How SEO Is A Digital Marketing Strategy Can Strengthen Your Brand For Small Business Online
A company’s brand is its most valuable asset, particularly when it has put a lot of effort into building it. Increasing brand awareness is a top priority for marketers and business owners.
Search engine optimization, though mostly used as a strategy to drive organic traffic, is also effective at strengthening the brand.
However, SEO has evolved over these years, with search engine algorithms getting smarter and more complex.
Gone are the days when marketers could stuff landing pages with the most popular keywords to rank higher on search engines. Today, you need a well-crafted SEO strategy to stay relevant in a competitive global market and lift your brand over others.
Why Use SEO for your Brand Promotion?
Marketers utilize different tools and strategies to increase their brand reach. Powerful tactics like branded content, social media, and paid ads take priority while SEO is often overlooked.
However, most other digital marketing strategies end up being too heavy on efforts and investment, particularly for small businesses.
SEO can prove to be effective at creating a more efficient and economical solution. Let us try to understand how beneficial search engine optimization is for strengthening your brand.
Organic Strategy
Search engine optimization is an organic marketing strategy which means you don’t pay search engines to put your website on the top of the search results.
The results you get from SEO efforts – clicks, visibility, and customers, are free. However, SEO does demand time, tools, and personnel to work as expected. But it remains a more cost-effective way to improve brand awareness as compared to other strategies.
This is particularly beneficial to small businesses as they find it difficult to stay competitive. With SEO, you can easily create niche-based tactics and strategies to rank for long-tail keywords that help your site acquire positions on the search engine.
Improves User Experience
Not only should a webpage deliver relevant content but also provide a good browsing experience to rank on search engines. Google requires complying with user experience principles like ease of use and accessibility for multiple languages and platforms.
This is how SEO contributes to improving the user experience within a website. An optimized site makes the user feel at ease, welcomed, and guided to easily accomplish the desired action. Apart from driving conversion, website SEO benefits the brand by adding a positive feel to it.
Establishes Authority
Companies enjoying the top positions on Google also have recognition from the search engine as well as the public. When a web page is ranking on the top, it is clear that it delivers the best experience and response.
Users seeing the first search results know that these sites are reliable. Such a notion is quite useful at boosting the brand as it strengthens the brand image in the minds of the users and associates authority with it.
Increases Reach
Every marketer wants his brand to be highly recognized among its target audience. This goal is directly associated with brand reach; SEO is highly powerful when it comes to increasing the range.
Search engines are one of the most popular components of the internet with every user performing more than 3 searches every day on average. Google reveals that it processes over 2 trillion searches annually.
It is easy to estimate the reach the brands appearing on the top positions on search engines gain. Moreover, the range these brands achieve is quite qualified.
By ranking on the top spots on search results, brands get visibility within audiences interested in what it offers. After all, people have reached the business while looking for specific content or solutions.
Shares Content
A brand can win the top position on search results only when it delivers valuable content. And this is what creates and maintains its authority in the market. The website content is proof of what value the brand can deliver.
The contents are not just about products, services, and sales but also problems, difficulties, and doubts.
Content that educates and informs people is a key component of SEO that drives confidence and strengthens the brand. When such content goes to the first page of Google, it gets increased visibility to reach more people.
How to Use SEO Strategies to Strengthen Brand?
A well-designed SEO strategy should naturally increase your brand awareness, so the goal is to follow SEO best practices. Relevant content will help you engage users and establish brand authority.
With on-page SEO, your web pages for niche keywords will grow strong and offer a smooth experience. When using off-page SEO, you convince Google that other websites find your content authoritative and that your brand leads the niche.
Let us look at a few tips for those who want to use SEO for branding as a priority along with other benefits that follow, including increased traffic, conversions, and leads.
Leverage The Power of Link Building
Link building is not an easy affair; however, the number of domains linking to a page directly impacts the SERP more than anything else. The higher your site ranks on search results, the better is your brand awareness among audiences.
High-quality content is the answer to getting highly coveted links through email outreach, guest posting, or other techniques.
Make sure you find high-quality, reliable, authoritative websites that depict your pages as relevant. Also, pay attention to the values and brand of your link-building partner.
Another powerful way to build backlinks is by creating simple videos with an online video editor and distributing them across video hosting sites with a link pointed back at your site.
Increase Organic Traffic Through Keyword Optimization
The most essential factor for attaining your brand awareness is organic visibility on search engines. Everybody knows how keywords can be used to optimize content for better SEO and online presence.
Ranking higher not only makes it easy for customers to find your business but also serves as social proof and shows credibility.
This is particularly important at a time when most users use mobile devices and voice searches. An effective strategy is to focus on long-tail keywords known to have a higher click rate as compared to generic phrases.
Deliver Optimum User Experience
User experience on your website is one of the most important factors for ranking and brand perception, and therefore, for strengthening your brand.
There is no denying that a brand that offers usability and convenience on the website wins the trust and retention of the customer.
When users can easily do what they want, and face no difficulties, they have a good perception of the brand. Some of the top considerations for ensuring the best user experience include site security, responsiveness, load speed, and functionality of links.
Create The Most Relevant Content For Your Audience
Though this seems to be a no-brainer, it cannot be left out when talking about SEO and branding. If you want to use SEO to strengthen your brand, you must create content that your audiences find useful and interesting.
Make sure the type of content you create is focused on the people viewing it. Understand the needs, interests, characteristics, and problems of your persona to come up with the most relevant posts and publish them in the most comprehensive language for effective communication.
This way, you can show them that the brand is by their side, and you are ready to solve any problems they may have, thereby strengthening the bond with your audience.
Focus On Top-of-The-Funnel Content
It is a fact – optimized content attracts more traffic and gets you more leads. Apart from focusing on long-tail keywords, your content should have quality and freshness. Moreover, it should be the type of content your target audience is looking for.
Top of the funnel content is what customers search for in the initial stages of their lifecycle. Such content aims to push users down the funnel to convert them into leads and ultimately customers.
Your website may already have some content you can repurpose to reach your target audience in the awareness stage.
Integrate Other Channels
Organic traffic is crucial for success but the competitive landscape of digital marketing means it is not easy to achieve. Though it takes some effort to blend your SEO with other channels and you may have to invest extra to get your content in front of audiences, the end result is worth it.
For example, social media works perfectly with SEO strategies when it comes to connecting with the target audience and increasing brand awareness. The content you post on social media sites gets indexed by search engine crawlers if it is relevant and useful. You can also make extensive use of videos, with the video range of online video markers to further enhance your link profile and user engagement.
Building trust and authority on social media and reaching a wide audience helps drive more traffic to your website, encouraging other sites to link back to your content. This, in turn, improves SEO and increases brand awareness across channels.
Final Thoughts
SEO is one of the most comprehensive digital marketing strategies that help achieve a variety of objectives. It is not just about driving organic traffic but also contributes to branding.
Use the advice and tips given here to use SEO to strengthen your brand. However, don’t assume that the same tactics will work again and again.
It is important to adjust your strategies over time to ensure you stay relevant and reach your target audience.
