SEO and branding go hand in hand. And even though SEO is a very effective channel for launching a brand and increasing its name recognition, many companies don’t really consider SEO as a natural choice for branding. That’s a missed opportunity.
In this article, I’ll use my own case study to explain why SEO may be one of the most interesting channels for branding and how to develop a good SEO branding strategy. But first, I’ll start with the key reasons for using SEO as a branding channel.
There are three key reasons to use SEO for branding. I’ll briefly discuss them below.
Whereas the return on advertising stops immediately when you halt your campaigns, SEO continues to deliver a return for years to come—even if you stop investing in it for months.
A good example of this is my blog post about sales funnels. I invested a significant amount of time (about 40 hours) in writing the article, but it has been consistently generating leads and customers for me for more than three years now.
If you look at the business case and assume a commercial hourly rate of €100 per hour, the investment in the article would be €4,000. But an average customer brings me an average of €6,000 per year. Over the past 4 years, this article has generated more than €180,000 (!) in revenue for me.
And that’s just the immediate return—people who convert from reading the article into leads and later into customers. But what’s even more interesting is that the article has been read more than 50,000 times on my blog.
The best part is that the article will continue to attract tens of thousands of readers in the coming years and generate a significant amount of revenue.
And this is just the return on a single item.
People prefer to buy from people they trust. This is especially true in the service industry, but it also applies to other sectors, such as retail. And content is an effective way to gain the trust of your target audience.
Because the best way to help people is to actually help them. All of my blog posts are intended to help readers take the next step. That might mean raising awareness or simply providing a practical solution to a problem or challenge.
And if someone has found a solution on your website several times, their trust in your (personal) brand will grow. Your visitors will then begin to see you as an expert on that topic.
And when an expert says something is good, people believe it. So when you, as an expert, sell a product or service, people assume that its quality is on par with the expert’s expertise.
In my case, I no longer need to convince potential clients who come to see me that I’m a good business coach. They’ve usually already come to that conclusion by the time they sit down with me. That’s why, in fact, all we need to do is determine whether there’s a personal fit and whether my rate fits the client’s financial situation.
In short: by establishing yourself as an expert, you can not only increase the value of your brand, but you’ll also have a direct impact on online—and potentially offline—conversions.
Because branding is difficult to measure in terms of return on investment, it’s usually hard to determine whether your money is being spent wisely. This is especially true because with paid advertising, it’s not always clear whether you’ve reached the right target audience.
With SEO, you have more control over who comes into contact with your brand. Based on the customer journey, you probably already know what your target audience is looking for. By using SEO, you can ensure that you appear in front of those people.
And it’s not just that you’re reaching those people, but that you’re reaching them at the right moment. After all, the target audience has gone out looking for information on their own. So the content aligns with the target audience’s information needs at that very moment. With advertising, you have much less control over that.
An additional advantage is that SEO, as you read in the first point, requires only a one-time investment. This makes it a great alternative to paid campaigns, which require a continuous investment of money and energy to remain visible to your target audience.
In my case, it’s almost impossible to reach my target audience with advertising at just the right moment. My services as a business coach are too broad for that. It would require a massive investment in branding campaigns just to stay visible. And even then, it would be a shot in the dark.
Most of the prospects who sit down with me have already come across my name (brand) dozens of times. On Google (organic search), on LinkedIn, and yes… sometimes even in Google’s paid results (AdWords). And in the latter case, they’re probably already sold on the idea, because they’ve seen my brand so often. For that reason, I only advertise on keywords that are at the bottom of the funnel.
At the end of the day, SEO lowers your average cost per view for your branding campaigns.
Branding through SEO is by no means limited to large companies. In fact… I think it’s actually a godsend for companies that have to compete against well-funded players who often have hundreds of thousands to spend on their branding campaigns.
And because many of those major players focus primarily on predictable, short-term results, they often opt for advertising. In that sense, you could say that SEO as a branding strategy presents an opportunity for both large and small businesses.
If you want to use SEO for branding, it’s important to start by mapping out the customer journey. This is important because you need to know what information your target audience is looking for and where they are in the journey.
Next, you’ll want to rank for keywords that align with the customer journey. But the goal isn’t just to rank for that keyword—it’s primarily to help your target audience take the next step from that point. There’s absolutely no point in ranking with a poorly optimized SEO article. You might get traffic that way, but it won’t have a positive impact on either your brand perception or your conversion rate.
Do you really want to take it to the next level? Then use marketing automation to influence the customer journey. Because now that you know where someone is in the customer journey (by tracking what content they read), you can use email marketing to influence the customer journey by regularly sharing interesting content that addresses their information needs as they move toward a purchase.
SEO and branding are therefore a very powerful combination for anyone trying to build a brand. It doesn’t matter whether you’re building a personal brand, a business brand, or a product brand. It’s an opportunity that I believe no one should pass up.
So take another look at that customer journey and figure out which keywords you should be visible for among your target audience.
This article was written by guest blogger Nico Oud. Nico is a business coach who helps companies achieve their personal and business goals.
With a passion for SEO and an unmatched drive for results, Jarik Oosting is the driving force behind SmartRanking. With over 15 years of experience in the field, he has built an extensive body of knowledge spanning technical SEO to complex site migrations. As the founder of SmartRanking, he has assembled a team of like-minded SEO specialists who help businesses achieve sustainable online growth.
His academic background in information science at the University of Groningen, with a specialization in natural language processing, gives him a unique perspective on the world of SEO. For Jarik, it’s not just about visibility in search engines, it’s about sharing knowledge and guiding businesses toward sustainable online success. That mission also led him to write a Dutch book about GEO.