Great SEO Starts with Your Brand
There’s a lot of talk about branding in the search marketing industry of late, and there’s good reason for that: Taking the time to really understand and define your brand allows you to be much more intentional and focused about the way you market your business online (and off, but this is a digital marketing blog so that’s what we’re talking about today). I recently spoke at the Dallas Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association’s annual State of Search conference on how to incorporate brand strategy into your digital strategy (and vice versa), and wanted to share what we’ve learned with the Moz community.
I’ve found that since we started making it a practice to help clients truly understand their own brands, we’ve been able to do much higher-quality work for them; we can connect businesses with their target audiences better, and really plan for the entire funnel.
What is a brand?
When many businesses think about defining their brands, they think about things like:
Brand name
Logo
Colors
Fonts
Editorial voice
Imagery
Look and feel
If you’ve taken the time to define these things, congratulations: you have a style guide! A style guide can be a useful component of brand marketing, but it’s only one piece of a much larger whole.
If your customer is a fish, your brand is the water they swim through. Every interaction people have with your business, from the first blog post they read to the coffee you serve in your office to their interactions with your customer service team, affects their overall perception of your brand. Not only that, but your brand is also affected by the things people say about you when you’re not around. To really curate a strong brand presence, you need to think about how your core values come across in every customer touchpoint.
Is brand a ranking factor?
Rand had a great Whiteboard Friday a while back about this very subject. In short, “brand” isn’t a ranking factor in the traditional sense; there is likely no algorithmic input that measures brand strength. That said, strong brands tend to give off the relevancy and authority signals that Google likes, so we often see websites associated with popular brands ranking highly, even if they haven’t done many SEO fundamentals well.
Google’s most recent Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines sum it up well: "A very positive reputation can be the reason for using the High rating for an otherwise Medium page." They also direct quality raters to look for expertise, authority and trustworthiness in a high-quality site — all qualities shared by most strong brands.
Building a great brand will also help with some of the usage signals that are likely contributing to Google’s machine learning about what makes a good SERP. Having a recognizable brand presence will contribute to increased click-through rate from SERPs, foster visitor engagement and loyalty, and may also help Google better understand the entity relationships between your business and the products and services you provide.
Taking the time to define your target audiences and their paths to purchase will also help you build a content strategy. If your business is having trouble competing with huge companies on head terms, defining your brand will help you carve out a niche and figure out which long-tail keywords to target to drive top-of-funnel traffic, so by the time someone is ready to buy, they’re more likely to come to you.
Define your brand
There are entire books on the subject of figuring out your brand; we won’t go that in-depth for the purposes of this blog post (if you’re interested in learning more about how to define your brand, HubSpot recently released a guide to brand identity for marketers), but here are a few things you’ll need to nail down.
Your core differentiators. What makes you different from your competitors, in your market or online? Why might someone choose to buy from you, instead of them? Look beyond easy answers like “customer service” — every business thinks they have great customer service, so if you’re going to try to differentiate on customer service, you’d better have unbelievably amazing customer service that blows everyone away. Instead, try asking yourself why you do what you do. How does that translate into how your customers experience your business?
Your unique values. What is most important to you, as an organization? I recommend having your entire staff do a card-sorting exercise to find the things they think your business values most. Here’s a free set of values cards, and there are lots of others available online. Go through the exercise a few times, narrowing down each time, until you come to a core set of values that represents your company. One question to ask here is “what wouldn’t we compromise on, even if someone was willing to pay us to?” Moz’s TAGFEE values are a great example of this.
Your customer personas. Create a profile for each major audience segment