Whether you are starting a new business or rebranding an existing one, search engine optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role in building your brand. SEO helps optimize various aspects of your website for search, increasing your rankings. This builds brand recognition, attracts more traffic to your site, and converts web visitors into leads or paying customers. Read on for seven ways to use SEO to build your brand awareness.
Implement a link-building strategy
Link-building helps you show your target audience how valuable and relevant your brand is. Other websites with similar niches use backlinks to reference your site, improving your rankings on SERPS. It also increases traffic to your site, leading to more sales and brand recognition. To build backlinks to your website, you should:
- Guest post on other websites and include links to your site
- Implement a broken link building strategy
- Email outreach
- Identify mentions of your brand on the web and request backlinks
- Create quality content that compels people to share
- Leverage the power of social media and get people talking about your brand
Use relevant keywords
Optimizing your website copies with relevant keywords plays a crucial role in every successful SEO strategy. Identify specific essential keywords that align with your target audience’s attention when searching for products and services in your area of expertise and place them in your content. This improves your rankings on search engine results pages for specific keywords, increasing your brand’s recognition.
While you could use short-form keywords in your content due to their higher search volume, they often have lower conversion rates. Focus on long-tail keywords as they are more specific, attracting users with precise search intent. Although long-tail keywords do not drive as much traffic to your website as short-tail vital phrases, they have a higher conversion rate.
Leverage local SEO
Local search engine optimization effectively boosts your brand’s online presence to gain traction within a specific geographical location. It entails producing content that aligns with the target audience’s search intent within your area to improve your rankings on local searches.
To optimize your site for local searches, you should;
- Develop and optimize your Google My Business page
- Seek local reviews and ratings to develop your brand’s credibility
- Create location-specific content with relevant keywords
- Optimize your website for mobile use and voice search
- Develop content covering local topics and events. For example, a company like Leave the Key Homebuyers that buy homes in New York would need to produce content on topics such as the home-buying process in New York
- Register your business in Name Address Phone number (NAP) directories
Optimize your website content
Creating a quality, unique, and valuable content is one of the greatest ways to build your brand awareness, improve your ranking on SERPs, and generate target leads to your website. It also establishes you as an authority in the industry, which helps build trust with your customers.
To develop an effective content marketing strategy, you should identify your target audience and then create content that aligns with their needs, interests, and behaviors. With that being said, do not limit your web content to case studies and blog posts. Instead, create informative and captivating content through podcasts, videos, infographics, e-books, and webinars.
Integrate SEO with other channels
Integrating your SEO with other marketing channels, such as social media, can be time-consuming and expensive. However, optimizing SEO with other channels is critical to engaging with your target audience and increasing brand awareness.
Search engines like Google often index social media improving visibility. You just have to ensure you publish high-quality, engaging, and relevant social media posts to be indexed. Social media also allows you to interact with your target audience directly, allowing you to determine what people say about your organization and your competitors.
Creating a social media profile, publishing a post, and then forgetting about it is not enough. You should further build a social media community, respond to customer queries, and invest in sponsored posts and follower campaigns to use social media to influence SEO and brand awareness.
Provide an excellent user experience
Your website is your brand’s touchpoint online. For this reason, you must strive to deliver an excellent user experience to improve your positioning on search engines and your brand’s perception, strengthening brand awareness. You increase customer involvement and win their trust by offering excellent website usability. Your target audience will likely perceive your brand well when they can accomplish what they want with minimal difficulties and obstacles. Below are factors that contribute to user experience:
Website loading speed
Approximately 53% of your website visitors will likely exit your site if it takes more than two seconds to load. Google also prioritizes user experience and uses site speed as a ranking factor. A slow speed will hurt your ranking, which kills brand awareness. To improve your site speed:
- Find a host that can accommodate your website’s current and future bandwidth demands
- Optimize images
- Get rid of unnecessary add-ons and plugins
- Include website-safe fonts
- Reduce redirects
Responsiveness
Search engines like Google have a mobile-friendly update. For this reason, if your website is not responsive, it will not appear in mobile search results. 57% of customers will not also recommend your organization if your website is not optimized for mobile.
Be sure to test your company’s website using the Google mobile-friendly test tool to determine whether search engines find it responsive. If you establish that it is not, invest in a mobile-friendly website builder and template, optimize your content, and include large, easy-to-scan images.
Improve reputation
Building an excellent reputation is critical to boosting your brand’s awareness. An effective way to improve your business reputation is by leveraging customer reviews. According to a BrightLocal research study, 88% of customers trust online reviews as much as recommendations from family and friends. For this reason, you should incorporate a provision of online reviews into your search engine optimization strategy. Below are tips for building a solid online reputation:
- Request existing customers for reviews
- Fight negative SEO. This includes low-quality backlinks and fake profiles
- Monitor brand mentions
Endnote
Brand awareness helps you reach out to a more targeted audience. This increases your sales volume, leading to more profits. Use the above methods to build your brand awareness with SEO to achieve your business goals.
