Branding is more than just the color of your logo and your website design. Your brand is everything that makes you stand out from your competitors in the industry. Getting started with SEO, how can optimizing your website help your brand? Read on to find out how to upgrade from basic branding to SEO branding.
Getting Started with SEO: How to Develop Your SEO Brand Strategy
Branding involves extensive planning. You need to make time for proper research and careful planning. Planning for your brand should not just involve colors and taglines, but also how you want your target market to view your business and how you want them to find you.
Although consistency is the core of branding, you need to be able to find ways to keep your brand relevant. You can do this by integrating SEO branding into your planning.
Here are some guidelines on how to develop a winning SEO brand strategy:
Pick your niches.
As much as it sounds tempting to claim that you can be everything for everyone, you need to pick a niche. Look at your products and services and see which ones best serve the needs of your target market.
Picking a niche is a smart strategic move because of the following reasons:
- You can focus on the products and services that speak to your customers best.
- You can save on your resources (especially money and time).
- You can stand out from competitors that offer general products or services.
Picking a niche allows you to keep your resources where you need them instead of spreading them thin to be all the things to everyone. You can allocate your time, money, and effort where they will do the most good.
Much like in SEO, you want to pick your battles. For instance, as much as you want to rank for high competition keywords, it means investing more time and resources to beat an ocean of competitors. And SEO experts know that that will take more time than you are willing to spend.
By picking a niche for your branding and investing in keywords that are truly relevant to your business– you can improve your SEO brand and stand out from the rest.
Define business goals for your SEO Brand Strategy.
SEO results can take anywhere from 3 months to a year to begin materializing depending on several factors. You need to define your business goals so that you can effectively evaluate your progress. SEO branding is all about reaching your business goal— but first, you need to know what you are trying to achieve.
Are you trying to increase your brand awareness in your local area? Do you want to start a customer loyalty program? Or do you simply want to drive more traffic to your website?
Check your competition.
If you are just getting started with SEO or branding, you definitely need to check your competition. Creating an SEO brand strategy in a bubble will not do much for your business. You need to understand what works for your competitors and other businesses.
Take note of what type of content compels your target audience to engage with your competitors, then go ahead and create a better and improved version of it.
Keep in mind that branding is not just about the pretty colors but is also about the message and experience. Let existing brands give you creative inspiration and strategic insights to help you rise above your competition.
Work on providing an amazing user experience.
Businesses have competitors because no concept is truly unique. For instance, there are many cafes like Starbucks– but why do people still choose to support the brand? It’s because of the experience. And again, the experience is part of your brand.
You need to work on providing an amazing user experience to help boost both your SEO brand awareness and SERP ranking. Customers, clients, and search engines favor brands that offer a high-quality experience.
Even if you do have competitors that offer products or services at a cheaper price, they would still keep coming back to you if you offer an exceptional experience for them.
On top of that, word-of-mouth is a great way to market your business– satisfied customers can help you market your brand for FREE.
Be more active in your community.
In the marketing industry, being more active in your community means utilizing your channels to connect to your target market and the people within the same industry as you. You can expand your reach by also expanding your connections. You can collaborate with other businesses to reach more people. Of course, it does not have to be a competitor brand— you can collaborate with businesses with a similar target market but with different products and services.
For instance, a business specializing in baby clothes can collaborate with a brand that offers educational toys for babies. These businesses have the same target audience, but there would not be a conflict of interests this way.
Connecting to your clients and customers on a more personal level through your channels can also help your SEO brand strategy. They can leave you great reviews on your pages or even link you to some websites.
There are other ways of getting more involved in your community such as attending or sponsoring local events and featuring your customers on your pages. Your methods should bring you closer to your customers while incentivizing them to support your brand.
Create high-quality content.
What is an SEO brand strategy without good content? Maintaining an active blog with quality content can increase your online visibility and it is a great way to improve your branding.
Your content will help you be easily identifiable in a crowd and your blog posts are a great way to communicate the unique personality of your business out there.
Make sure that your topics are relevant to both your brand and your audience. It is best to keep your post easy to read by using simple words and adding visual aids like images or infographics.
Develop your visual identity.
Crafting your message should be one of your priorities when creating an SEO brand strategy. The same goes for your visual identity. They say that one picture is worth a thousand words–so it makes sense for you to utilize them on your channels.
Aside from making your web pages and blogs prettier, images can also make your content more understandable for your readers. On top of that, it can also be useful for your SEO branding since it is a good place to add a keyword (alt tag) and it can increase the time visitors stay on your website.
What’s the Point?
Although your brand starts with you, your efforts, and your ideas– it still ends with the perception that your target audience will have of your business. People’s perception of your brand can dictate what actions they do or do not take.
By being mindful of how you plan your SEO brand strategy, you can shape every aspect of your brand with a purpose in mind and achieve the goals you have set for your business.
SEO branding will not only help you get a response from your audience, but it can also improve your ranking on search engine result pages.
If you want to build stronger relationships with your target market, establish a better reputation, and get a stronger presence both online and offline– then getting started on SEO and improving your branding is an invaluable part of your business plan.