Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization Marketing’ Category

How SEO Can Build Brand

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.

Do You Want To Be Number One?

Everyone wants to be number one. You want your site to rank number one in your main competitive keywords, don’t you? It’s quite a natural aspiration. If you are like thousands of other businesses approaching search engine optimisation, you may well ask yourself, if SEO is so great, why isn’t everyone hitting the top spots on Google?

Guarantees and other sweet nothings

Search engine optimisation professionals are unable to provide that guarantee of a number one spot. In fact, such a guarantee is usually the sign of a less-than-reputable company, and tops the list of things SEO experts caution newcomers to watch out for. It does bring up the question, what exactly can your SEO company guarantee for your business?

The answer is slightly unimpressive. Search engine optimisation is not an exact science. Each site is an individual case with individual challenges and individual advantages. You can discuss your individual case with us at SEO Consult. The upshot is that there are absolutely no guarantees. Unfortunately, this is not as compelling as a slick salesperson’s smile and a glowing promise.

SEO goes well beyond search engines

What ethical SEO companies do achieve for their clients is an across-the-board improvement of a site’s relationship with the search engines. Sites are rarely built with the invisible little robots of the search engines in mind. SEO implements many small changes to a site which helps the search robots crawl across a site more efficiently, placing what is hoped to be the right information in their path.

SEO experts don’t have the magic formula for search engine success, but nevertheless the implementation of search engine optimisation tactics can have a positive influence on the health of your site. The improvements made within your site’s architecture, the placement of keywords in your content, and the addition of fresh content, all add up to a site that is more appealing to human users as well as search engines.

SEO is a form of marketing

SEO companies are constantly asked whether they can guarantee results. This is partly the fault of regular marketing, where professionals are keen to show that they can achieve predictable targets, and partly the fault of a less-than-perfect understanding of SEO. SEO is a form of marketing, but it’s more like the regular mechanical tune-up that leads to a racing car winning a Grand Prix. The relationship between effort and success isn’t as clear, but without it no-one wins.

Take a few seconds to consider exactly what constant guarantees of number one spots would mean. In a perfect world, where your SEO company had all of the secrets to search engine success, you might well receive a guarantee of a number one ranking. That company’s other clients would also receive that guarantee, and so would all of their past clients, until the net was filled with guaranteed number ones, all kicking each other off the top position in milliseconds. You might be able to get to number one, but you’d have no time to benefit from your status.