How to promote your brand using SEO
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is one of the most excellent digital marketing tools companies can use to promote their brand. Increased web traffic, brand recognition, and qualified leads are all benefits of using SEO. But how does SEO work to promote your brand? We’ve explained all you need to know below.
What is SEO?
What is SEO? Search Engine Optimisation is the process of optimising your website to increase website traffic and conversions. This tool correctly brings your brand visibility across search engines like Google, Microsoft, Bing, and others. The ultimate goal of using this tool is to get visitors to your website who will become customers or clients and stay.
SEO is only successful when used correctly, and although there are other search engines, Google holds the most significant share of 85%, so SEO typically revolves around Google’s search engine optimisation, and they have a list of factors that they want for it to be utilised successfully.
Google is designed to provide the best search results to its users, so provident the most relevant results as fast as possible. To rank highly, you must use applicable key terms throughout your website and any content produced. For example, if you are a clothing store, you want to ensure that you rank for keywords such as ‘mom jeans’; these are on trend right now, and a simple key term like that could push your website to the top.
Promoting your brand with SEO
Promoting a brand through SEO marketing is long-winded; getting into the desired position takes time and patience. However, using these SEO best practice strategies can push you ahead and gain strong brand awareness.
Build backlinks
Search engines can determine your relevancy, which is essential when building backlinks. What are backlinks? They can be guest blogging, social media shares, exchanging links and more, all of which are links from one page on a website to another. If someone links your site, this could reference the content you have written, and then you have received a backlink from them.
Backlinks play a huge role in improving your SEO as it increases website traffic, which builds brand awareness. If a very popular website includes a link from your website, then you can gain new website visitors.
Optimise your content marketing
Content marketing is great, in general, for building awareness as it can be intriguing and easily meet the needs of your target audience. But, regarding SEO, you must optimise the content you are producing. Using analytics, see the type of content your users seek and need and the keywords they will be searching. Then build your content strategy off of that. Once you have gathered the results, put them to work. Place your chosen keywords in your content title and throughout your work.
Another way of finding the correct keywords is by looking at your competitors and the keywords they are using; you can do this organically by typing in specific keywords and seeing whether they come up; if they do, then you know to implement those words into your content. SEM Rush is a great website that can you show you keyword rankings.
Find your niche customers
Finding your niche customers gives you a higher chance of selling than mass marketing. Use social media to find the perfect niche customers for your brand; use smart keyword research to track them and see their interests and what they are searching for on the internet, and then use those specific keywords to attract them to your site.
Focusing on a single group of customers is a lot more effective as the chance of a sale and the likelihood of them returning is high. Often, these niche customers are so satisfied that they do word-of-mouth marketing for you by leaving reviews, recommending you to their friends and family and talking about it across social media.
Use local SEO
If you have ever searched ‘restaurants’ or ‘restaurants near me’ and many options pop up, this is called local SEO. This is a great SEO strategy where Google will use a proximity factor that sees where you are and where the nearest restaurants, businesses or whatever you are searching for are near you. So, ensure a location is linked to your brand; this way, your business can appear in the results when someone searches a keyword.
The benefits of using SEO
Inbound marketing and targeting quality traffic
One of the main advantages of SEO is that it generates leads and website traffic correctly. Compared to outbound marketing, where the customers will hear about you regardless of whether they want to or not, SEO allows your customers to reach you when they would like to, which is more rewarding.
When you use SEO to target customers who actually want to see what your business offers, your success rate will be higher.
Trust
In order to rank on search engine results, the content you produce or your website as a whole must be authorised and credible in relation to a searched query. So, when your target audience sees your business ranking highly at the top of the results page after searching a particular keyword and reading content on your website that they find helpful, they will view this as trustworthy. Once a customer has trust, it’s hard for them to go elsewhere.
It takes time and patience to see the benefits of SEO and trust; it involves a mix of content marketing, social media marketing, link building and building reliable and authoritative content, which Google determines. But, once this has been achieved, the benefits are outstanding.
Cost-effective
Google will determine the best results for any searched query, so once you have created a page that Google chooses as having the best results for users to be directed to, it will continue to drive traffic for years to come.
With this not costing anything, you will have to invest time into writing high-quality content and ensuring it is always up to Google’s algorithm standards. Over time you may have to update/edit your website content, but overall this is not a costly tool to raise brand awareness and increase conversions.
The key to successfully using SEO
SEO can be very complex and definitely not the most straightforward marketing tool to use, but as long as you can keep trying and putting in that extra effort, you will get results. Building backlinks, optimising your content using keywords and primarily targeting a niche group of customers will drive traffic to your website and build brand awareness.
FAQ
Why isn’t my website ranking on Google?
If your website is brand new, then this will be why it hasn’t ranked just yet; it takes time and dedication for your website to build sufficient authority. Another reason could be that your content doesn’t match what the searcher is looking for, or the quality isn’t great; you must ensure that your content is of higher quality than what is already ranking.
Some more reasons could be:
- You’re using the wrong keywords
- Google is not indexing your site (this is when Google will analyse the text, images and videos on the page and stores this information in the Google index – without this, you can’t rank)
- You have no authoritative backlinks
- Your website has been penalised by Google – this can be unfortunate. Still, suppose you have broken any Google guidelines (building spammy backlinks, over-optimising keywords etc.). In that case, this penalty can be placed on your website, where you will lose organic traffic and rankings, making it hard for your website to be discovered. To find out if this has happened to you, log into your Google Search Console, press ‘manual actions’ and then fix the issue Google cited.
- Google has released a new algorithm update.
How long does it take for my website to rank in the search results?
There isn’t one answer for this, as it all depends; you can’t expect to create a website and then have it ranking overnight; it takes time, patience and dedication. The most plausible answer is between 6 months and a year; this is obviously based on whether you have stuck at it, your competitors and the level of resources.
What are the downsides of using SEO?
Like everything, there are going to be cons to using SEO. It’s not the most accessible tool to use or get right; in fact, many businesses will outsource help for implementing their SEO strategy. Some cons are that it takes a long time to see results, the competition is huge and hard to meet, and there are no guarantees; you may be ranking at the top one day, but you could lose this position to competition or algorithm change.
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