SEO is an ever-evolving industry, but lately many are starting to question just how much one area bleeds into another. For example, could a good PPC strategy be used for an SEO strategy and vice versa? We have begun to consider that the age-old ways of thinking about how to do SEO for your website have completely changed.
SEO has been around for a long time, but sadly the industry hasn’t really evolved beyond the primitive thinking of backlinks and content; instead, it focuses on technical elements instead of looking towards the big picture, which is a basic understanding of the concepts of business and how to get your brand name mentioned and trusted by consumers.
Google is one of the top brand names in the world, and they have achieved that by building a search engine that rewards those who have a strong brand within a certain market and also websites that consumers like and trust to do business with. Before the internet, we had things like the Yellow Pages, which was used to build your brand locally or even nationally; this was basically replaced by Google and other online search engines, but even before that, we had things like billboards and newspaper ads.
The only thing that has changed over time is how quickly technology can be leveraged to scale to a million eyeballs and how cheap it has become to reach these eyeballs. Now you can get a PPC campaign up and running within 15 minutes and start to expose consumers to your brand name. The latest version of this is apps like TikTok, which can help you to go viral across the globe very quickly. This may seem like a completely new and novel concept, but the same brand building that worked in the Mad Men era still works today.
The concept that drives real sales is the trust factor. If you don’t have trust, then no one will do business with you. This is a simple fact. People will avoid you unless you have certain trust indicators on your website and have an established brand name online. Google, as a search engine, has evolved over time to weed out smaller businesses that have not taken the time to really market themselves or build up some trust. They can do this algorithmically these days.
The types of things that they can look for are things like how many reviews your business has, how many searches your brand name gets per month, how many backlinks you have, how many mentions you get on social media, how often you have been in business and how many pages your website has. These are just some of the things they could build into the algorithm that would be valuable data to be used by them to decide if you should be trusted or not.
Advertising has been around for a very long time, and before the internet we saw many companies that mastered branding and advertising. When applied to the internet, we can see similar themes, which is that big businesses tend to invest heavily in advertising to keep their brand name at the forefront of marketing and help to keep their business at the top of your mind for a certain product or service. You must have a plan to remind your customers that you exist; it’s incredible how fast you can fall when people forget about you, so brand building and advertising should be a continuous process.
Coming up with great branding and advertising campaigns was the lifeblood of the advertising industry, but digital marketing seems to be just focused on editing title tags or fitting keywords onto a page. We must remember that behind every piece of content is a message, and crafting that message is critical. You need to decide what branding message you want to send and be sure to include it in your SEO strategy.
Many people will simply not understand that SEO is just an extension of branding and advertising. When you rank your website at the top of Google, you are signalling that your brand is trusted by a billion-dollar company. That is an extreme trust signal for consumers to see, and as a result, they trust you by default now. They are now more than willing to do business with you.
One of the most undervalued skills in the SEO industry is copywriting. This is likely due to so many using copy-and-paste strategies that they just forget about the words on a page and instead focus on hitting word count numbers. Being able to accurately communicate a branding message that is simple but effective is critical even on the web. If you are involved in the SEO industry, then it’s a great idea to start collecting words or phrases that connect with you as a consumer and start including those in your articles or even in your title tags.
One tool the SEO industry needs to research is how to create a brand name from scratch; this will give you some insights into how the SEO process works. Modern SEO is all about building relationships, networking and crafting carefully placed branding messages. If you do this and do this over a number of years, you will never have to worry about any Google updates. Google has been rewarding branding efforts for over 10 years now and has been rewarding them for putting out press releases, forming partnerships and using traditional offline marketing efforts.
SEO has evolved since the start of search engines when it was enough to just have a tonne of keywords placed in the META keywords tag and rank for all kinds of terms. Most people doing this had hundreds of keywords in the tag and got some major traffic from implementing it. Since that time, search engines have got smarter and started to understand the relationships between websites and how they link to each other. At the start of Google, the most important factor was just getting backlinks. Since that got abused, we have seen them branch out and figure out multiple ways to determine the value of a website and brand, which allows them to filter out trusted brands from the rest.
These days creating value on your website can be done in all sorts of creative ways; you can do interviews with industry experts, you can write creative new information on existing topics and give your own thoughts, or you can even create video content to be embedded. Either way, you have to find brand new ways of presenting information as well as staying on brand and establishing to Google that you are, in fact, an expert within your market.
Frequently updating your content is one such way that you can signal to Google you are serious about becoming a brand within the industry; you are giving your best every single day to make sure you provide further information to the marketplace and keep your brand name at the forefront. This is a powerful signal to Google that you have committed to growing your website and are going to stick with your idea for many years instead of just giving up on it overnight if it doesn’t succeed early.
There are many different channels you can use to build your brand name, but SEO is perhaps one of the oldest, and if done correctly in the long term, you will see great returns and also have an established brand name at the end of it, but it does require an awful lot of work upfront to get into that position, and then you have to be updating your website all the time to stay ahead of the pack. One of the best ways around this is to allow others to post up content on your website, which saves you having to do everything yourself and establishes you as a place to go to get different opinions on an industry.
Google likes to see that you are willing to form partnerships with other brand names, so don’t be afraid of linking out to other authorities who have already established a brand name within the industry; this will really help you to form relationships with people, connect with them via email or on LinkedIn and form some ideas about how you can work together to produce great content for each other, and most importantly, do it so that the consumer benefits from gaining additional knowledge.
Branding is even prominent inside of anchor text; when you do some solid research into large websites, you find some of the same things, which is that the brand name is always the number 1 anchor text, and this is due to the fact that the brand name is a highly searched keyword that Google can recognise as a valuable resource, and as a result, it pushes it to the top of the search results.
Brand building is an art form, but it can also be done digitally. One of the most overlooked ways to get some high-quality links to your site is by promoting your logo. Your logo is a strong branding signal that Google notices. When someone links back to you with an image, this is a strong signal they have used your logo, which is normally done by brand names who want that logo to be at the forefront of a brand-building campaign. After all, what would brands like Coca-Cola be without their famous logo?