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The online marketplace has turned super competitive in the last few years. SEO is vital for your survival, but SEO alone is no longer enough to get you noticed by your ideal customers!
Google emphasizes starting SEO efforts as soon as you launch a new website or product. In addition, Google’s focus on E-A-T rewards websites with high levels of trust and authority, giving them more visibility.
A strong brand helps establish authority, especially when you use it to foster connections, a strong social presence, and an overall image of topical legitimacy with quality content.
For effective results in this competitive landscape, branding and SEO must work together to get the desired results. Understand your customers’ needs and include branding in every aspect of your content marketing to instantly capture your ideal audience’s attention.
Here are 10 easy ways to use branding as an SEO advantage for your business. These tips are easy to implement and give you a competitive edge by boosting your SEO efforts and increasing your reach.
1. Choose topics of interest to your ideal customers
It may seem obvious, but to capture and hold your audience’s attention, you need to hone in on their interests and needs, writing about topics they care about, providing solutions and value.
Choose the topics your audience cares about, or which solve a problem they have. Make them feel appreciated, understood, and acknowledged. If your message resonates with your audience, they will consume it, share it, and become brand advocates.
For instance, Dove initiated a campaign called the Dove Self Esteem Project, helping to build body confidence in young people and featuring resources for parents, teachers and youth leaders. Dove chose a very topical subject of concern to many. The project has been running over 15 years and its success has boosted their brand visibility.
2. Give your copy a personality
We all know the importance of content and phenomenal amounts are produced today. So how can you make your content stand out in such an overcrowded, competitive field?
The way to do this is by giving your brand a distinctive and memorable voice. Your content’s tone should reflect your brand’s personality, align with your brand’s core message, and so differentiate it from your competitors.
Make sure you use an appropriate tone. Business and finance companies use formal language to create an air of authority, but a life coach or a beauty influencer would use much more casual language to develop a sense of friendliness and accessibility.
Service providers can decide where to position their brand voice. For example, the 404 Error pages of software business SendinBlue and email marketing platform Mailchimp reflect their their unique brand personalities. SendinBlue is more formal with an authoritative personality, whereas Mailchimp has a super casual tone with friendly vibes.
3. Own your writing style
A unique writing style is crucial to make your brand memorable for your audience. With so much generic content being churned out today which is neither unique nor valuable, readers quickly click away if the copy fails to engage them.
Your style is your signature way of communicating with your audience. It’s the words you use, your sentence structure, the information you transmit. Your style can be highly analytical, philosophical, technical, emotional, or natural.
The challenge is to create a distinctive style that stays true to who you are and resonates with your audience. If you achieve that, you can maximize the benefits of your content marketing efforts.
Check out the writing style of Barre & Soul, a fitness spot with an energetic vibe visible throughout their website. Even their email signup reflects this.
4. Preserve brand voice in on-page elements
When your website shows up the search results your title tag and meta description are what potential customers notice first. These are decision-making elements that will make the searcher either click on your post or scroll down. Attractive titles and meta descriptions get more clicks, and the more clicks you get, the more traffic you get; it’s that simple!
While you should follow SEO best practices for length and keyword usage, reflecting your brand’s personality in the title and meta description will catch the fleeting eyes of your tribe, i.e., your ideal customer.
In the example below, Preventive Vet uses intriguing titles and meta descriptions that both optimize for the subject of dog training and entice the reader to click. After all, who wouldn’t want to know the dog trainer secret he’s letting you in on?
Once someone has clicked on your page, make sure they see attention grabbing and informative headings. Many people will just skim a page, so headings have a chance to make a strong impact. That’s why your brand voice should shine through all your headers—to maintain familiarity and continue to build trust with your brand.
5. Brand your link-bait
Link building is crucial for establishing authority and reaching a wider audience. For this purpose, businesses create link-worthy content and resources such as guides, infographics, images, and interactive content such as calculators, surveys, polls, and quizzes.
Make sure to sustain your brand voice in these pieces. Since there’s always the possibility the content can be widely shared or even go viral, branding them will reinforce your brand image around the web.
Your brand voice will resonate with your target audience and attract traffic that relates to your brand’s values and personality. Since these people are already receptive to your ideals, they will be more likely to absorb your message and may turn into customers.
Branded link-bait can also attract like-minded influencers for possible collaborations and partnerships.
6. Include helpful on-brand visuals
On-brand imagery is vital for creating a stunning brand impression and also important for SEO as Google has a strong focus on visuals.
However, you must strike a good balance here. Too many images can make the page feel overwhelming, while large blocks of text are dull and tiring to read.
Your images shouldn’t be random or stock-y. They should be used to include additional information or illustrate a complex point in a simple way. Interesting and informational images are a good way to convey information and increase the time a person spends on the page.
Incorporate your brand identity into the images by using branded color schemes and fonts. Gradually people will begin to associate these unique design elements with your brand, which will improve your visibility and CTR in Google’s image search.
For instance, BMW is a luxury vehicle brand with the target audience enjoying or craving the lavish lifestyle it embodies. It’s a premium brand, and its image campaigns are high-profile, involving movie placements and iconic characters like James Bond. Each image is on-point, creating a sense of luxe and extravagance.
7. Add fun callouts and calls to action
Callouts can inject fun into a blog and improve the engagement on your post. Text callouts are a great way to highlight important info and create another element to advance brand identity. They stand out from the regular text around them and demand attention, making them an excellent place to incorporate your unique brand elements.
They are fun to experiment with; you can change font style, color, and size. You can use your brand colors in the CTA or the background to keep the brand familiarity. Use them to highlight unique selling points, define complex technical terms, or include additional information.
8. Don’t neglect branded keywords
When people find your content helpful, powerful branding can make you memorable and foster a good feeling associated with your brand. Subsequently, searches on your brand may increase, with people looking for you even if you’re not ranking top of the SERPs.
Branded keywords are search terms which include your brand name or variation on it, or a specific product name. So, for example “how to jump start a Polo” is a branded search for the Volkswagen company, which manufactures this car.
Many businesses tend to neglect branded keywords because of their low search volume, but it is low hanging fruit in SEO terms. People running a branded search are usually trying to get to that particular business so click-through rates are very high.
Large, super-powerful brands such as Nike will obviously do well with branded searches, but small businesses with a well established and well known local presence or a strong niche product offering can also do very well.
People looking for your brand will often explore the results, even going through to the second page to look for the particular product they are after. That’s how powerful branding can be, and once people bond with your brand it can be a goldmine to attract customers with high transactional intent.
9. Maintain consistent branding across platforms
Branding gives your business a personality, and gradually your audience becomes familiar with it and learns what to expect from it. In order to establish a strong brand you must be consistent in terms of values, voice, visuals etc across all the platforms where you have a presence.
Here are a few essential tips on how to preserve your brand voice and be consistent across all the platforms:
- Use branded colors in image posts and headers
- Use the same display picture and header photos on all online platforms
- Use the same font styles and colors across the internet
- Stick to your voice and tone in all social posts and direct messaging
Nowadays, most people use multiple platforms. People will expect to see consistent branding from your business across Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and so on. Inconsistency can cause confusion and damage your credibility.
The overall social media presence of The Curvy Fashionista is on-brand and consistent. Both their Facebook and Instagram pages showcase their bold and sassy ways and unapologetic stance for plus-size fashion.
10. Connect with on-brand influencers
People are wary of being sold to constantly and can spot an ad no matter how much you try to keep it under wraps. However, people trust recommendations and suggestions ,and influencer marketing, (especially with micro-influencers) is a powerful way to promote your products.
Research who to collaborate with. Make sure it’s someone who aligns with your brand’s values and whose followers match your target audience. Work with them to decide the best strategy. They will already have a strong online presence so will have a clear idea what works well for their followers.
Closing words
Your brand identity is your secret sauce to attract and engage your tribe, that is, your ideal customers who will remain loyal to your brand. In today’s highly competitive marketplace strong branding is essential to standing out. Google also rewards brands that meet audience expectations and provide consistent value.
Having a unique brand voice and style increases your visibility among your target audience and is a powerful tool to convert visitors into buyers and followers.
