five ways how.
Five Links Between Brand Building and SEO
Customer Journey/Marketing Funnel
Search engine optimization is used to make sure your landing pages and website content are up to Google’s standard. The search engine giant has no product. Its function is to make sure the pages retrieved by certain keywords are informative, reliable, and updated.
On-page SEO encourages site owners to improve the customer’s journey from awareness, consideration, loyalty, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy. This begins from an informative landing page. Then, it transitions to encouraging audiences to research. Lastly, it helps companies provide insight into aspects that make them appear helpful while touting their brand at the same time.
Landing pages account for majority of profits and fast ROI. Small changes, such as adding a human photograph to reducing registration and purchasing steps, definitely improve your customer’s journey down the funnel.
These practices not only allow sites to improve its rankings in Google, but it also allows them to have a well-designed, informative, and brand-building design and content.
Navigation
Search engines guarantee users the results they receive will yield a positive experience. They can perform this by answering queries or retrieve sites or pages that have the answers. Aside from content, Google and its competitors guarantee their search results are easy to navigate. Bots look through many aspects of the result websites, such as the design layout and prominent keywords used.
However, well-placed links, an optimized top-menu, an aesthetically-pleasing design, and proper use of “fishbones” (the bottom of each article that links to different related content) are just the cherry on top of navigation optimization. You must also make sure your content is well-designed.
Bots can detect photographs through their alternate text. This element appears if the image’s host is offline. They can also detect the use of headers in an article. Search bots also understand that 300-500 words of content with recognizable sentences are informative.
If you look at it from a brand-building perspective, it makes your site look easy on the eyes. By doing this, you show audiences the best effort you have in producing and developing content. Perceived effort contributes positively to your brand.
Authoritative and Informative
Bots can recognize common sentences and keyword “bloating,” which means keywords used too many times in an article. This is one of the things to avoid when optimizing your content and website for search engines as a whole. A well-written piece will limit its use of keywords (because they are nouns; excellent writers will discourage frequent noun use in writing, too), and search engines often place limits at around 20-25 repetitions; a generous amount.
Using keywords properly allows your well-researched content to become a topic authority, which bots recognize based on data it collects from keywords, sentence patterns, back links (link building will always be a thing), social media shares, and others (that you can measure using specific site analytic tools).
Taking the technicalities aside and looking at it from a branding perspective, the content you produce within SEO limits contributes a positive experience. Making your content authoritative on a subject improves your brand recognition by providing a pleasant visitor experience.
Technical SEO Focused on Identifying Dependable Brands
Today’s search engines use complex algorithms that allow bots to recognize entities, see the performance of a certain code structure or schema, process sentences and compare it with natural language or grammar (lenient and based on public speaking or chatting logic), matching concepts with similar competing pages, and others. The lengthy list will continue to grow as the world’s programs become more complex with features over time.
However, the basis of these new technologies comes from the practices established by older and trusted brands. Apple’s marketing strategy became renowned because it focused on storytelling and providing an excellent audience and customer experience — a practice adopted today by many small, medium, and even multinational enterprises.
The way an excellent writer produced a post that garnered millions of likes and shares can be the basis of new content metrics that bots can have in the near future.
The bottom line is, if you follow the ideas of bigger brands in all technical aspects, then you can still rank for SERPs. Search engines still look for these signals no matter how complex their algorithms can become in the future.
Trust Signals – Consistent Positive Experience
All brands know the way to a customer’s heart; it is to provide them answers to questions they have regarding a product or service similar to yours. Detailed and informative data about products and services gives audiences a subtle positive experience after visiting your site. In this stage of the customer journey, they will be “considering” your product or service due to the usefulness of information you share to them.
Search engine bots prioritize informative content and view it as a “trust signal,” which improves over time as more visitors experience something similar while reading, watching, or browsing through your content. If your page reaches too many visits, then Google will index it and keep an offline copy, which is a good sign your page is going up the ranks.
A consistent positive experience for the visitor is the bottom line of any SEO algorithm search engines might have in the future. Therefore, it is important to find more “trust signals” when it comes to your site design, navigation, content, and in other areas using analytic information you can collect from tools available online.
