6/24/2009
The Branding Power of Search Engine Optimization
When people think of search engine optimization (SEO) – the art and science of making your web pages rank highly on search engines – they usually think of precise, tactical activities aimed at specific sets of keyword phrases. SEO is all that, but it can serve another purpose, one that may be more significant than driving traffic to a web page to sell a particular product or service.
I’m talking about branding.
SEO Lets You Brand with the Big Boys
What is the cumulative effect of having customers in your niche see your company’s name over and over again when they search for anything related to what you sell? Being visible on Google for search after search familiarizes the market with your name. For small and midsized firms, brand recognition is an expensive proposition and hard to come by. Few can afford to carpet the country with billboards, produce television commercials, or run advertisements in high circulation trade magazines or general interest publications. Even paid search campaigns, though effective, can be extremely pricey for highly sought after, competitive search terms.
By comparison, SEO is an affordable way to generate brand recognition. Research varies, but many of us view organic results as being more credible than paid advertisements on search engine results pages (SERPs). What’s great about using SEO for branding is that you kill three birds with one stone. The cumulative effect of optimizing your site creates brand awareness, and in the process, every appearance of your web pages on a SERP creates an immediate conversion opportunity. SEO serves your short and long term marketing interests.
The Third Bird – Establishing Leadership Position with Qualified Prospects
I said three birds, and number three is not to be overlooked. When you achieve strong position on keywords that represent the heart and soul of your business, you will impress prospective customers who Google you for those terms to check you out. In my case, “business blog consulting” is a central part of what I do. I want clients to see me ranked highly for that term, not on Google page 10 or 20. If you sell cement mixers or advise corporate leaders on strategic planning and are invisible for those terms, will customers trust you enough to do business with you? Obviously the answer is not always the same, but if a strong search profile makes a difference a few times a year, that alone may make SEO worth the investment.
Over to You
Are you thinking strategically about your search engine optimization activities?
(Photo Credit – Wikimedia Commons)
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11 Responses to The Branding Power of Search Engine Optimization
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Great post, SEO is so important for raising awareness about your business and brand.
If customers search for a variety of keywords along the same theme that could be related to your business and you appear regularly near the top of the rankings, this is inevitably going to look good and raise this awareness of the brand.
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Danielle, You are correct. I’ve seen this work amazingly well, as long as you are willing to wait. It can take many months or even a couple years before the repetition effect takes hold with customers.
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Hi.
You are nailing it on the head here.
This would work really nice for blogs and pages with just one niche topic.
But My blog is about broad spectrum online marketing, not really a one topic niche. Do I need to get a lot of different keywords or keyphrases, or do I just need to alter the search words or phrases every week. Do I need to alter my SEO methods according to this?
Never the less, great post.
Hi Abraham, It’s difficult to optimize a single web page for more than a few keyword phrases, but by devoting pages to specific parts of your business, you can cover all of your online marketing services. After you’ve established your keyword targeted pages, you can support them with links from your blog posts.
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Thanks for your great tips for search engine optimization…
A mere online presence won’t serve the purpose of reaching out and impressing your target audience, to beat the competition you need a well designed website with a good search rank and for that you need help of companies which provide complete solutions in website designing and development and search engine optimization.