SEO is your friend — in more ways than one. Discover the best ways brand managers and marketers can use SEO to increase brand awareness.
Increase brand awareness. One of the main tasks for brand managers and marketers. And gone are the days of the early internet, where digital marketers would just flood the landing pages with the brand’s name, cross their fingers and hope that this was enough for optimal SEO! These days you need a savvy SEO strategy in order to increase brand awareness.
As technology has developed, search engine algorithms have gotten smarter, more complex and much more user-focussed with brands competing with a global market in an extremely noisy space. SEO is, therefore, an essential strategy to increase brand awareness. We’ll look at the whys and hows, including some practical tips on how to increase brand awareness that you can start implementing straight away!
How to Use SEO to Increase Brand Awareness
Link building as a strategy
Link building is the process of creating links between other websites and yours. Search engines use these links to crawl the web, as well as individual pages within your website. Google likes this and will react favourably by pushing your content higher up the search results. In addition, you will most likely get additional traffic to your site from these links on other sites — just make sure that you gain links from relevant sites, otherwise the traffic will be of no real value. Want to use SEO to increase brand awareness? SEO-experts Yoast published a detailed link building strategy here.
Optimize keyword phrases to increase organic search traffic
Nike Golf (that’s Nike’s golfing brand) managed to leverage their SEO by using keyword phrases which resulted in a 169% increase in organic search traffic. The main challenge faced by Nike Golf was a lack of focus keywords that directed customers to their site. Their SEO team used analytics to report on keyword data and search trends, to see what exactly their customers were mostly searching for and where they were located. They now had a keyword strategy and set about rebuilding their website content accordingly. The 169% increase in organic search traffic included both branded and non-branded search results. Not a bad result, hey!
Optimizing your socials to divert audience to your website
SEO and social media are a match made in heaven when it comes to increasing your brand awareness and connecting with your target audience. Knowing your brand’s target audience is the foundation of a good content strategy. And a good content strategy will pave the way for good content creation.
How well do you know your audience?
Do you have those personas in mind when you’re writing your content?
Have you created a meaningful social media profile that reflects your brand?
Even a simple tweet or Facebook post, you must write for your intended target audience. Social media feeds your audience directly to your website, which will make your brand rank higher in Google’s search.
Social media also provides ample opportunities to engage directly with your target audience and get direct access to what people are saying about your brand and your competitors. And don’t forget the sponsored posts! As organic reach can dwindle, you can redirect some of your marketing spend towards paid campaigns such as Google Adwords as well as each social media’s own native advertising platforms where you can utilize those target keywords and run your campaign content accordingly. Don’t forget a brand’s social media can develop their own brand themselves. Tweeted a complaint about a late flight lately? Did the airline respond? Your audience is watching! An active and engaging social media presence will make customers feel listened to and will paint your brand in an authentic and positive light.
Optimize content for more data and leads!
Have you heard? Optimized content gets more data and leads! Whether you use long-tail keywords or location-based keywords, your content must be fresh and high-quality (don’t forget those internal links!). Make your landing pages and blogposts mobile-friendly, optimize your meta descriptions and don’t forget to optimize your images too! You can even optimise your URLs. And when you’re done working on your new content, don’t forget you can repurpose and update existing content as well as removing content that is no longer relevant.
Analyse which are your best-performing blogs and why. Auditing is no longer for accountants! Perform a content audit and see which blogposts and website pages are performing the least. Are they still relevant? Can they be repurposed? Before you start Marie Kondo-ing all content, have a look at what can be reworked and realigned with your current strategy and market demands.
Strategic and responsive design across all devices
Responsive Web Design (RWD) is now demanded by the market but many businesses are yet to adapt. With so many customers online via their smartphones, it’s important your website is optimized accordingly. RWD responds to user’s behaviour and their environment, be it screen size or platform. It uses a mix of flexible grids, layouts, images and CSS. RWD benefits your SEO by improving site usability, your pages will load at a faster speed, a decreased bounce rate, less duplicate content and more social sharing. It’s a mobile-first era and RWD is now accepted as the industry norm, not the exception. Working closely with website designers and developers is a must if you work with SEO content. This Google Developer blog explains more.
Maximum Customers for Minimal Cost?
Have you heard of Customer Acquisition Cost? If you work in marketing, you almost certainly have. CAC is a metric used to measure how you can net the most amount of customers for the lowest amount of spend. Ooooh, sounds promising! But while investing in SEO increases your brand awareness, can it also give you a great ROI? Yes, there are the SEO set up costs, the analytics tools and hiring a performance marketing specialist will further your ROI if budget allows. But even within small teams, having a well-crafted SEO strategy will not only target your prospects, but it will also increase brand awareness and makes your brand visible to the people who actually looking for it.
How Do You Track if Your Brand Awareness is Increasing?
If you’re a brand manager, creating and implementing an SEO strategy is crucial for increasing brand awareness. Using brand tracking software means you’ll be able to access critical insights into how your brand is performing. Using this, you can then tailor your SEO strategy to your audience, by using keyword data insights and adjusting your content accordingly in a number of practical ways such as optimizing search keywords, existing and new content and designing your content around RWD principles. The results? A high traffic website and increased brand awareness, and sales growth across your target audience. Not only can you enjoy positive results, you can let those data-driven insights inspire your entire strategy. Double win!
Interested in learning more about brand awareness? Check out our post on increasing brand awareness using brand tracking.
Originally published at https://www.latana.com.
