The importance of SEO for brand awareness
It doesn't matter what type of business or organisation you run. It also doesn't matter whether you employ B2B marketing or B2C or what kind of services or products you sell. Brand awareness will always be a top priority when it comes to creating success for your organisation or business.
When working to improve brand awareness, our first thoughts are often of the outward-facing elements of a brand. The logo, the colour palette, the font and even the tone of voice we use to communicate our core messages. These elements are essential for brand awareness, but what about the internal components that help build and maintain a brand? Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of these crucial elements.
What is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Search engines like Google or Yahoo enable customers to find the answers they are looking for, whether a helpful blog post addresses a problem they have or connects them with a service provider who can help them with a particular task. SEO enables search engines to rank websites accurately to provide search engine users with the content that best suits their needs. The ranking can be based on content, keywords and structure, as well as the speed of your website, responsiveness design and more.
A well-optimised website helps push your business or organisation to appear higher up in the search engine results that appear when a user enters a query or a search term. Therefore, it's essential to ensure your website is optimised with relevant and quality content that users are searching for; this is the foundation of building brand awareness through SEO.
Why SEO matters for Brand Awareness
SEO is essential for increasing brand awareness because it helps people discover you online.
When someone searches for a product or service you offer, they will likely come across your website in the search results. This will help you reach a much larger audience than if your website was not visible in the search results.
When it comes to search engine results, there can often be pages upon pages of results, all offering content that matches the search term a user has entered. In other words - it’s very competitive.
But, if you aren’t working on improving the SEO of your website, not only will you miss out on potential customers and valuable website traffic, it is likely that those users could end up on a competitor's website. Your brand will be lost in a sea of more prominent sites.
SEO also helps to establish credibility and trustworthiness among your audience. This is particularly important as brand awareness is essential for building trust with customers. When customers see you have a strong presence in the search engine rankings, they're more likely to believe that you are an authority on the subject. This can help to drive sales and help you reach business goals.
People will also start to associate certain terms and phrases with your company as your rankings improve. Every time you pop up in the SERPs you are increasing your reach and brand awareness online.
You can also work towards providing a content hub or blog full of useful content. These articles will help your brand to be found and portray you as an expert in your niche.
We’ve summarised some of the key ways SEO helps boost brand awareness below.
Ways in which SEO helps brand awareness
- It gets your brand seen in the search results
- It ensures your brand comes across the way you want it to
- It presents the right content to your audience and helps create a content hub for your audience to engage with
- Your audience start to relate certain words and phrases to your brand
- It helps to target the right audience and reach them in the places where they are active
- It helps you get recognised and build a reputation locally (local SEO)
- It increases brand reach, which in turn improves brand awareness
- SEO can often be described as PR in disguise because it gets your brand in front of online audiences
5 ways you can improve your search engine optimisation
Now that you know what SEO is and why it's important for brand awareness, it's time to discuss what methods you can employ to help ensure that your website is optimised in order to give you the best chance of improving your brand awareness.
1. Create Quality Content: Your business or organisation should use content marketing to ensure that users are provided with quality content that is relevant to their search query and provides a great user experience. Carefully consider your audience. Consider what needs they have or what information they might need and create content with this in mind, so your website shows up in the search results when your ideal customer enters a search term into Google.
2. Use Keywords Wisely: Optimising your content for the keywords your customers or website visitors are likely to be using is a great way to improve SEO. Utilise keywords & phrases that accurately describe the product/service you're offering while also being mindful of how they are used in your website's content. Tools such as SEMRUSH and Moz Keyword Explorer can help you to identify the most relevant and commonly used keywords so you can choose the correct keywords that people are actually using when they're searching for content online. However, it is important to remember that the quality of the copy is paramount. Keyword stuffing is never a good idea. The content should sound natural and be written for users, not search engines.
3. Optimise Website Speed: Making sure that your website loads quickly and efficiently will also play a role in increasing visibility in search engine rankings. The faster your website loads, the better the user experience. Find out ways to improve your website speed here.
4. Work on increasing 'Inbound Links': Inbound links or backlinks refer to links that lead to your website which are on other pages. Search engines view inbound links as a sign that your website is of value and, as a result, will rank it higher in the search results.
5. Technical SEO: Make sure your website is coded correctly, meets the recommended requirements for web speed & mobile responsiveness and that you check the quality of your backlinks regularly. You should also ensure that your page titles and meta descriptions are optimised. Creating good meta descriptions will help customers to get a quick idea of what your website or webpage is offering them. If done well, the meta description should encourage more clicks and increase the number of relevant visitors coming to your website.
By implementing these methods, you can ensure that your website is well-optimised for SEO, allowing you to reach a larger audience and improve brand awareness in the process. Remember, SEO takes time; you should consider it a long-distance marathon rather than a sprint. It's important to be patient to continually monitor the success of your efforts and continue to employ the methods listed above to improve your SEO. Good luck!
