SEO For Branding: How to Use SEO to Build Brand Awareness
December 27, 2023
Rudra Kumar
What has been updated from the old blog post:
- Added 9 SEO strategies to build brand awareness.
- Added a section on the importance of brand awareness SEO in 2024.
- Language modified to make the content more reader-friendly.
Summary: The blog post gives nine helpful tips for using SEO to improve brand awareness, like using the right keywords, creating good content, and focusing on local audiences. It also emphasizes that in 2024, SEO is crucial for making brands known and suggests seeking help from a leading SEO company like Techmagnate for better results.
So, you are searching for a product online and suddenly stumble upon an entirely new brand in the process. After checking its website and other online credentials, you immediately place an order. Later, you cannot stop smiling. ‘What a find! How did I get so lucky today?’ you wonder.
Except luck has nothing to do with it. What you see here is a successful example of SEO and branding.
Today, brand awareness SEO is one of the most effective things available to businesses, agencies, and marketing professionals. However, not many recognize the immense potential of creating brand awareness through SEO.
Marketers and brands often mistakenly relegate SEO brand building to the back burner as they focus on social media and campaigns. This means that they leave it too late. Despite all their crazy spending on digital marketing efforts, they fail to understand why they can’t drive brand awareness metrics.
However, those who recognize the value of SEO for brand building know that it serves a dual purpose: enhancing both the user experience and brand visibility.
In this blog post, we will explore several topics around SEO for brand building.
Keep reading on!
Why is Brand Awareness Important for Business Growth?
Effective brand awareness means visibility, searchability, popularity, loyalty, and advocacy. Brand awareness gives you the power of an audience base. When a customer reaches a stage where he or she is aware of your brand, they have a better chance of relating to your values and your story.
This eventually leads to higher chances of current and prospective consumers remembering your brand. Thereafter, the probability that they will engage with your products and services and develop loyalty for you shoots up. Finally, they become your advocates; this further boosts awareness.
See how the wheels move? Thus, brand awareness is the engine of your business growth. It gives you a great competitive advantage, provided your brand remains the center of attraction.
SEO for brand awareness: How does it make a difference?
So, the question is, where does SEO for brand awareness feature in the brand-building conversation? The answer is – right at the very beginning.
Brands often launch their digital presence through a website. This is the time when the iron is hot and ready to strike. A website is a brand’s most important asset when it comes to building awareness. This is where most marketers launch full-fledged SEO campaigns to optimize the website content to grab more attention, rank for important keywords on search engines, and increase searchability.
Additional Read: What is SEO
However, there’s much more to SEO for business branding than simply stuffing landing pages with top keywords. Here are 4 reasons why:
- Search engine algorithms have become more advanced and complex over time, which means that devising a nuanced, refined strategy for increasing SERP is the need of the hour.
- In an increasingly connected world, marketers have to account for not just local but international visibility to produce the desired results. [refer to our quick tips on boosting local SEO in strategies part]
- Digital has become increasingly cluttered with thousands of brands, millions of websites, and billions of landing pages. This means that to compete for invaluable digital real estate and visibility, you need to differentiate from established players and disruptors. This requires an in-depth SEO strategy for which you will require the help of an expert digital marketing company.
- A well-thought-out SEO brand marketing strategy is not just about becoming visible but also relevant, experiential, and engaging. After all, that is what SEO is all about, right? A search engine ranks websites and content first and foremost on its quality and user experience score. Quantity comes later. Hence, brands gunning to move the needle on awareness metrics must utilize SEO to improve the user experience drastically – right from content to design, loading times, mobile-friendliness, etc.
How to Use SEO to Build Brand Awareness: 9 Strategies to Follow
1. Keyword Optimization for Organic Traffic: Up your organic visibility by using long-tail keywords, branded search terms, and non-commercial keywords. While long-tail keywords can get you up to a 5% higher click through rate (CTR) than generic searches, optimizing for branded search terms can boost your CTR by up to 25%. You can also leverage structured data to make your brand stand out via rich snippets.
2. Create Optimized Content: Combine paid campaigns with social media to maximize brand visibility. By spending towards paid campaigns and using relevant keywords, you can further boost your brand reach. Using social media here is a good long-term strategy to create relevant content that gets indexed highly on search engines. It also allows you to use paid like/follower acquisition campaigns and sponsored posts to further drive traffic to your website.
3. Local SEO: For businesses with a physical presence or a local target audience, local SEO is vital. This involves optimizing your website for local search terms, creating and optimizing Google Business profiles, and managing online reviews.
4. Target Niche Audiences: Doing so helps bolster brand awareness. By focusing your content on niche keywords, you get to own a space on the internet. This way, not only does your brand improve its authority amongst existing audiences but also becomes the first name in the search bar for newer ones.
5. Link-Building Strategy: Focus on link-building to earn serious traction. Although it is a cumbersome process, you can ace it with a few tricks up your sleeve. These include broken link building, using social media communities to promote your brand, or creating infographics and slides.
6. User Experience (UX): A smooth and user-friendly website enhances your brand’s image and SEO ranking. Ensure fast loading times, easy navigation, and mobile responsiveness for a positive user experience.
7. Optimize for Local SEO: Given the fact that 46% of all search engine queries have a local intent, it pays to localize your content, including your visuals as well. By geo-targeting, you can connect with multiple regional audiences and put your brand at the forefront. Other strategies to optimize for local SEO include adding local schema to your website, acquiring local reviews, listing your businesses location-wise on Google, and collecting backlinks from local websites.
8. Promote Brand Image: Using SEO, you can shape your brand perception by associating your brand with and optimizing your content for desirable and influential keywords.
9. Track and measure your results: When you’re clear about your brand awareness goals, it is paramount to track your progress in a timely manner. You can use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track your website traffic, keyword rankings, and other important metrics like social media engagement, brand mentions, and lead generation.
Importance of Brand Awareness SEO in 2024
It’s 2024 and the value addition that SEO brings to the table is immense, especially for moving the needle on brand awareness. You can have the best website design in the market or the most engaging content. But if it is not discoverable, then it barely serves its marketing purpose.
The best part about SEO for brand awareness is how multi-pronged it is, encapsulating everything from content to design to ORM to social media. But that also makes the process complex.
In that regard, partnering with an SEO agency like Techmagnate can be a great idea. We’ve helped many big brands with their SEO branding strategy.