How To Use SEO For Your Brand Awareness

If you’re not using search engine optimization as part of your digital marketing strategy, you are missing out on potential customers. Most people these days learn about brands through the internet, so that’s where you need to be to increase brand awareness.

Getting your website to rank at the top of search engine results pages will help you reach your target audience. This is true whether you are the CEO of a large organization or a small business owner.

Here are some strategies to help you leverage SEO for brand awareness and visibility.

Using Organic Search to Improve Awareness and Visibility Online

Organic search can be an overlooked branding tactic, but it can be a powerful tool when executed correctly. According to BrightEdge, 53% of all website traffic comes from organic search. That’s a lot of opportunity that brands simply should not ignore.

53% of all website traffic comes from organic search results alone, according to Bridge Edge.

1. Creating a Keyword Plan

Keywords are the foundation of any SEO plan. Finding the right target keywords for your brand is the most important part of the keyword research process. We must find the keywords that are most relevant to our brand and our audience. 

Brands can determine the best keywords that will bring them the most traffic and business. 

First, it’s important to understand the different types of keywords:

• Informational: content that answers a question about a topic
• Branded: a search for a specific website, company or product
• Commercial: find reviews and comparisons
• Transactional: find products, solutions or services to purchase

For brands, the greatest opportunities are to optimize for informational and transactional keywords. Ideal keywords are ones with a high monthly search volume and a low difficulty rating. This means that people are searching for this keyword, but there is a lack of content about the subject. 

Keywords can be informational, branded, commercial, or transactional.

Focus on highly-relevant transactional terms

These are the keywords that people search to find the products or services that your brand offers. These will likely be your most important keywords that you need your brand to appear for. To think of it another way, these keywords will bring in the most revenue and improve your bottom line.

Use these keywords on your homepage, product, and service pages to optimize for them. This helps these pages appear higher in Google search results.

If you are in a crowded industry with established competitors, consider using a long-tail keyword to find your niche. 

Use this checklist to make sure your blog is packed with high-quality content.

Find great article topics 

Research and find keywords for topics that are relevant to your audience. What does your brand have expertise in? Content is your opportunity to provide expertise and authority on these topics. 

Using a keyword research tool, evaluate data to help find great opportunities. Consider both the search volume and keyword difficulty to see the potential impact of ranking on those search terms. Less difficult and high search volume keywords may present a better opportunity for your brand to gain awareness. 

2. Writing Content

Once we have our keywords, we can research and plan out content. Here’s how to optimize blog articles, and other forms of content. 

Create an optimized, click-worthy title 

Create an attention-grabbing, catchy headline that will pique the users interest and encourage them to click. Your title should also include your keyword you’re planning to target.

Format your content so it’s easily scannable

Most people won’t read through an entire blog post because they are looking for a quick answer to their question. This is why it is important to format your blog in a way that makes it scannable.

Great formatting helps readers get the answers to their questions they are searching for online. Provide users with answers to their search queries, and they will continue to use your brand as a trusted source. When they have questions in the future, they will come back to your website. 

To make your article scannable, use headings and subheadings that clearly outline the content. Where it makes sense, use bullet points and lists within your content.

Use this guide to format your blog posts for maximum readability and scan-ability.

Be the authority on a topic

When writing your article, make sure that you are approaching your content as the authority on a topic. This helps build credibility and trust with your readers. High-quality content is one of the most important ranking factors on Google. 

Go into detail about strategies and offer your readers value. Provide or reference facts or studies when necessary.

Don’t just use artificial intelligence writing tools to help you create your content! Publish original and unique content that only you can write.

Using images and videos

To support your text, consider adding images and videos. People often process information better when they receive it in a visual way. Adding images lets you deliver your information in a different way.

Visual content also helps your brand’s SEO performance for the article you’re writing.

According to Optinmonster, blog posts with images get 94% more views than those without. Adding visual content makes the post more engaging for the reader.

3. Local SEO

For local businesses, optimizing your Google My Business profile will help your business appear in Google Maps listing.

Choose the right category for your business

Google My Business has hundreds of categories to choose from. While you can choose multiple for your business, you will have to pick a main category. 

Patriot Maids uses descriptive categories for their Google My Business profile.

Leverage posts on Google My Business

Google My Business allows business owners and managers of the profile to share news updates with their audience. Posts can include text, image, and video to promote yourself to local customers.

This helps to increase user engagement and improve your SEO performance.

Patriot Maids posts regularly to their Google My Business profile.

Encourage and respond to reviews

Reviews are another ongoing effort that local businesses should leverage to enhance their brand through SEO. Reviews offer credibility and trust to users because they demonstrate that you value quality customer service. Positive reviews also have significant benefits for your SEO performance.

In addition to positive reviews, you should also be responding to negative reviews. You want to take a proactive approach to this because ignoring bad reviews can make things worse. Just make sure to follow these best practices for responding to negative reviews.

Patriot Maids does a great job of responding to customer reviews on their Google My Business profile.

4. Off-Site

Off-site SEO is about what you do to promote your brand across the web, and not just on your website. A large factor in this is the ability of your site to get backlinks. Backlinks refer to links from  external sites that lead back to your own website.

In addition to backlinks, you should also practice internal linking in your website. An internal link just means any link on your website that leads to another page on your own website.

Linking related blogs together is a great internal linking method. For example, you’re reading this blog because you want to learn more about SEO for your brand. Therefore, you might also be interested in SEO reputation management.

Claim unlinked brand mentions

Brands can use this SEO tactic as a starting point for their link building journey. An unlinked brand mention is another website that mentions your brand name, but does not link to your website. 

To find unlinked brand mentions, you can perform a Google Search for your brand keywords and see what results appear. You can also set up a Google Alert for your target keywords. Google will send you an email when they find a new result that matches the search term.

Because they already mention your brand, they are likely willing to add a link to your website. Find an appropriate email address of a webmaster, editor, or content marketer. Ask them if they would be able to add a link to your website. 

Collaborate with other brands

Consider partnering or collaborating with other brands that strategically align with your business. This encourages relationship building and greatly increases the chances of getting a backlink to your website.

Here are a few ideas to collaborate with other businesses and organizations:

• Co-hosting a webinar
• Sponsoring an event
• Writing a guest blog
• Being a guest on a podcast

These ideas will help you get backlinks and put your brand in front of new audiences. Collaboration will further increase your online reach.

Collaborate with other brands by co-hosting a webinar, sponsoring an event together, writing a guest blog post, or guest-starring on podcasts.

Promote your brand’s best content

Invest in your best performing content to expand your reach. You can use other marketing channels to promote your content:

• Social media marketing
• Online advertising
• Email marketing

These channels drive more traffic to your website, which means you can earn more backlinks through quality content.

Earn brand media coverage

For some brands, getting media coverage can be a challenging task. However, the opportunity it presents for link building and off-page SEO can help tremendously. 

• Pitch media outlets on a unique story
• Use media platforms like Qwoted and HARO (Help a Reporter Out) to connect with journalists
• Pitch local media outlets instead national 
• Create a press kit that users can easily find and download from your website
• Use newsjacking to get more buzz from recent trends or news. 

Using these tips should help increase your brand presence beyond your website, and open more opportunities for backlinks.

Closing Out: SEO for Your Brand

Organic search provides a huge opportunity for many brands looking to improve their visibility and awareness online. 

SEO can take time to see significant results, but it is worth it in the long-run. Expect to work on these strategies for months and even years to see continued improvements.

Branding is all about creating your message and reaching others with that message. But what do others think about your brand? If your brand and reputation are misaligned, Reputation911 can help.

We can address negative or false reviews, news stories, articles, and other forms of content that can negatively affect your brand. Learn more about business reputation management and how we can help you.