When you are a brand, you will be searched for by name and the searches can be for your website or social media content on your various social media profiles or news about your business. Traffic coming into your website will be what is known as direct traffic. The more traffic you have coming into and staying on your website, the better the website will be in the eyes of Google. This will help your site to move up in the rankings.
Whenever there are good and reliable resources about doing proper SEO and information about how search engine optimisation should be done that is where you should look for guidance.
If your business name or brand name is not known to the user, your website can be found by virtue of its visibility in the search results. This in turns helps to expose users to your business or brand name regularly.
It is also important to get target searches for your brand name as part of building your branding and ranking the home or the products or services page.
What are the most important channels of driving traffic to a website? Search engine optimisation that provides organic traffic, branding that provides direct traffic. Referral traffic from sites that are linked to your site.
So what creates a brand? It is said that a brand is the intangible sum of a product’s attributes which are unique and targets a sector of the consumer market. Others have said that it is creating a name, symbol or design identifying or differentiating it from other products.
It should be more than that. It is a promise of your service, your quality which sets your business apart from your competitor. It is a promise that is consistently communicated throughout the organisation in writing, verbally and visually.
The key to brand success lies in the link between the values embraced and supported by the business and these values aligned with the consumers’ values. The message communicated by the business must be consistent with the quality and service offered by the business.
The brand differentiates one business from its competitor. Consumer loyalty is part of brand creation. Part of the process of creating a brand will include creating an interest and awareness in the target market and understanding them. This in turns creates a curiosity and when people are curious they look it up by searching for it as is explained in this article. (https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/advertising-channels/search/how-advertisers-are-using-search-for-brand-building/)
What are consumers looking for? Quality or price? Pricing is important as it can be seen as the value of a product and is very much a part of the marketing mix. A low price may indicate a lower quality whereas when the price of a product is set higher, it may indicate high quality or even that it is a luxury item.
Are you seen as the business or company that they will turn to provide a solution for what they are looking for? If you are, then you have succeeded in creating a successful brand
When the name, reputation of the business or the content on the website is interesting, trustworthy or authoritative, there will be traffic going to that website.
A business that has a well regarded brand with a good reputation and well optimised website will outrank any of its competitors. One metric that comes into play are the links to the website. Any business that is attractive with a good brand will have more people sharing links to their site and more people searching for the site and clicking to get onto their website.
Good useful content will have more people staying on the site to read its content. Good content will also mean that other websites will link to the content.
Some have argued that small busineses ought to spend more money on building the reputation of their brands than on SEO.
Building great products and services, good site content and great customer service are all equally important
Having great SEO without great products and services will not help any brand’s reputation.
It is interesting that the ranking factors used by Google for determining where to serve a website are EAT which stand for expertise, authoritative and trustworthiness. The authority building of any online brand when doing SEO has the same underlying purposes as brand building.
Although it can be argued that SEO forms just a small part of the branding process, this argument fails to recognise just how important an online brand presence and online visibility need to have now compared to say ten years or so ago.
After all that, we can say that good branding feeds SEO and good SEO builds brands.