Would you believe it takes an average of 5 to 7 impressions to start building brand awareness?
Brand awareness, most of the time, sounds like a vague concept. In truth, it is. However, despite lacking a measurable metric, you can’t dispute the importance and value of brand awareness for a business. Brand awareness fosters trust, creates an association, and builds brand equity.
That said, creating and building brand awareness is not the easiest thing to do, which is why you need to maximize SEO for branding. Simply put, SEO is the basis for building your business’s online brand awareness. Increasing your website visibility in SERPs is one of the most vital aspects of building trust, credibility, and brand awareness.
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What Makes Brand Awareness So Vital?
Your brand is hands-down, the most important asset your company has. Understand that brand awareness goes a lot deeper than just your logo, slogan, and color scheme. Brand awareness is the extent to which your customers recognize your business and associate it with particular products or services.
Brand awareness is the mindset your potential customers get into the minute they see your company name or logo.
There are five levels of brand recognition. They include rejection, non-recognition, recognition, preference, and loyalty. The end goal of using SEO for Branding is to get to preference and loyalty, where your customers come back to your brand again and again. With brand loyalty, it’s unlikely that they will consider any other business first.
Brand awareness is essential because it creates trust, and people buy from companies that they trust. You see, familiarity breeds comfort, and it’s this comfort that will make your customers choose you over your competitors again and again.
In this guide, we’ll help you understand how you can use SEO services to maximize your brand awareness.
Be Consistent
One of the most vital aspects of SEO brand awareness is consistency.
It’s incredibly essential that you keep putting your brand in front of potential customers so you can start by building brand recognition. Now the vital aspect of using SEO for branding is the fact that a majority of users click results from the first page of Google.
This means that you need to rank high on SERPs to drive traffic to your website. The more people click on your search results, the more they become aware of your brand. The question is, how do you make sure your customers recognize and remember your company using SEO?
Choose Relevant Keywords
The foundation of any SEO strategy is the keywords a business chooses to use. Use the Search Console to see how many people search for your brand.
Check what branded terms they use when looking for your products or services. It’s vital for you to review this before you start implementing SEO for branding. For SEO to work in your favor, you need to use keywords that matter to your business.
Start by creating a relevant list of keywords that fit your target market. Start the process by brainstorming the most relevant and suitable keywords for your business. Utilize keyword research tools to review the volume and difficulty of each keyword.
There are several incredible keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner. You can also use Keywords Everywhere to reveal the volume of keywords in your browser. Beyond that, you can check what keywords your competitors are using to formulate a great SEO strategy that will help you beat them.
Create Content That Aligns With User Intent
Once you have your keyword list, it’s essential that you decide what kind of content you should produce. The best way to do this is by aligning it with user Intent. Google algorithms keep changing, and the company wants to ensure its customers get the best experience.
This means that they provide customers with what they intend to find. Essentially, this also means that you need to understand what kind of content is ranking for your target keywords, the format of the content, the length, and the HTML heading.
With this information on hand, you can start producing the right content. If there’s one thing you need to understand, it’s that content is still king. It needs to be informative, valuable, and user-friendly for Google to rank it on top of the SERPs.
Control How Your Business Appears in Search Results
Given that 93% of all online experiences begin with the search engine, it’s imperative that you consider how your site appears on search results when your potential customers undertake a branded search. For instance, having a Google My Business account can go a long way.
You can provide as much information about your business to your customers on the platform. This will help with the knowledge panel in search results, and potential customers can find what they’re looking for.
When you control what appears in search results for branded terms, you provide a good user experience for your visitors. This will help them associate your company with your brand, cementing their brand awareness.
Provide Users With Optimum Customer Experience
There are many components of SEO, but user experience is one of the most important ones. Even though there are tons of things you can do to improve user experience on your website, there are certain aspects you should focus on.
For instance, it’s incredibly important for you to improve your website loading speed.
Online consumers have a very short attention span and hate slow loading websites. Additionally, your content needs to be about three clicks away from your home page so your customers can easily go back. Of course, your website should be easy to navigate, and you should have a website style guide that defines you, from colors, fonts, and imagery.
Make sure you use these aspects consistently on your website. Even more important than that is making your business logo visible to all your website visitors. Also, follow the customer journey and use Google Analytics to track what visitors do on your website.
Use the information you find to fix any issues you find on your web pages to provide an even better user experience. With incredible user experience, customers will recognize your brand, and this will ultimately lead to brand awareness. If this sounds overwhelming, you can always hire digital marketing services from a professional company and outsource your work.
Invest in a Link Building Strategy
Link building involves having authority websites link back to your website. Backlinks from high domain authority websites are a critical part of your SEO strategy and overall SEO brand awareness plan. The thing is, quality backlinks boost your trust and credibility, resulting in a higher ranking on SERPs.
Backlinks will also play a vital role in brand recognition because when potential customers see your brand linked to a website they trust, they will not only recognize your brand but come to you as potential loyal customers as well.
Leverage Guest Posting
Guest posting is by far one of the best link building strategies you can use. It involves contributing your content to another website and linking it back to your website. This is also an incredible weight to introduce your brand to the hosts’ regular readers and loyal customers.
Leverage the authority of the brands you post on to establish your own authority in your niche. The best way to find these authority websites is to identify what kind of website you would like to write for and how authoritative and trusted they are within your niche.
Pitch to these websites as a guest writer and strive to provide high-quality and valuable content. Apart from guest posting, you can also come to reciprocal linking agreements with relevant websites as another way of backlinking.
Use Google Paid Ads Strategically
PPC or pay-per-click is a search engine marketing strategy that works closely with SEO and can help you with brand awareness. Paid and organic marketing work hand-in-hand, but paid advertising has a direct impact on brand awareness because ads appear at the top or bottom of search engines. Customers will see them whether they click on them or not.
The trick with PPC is to bid on the most relevant long-tail keywords. The beauty of long-tail keywords is that they’re high volume and low competition. They’ll bring you closer to the top search results on the first page of Google.
You can also bid on your competitors’ branded keywords because it will place your brand in front of people that may not have known your business exists.
If they do choose your business, they are almost always likely to make a purchase. However, there’s always a chance that if they’re specifically looking for your competitor, they’re not ready to purchase from any other brand.
Using SEO for branding: The Ultimate Guide
The most significant reason you need to leverage SEO for branding is the fact that for customers to become loyal, they must know you exist.
SEO is the strategy that gets your business out there and paves the way for brand recognition and, eventually, brand awareness. After brand recognition, you should strive to give your potential customers compelling reasons to become loyal customers.
This involves providing informative and valuable content, great customer services, and incredible products they will want to use again. Beyond this, if you want to know more about SEO and the best strategies to use, please check out more of our website today!
