Branding and SEO: Your Recipe for Online Success

As a business owner, you want to ensure that your brand stands out from the rest. To be the go-to company for prospective customers, you want to have a strong online presence. This is where branding and search engine optimization (SEO) come into play.

Understanding the Dynamic Duo

Branding: The Essence of Your Identity 

Branding is the process of creating a unique identity for your business. Your brand represents the soul of your business. It is the emotional connection that makes customers choose you over competitors. Branding involves creating a logo, a tagline, and a voice for your brand. Your brand should reflect your company’s values and mission and be consistent across all channels, including your website, social media, and marketing materials.

SEO: Guiding Your Brand’s Discovery 

SEO is the art and science of making your website more visible in search engine results. By understanding how search engines crawl and rank websites, you can strategically optimize your content and structure to attract organic traffic. SEO ensures that your brand is discoverable by the right audience when they’re actively searching for products or services you offer.

The Intersection of Branding and SEO

Here’s six reasons why you need to consider your branding and SEO together: 

1. Good branding converts website visitors. You drive/funnel traffic to your website through SEO, but your branding (how you showcase your brand visually on your website, as well as your brand messaging on the site) keeps them there, engages them, and converts them. 
2. More branded searches can lead to higher domain authority. Branded searches (searches for your own brand name) are often the main drivers of organic search for many companies. Improving brand awareness and recognition through other means (ads, press, community involvement, networking, socials, wherever) leads to more branded searches. More branded searches equal more overall website impressions and traffic — increases in overall website traffic result in higher domain authority. Higher domain authority makes it easier to rank for unbranded keywords compared to your competitors.
3. Think of meta descriptions not only as places where you need to try to pack in your target keywords. They’re also where you can infuse your brand messaging. Meta descriptions are like free mini ads on search engines. Not only do they need to make sense linguistically, but they also need to entice the searcher to actually click on your website on the search results page. 
4. Making a tagline or coining a term as a household name takes serious brand messaging and marketing effort, but coined keywords can take off in people’s everyday use, skyrocketing your search presence and authority. Think of coined terms as potential content opportunities to help your brand go viral. A great example of this: is “domain authority,” which is a Moz-specific term, but nowadays, people use it to describe their website’s clout in search engines. All this conversation and talk around domain authority increases the number of search impressions and backlinks to Moz’s website.
5. Create positive user experiences. Consider the entire user path — from first click to conversion — in your customer’s journey. Your meta description in SEO may be the first touchpoint a prospect has with your brand, so it has to be compelling enough for them to click. Your page content must also align with the searcher’s intent and fully answer their question or need for them to stay. Finally, your call-to-action offering should be clear and compelling to entice them to act. This consideration of the user’s journey is a branding and SEO effort requiring skill in both areas. 
6. Link building. The more broadly known your brand is, and the more your brand is thought of as an authority source, the more people will organically link back to your site’s content, which — you guessed it — improves your domain authority and ability to rank for more competitive keywords.

By using branding and SEO together, you can create a strong online presence for your business. This will help you to attract more customers, build brand loyalty, and ultimately, increase your revenue. Remember to stay consistent with your branding and to regularly update your website’s SEO to ensure that you stay ahead of the competition.