SEO for Branding: Tips and Tricks for Boosting Brand Awareness With a Smart SEO Strategy

27 Jan ‘21

In: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), / By: Ripe Media

If a brand exists online, but nobody clicks on its results in a Google search, does it make a sound? This is the age-old question for marketers working to build a brand for an online business. If you’re worried no one is finding your branding through search results, incorporate SEO for branding.

Search engine optimization (SEO) works for you. When done properly, you will gain organic traffic to your website. Strategizing building your brand into your SEO is one way to get customers familiar with your brand. The more that customers interact or search for your brand, the higher search engines begin to rank your brand.

Quick Refresh: How Does SEO Work?

If you’re in marketing, you no doubt already have a basic understanding of SEO down. Let’s give it a quick refresh so we can see how it connects to your SEO branding.

Search engine optimization does exactly what it says: it optimizes your search engine results. By coding your online content with relevant keywords, you help search engines learn more about your site and services.

Search engines make associations between keywords. Good SEO should help increase organic traffic as search engines recognize your well-chosen keywords for what they intend.

Responsive SEO takes into account how your potential customers’ phrase searches. You can adapt and update SEO as you learn how customers are using the other side of the search engine.

Branding Strategy

When you cultivate a branding strategy, it’s time to think about how to characterize your business in searchable terms.

First, think about how you would describe your business. What buzzwords, branded or otherwise, would you associate with yourself?

Start running some searches on these potential keywords through an SEO toolset. Are a lot of customers searching for the words as well?

Or is there a related keyword that seems to have a higher search volume? Compare the words you use for yourself to the words customers use when searching for similar services.

Now, perform a content gap analysis. This is when you look at similar services and see what keywords and branding terms are already very popular for another business.

You do not want your brand to already be taken by a more established brand. This will only be an uphill battle if you try to compete for the exact same branding keywords. Adjust as necessary.

Now that you have looked at your potential branding terminology from three different perspectives (yours, customers’, and competitors’) formulate your final branding strategy.

Branded vs. Non-Branded Keywords

Focus on branded keywords when you are building brand recognition. While non-branded keywords—words and phrases associated with your field of services but not your brand—are important to include as well, focus on them at other points.

Your research into branding strategy should have turned up some unique branding phrases that will work for your business, be searchable by your customers, and distinguish you from your competitors.

Now make sure your keyword difficulty and search volume are worthwhile. Keyword difficulty tells you whether or not you can get a high-ranking with that word. There must be enough backlinks to help the word get ranked more highly.

Your search volume tells you how often the keywords are searched. Choose the highest options that meet other criteria. Choose strategically to get the most effective keywords out in front of your audience.

Upping Your SEO and Brand Awareness

How can you increase your brand awareness? And how can SEO help with that?

When you think about brands you are loyal to, ask yourself why? Over the time you have used their products and services, you have likely come to believe in them.

Allow potential customers to do the same with your brand while you build brand awareness. You can do this by offering expert content that gently steers potential customers toward your services but has no pressure.

For example, if one of the services you offer is wedding photography, create social media posts and blog content offering “The 5 Best Poses for Your Bridesmaids,” or “Make-up Tips for the Bride’s Photographs.”

When properly optimized, this content will come up in search engine results for related searches. When you produce enough of this content, potential customers begin to recognize your brand and know they like your expert opinion. In this way, SEO drives customers to your brand.

Have You Done Enough Link Building?

You network in real life. You make sure you meet the right people, shake the right hands, and make the kind of connections that can help you later on. Networking is a respected tool because it builds organic connections between folks in the same field.

So why aren’t you doing the same for your web presence? One of the best things you can do for your branding strategy is to build an excellent array of organic backlinks. You can do this by networking with some of your real-life business acquaintances.

Perhaps they place a link to your site in their resources. You, in turn, link them in your next blog article. With all these moves, you build associations with each other so that search engines recognize you as connected.

Organic backlinks help with keyword ranking. The stronger your backlink game is, the higher your keyword ranks. Then you feature higher in search engine results pages.

When building backlinks in your branding strategy, ask your network acquaintances to use some of your branded keywords. When submitting guest posts, work to flesh them out with branded keywords and links specific to your brand. Each time you do this, you move closer to great rankings.

Build Better SEO for Branding with Ripe Media

At Ripe Media, we are a full-service design and marketing agency committed to building up your SEO for branding. With both creatives and industry experts, our team is ready to take on your branding project and make search engine optimization work for you.

Tell us about your project and see how we assist in your brand growth strategy. Experience the ripeness!

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