Think of what you expect from your SEO campaign. If you’re like most businesses, you’ll probably expect that four or five of your pages will be pulled up into the top ten results for some of your keywords. If you have a little experience of SEO, you might expect your non-search engine traffic to increase a little from inbound links. You might expect your general internet presence to increase slightly. What you probably don’t expect is that SEO can set you up as a leading brand within your industry.
Brand is something intricately linked with SEO, yet most site owners never think about the two in the same sentence. If brand is taken into consideration when the SEO plan is being devised, both the brand and the SEO plan have a better chance of success.
Why bother with branding
It’s best to consider this question from a personal angle. Think about the food you ate today. Think about the shoes you’re wearing. Think about the car you drove to work. In most cases, the items that come to mind are brands, rather than generic products.
Branding is an incredibly powerful force. Some brands are so powerful that the products they promote are known simply by the brand, as with ‘Hoover’ for the US vacuum industry. Often, people refer to a particular brand when they’re thinking about buying a product, leading them to ignore the other products on offer when purchase time comes. Branding can help you corner the market, regardless of what your industry is.
Branding goes beyond physical products
The above examples might lead you to think that the power of brands only extends to physical products, but branding affects all sorts of products and services. Take Google, for example. The giant search engine operates entirely in the electronic realm, yet has cornered the market with its brand. People talk about ‘Googling’ something, instead of searching for something. Google as a brand is associated with reliable, fast, accurate search results. This image may or may not be strictly accurate, but it ensures that Google retains its stranglehold on the search industry.
How brand affects your SEO campaign
Your brand will have some influence over your search engine optimisation campaign. Your existing brand presence can be an asset that your SEO consultant can use when trying to implement your off-page SEO. You can talk to our experts about off-page optimisation techniques at SEO Consult. Your brand keywords will also be taken into consideration in your SEO plan.
A better way to look at it, though, is what SEO can do to affect your brand. Basically, what SEO aims to do is increase your site’s presence all over the net. If your site is well known, it has a better chance at a good PageRank. Off-page search engine optimisation is all about getting your site out there and talked about. A side-effect of this is in making your brand the subject of talk also, but only if you’ve worked your brand into your SEO plan.
