Brand SEO: Greasing The Wheels
All I want for Christmas is 100000 marketers screaming into a void. As a brand marketer and SEO, I spend equal time growing keywords as I do growing brand searches. For years, I’ve struggled to get the full budget needed to invest in anything that wasn’t an ad with an attributable click.
But… Why?
Choosing between brand and anything else for any reason is a false choice.
You have a brand new car. Would you choose between gas and oil? Think of brand like oil and attributable marketing campaigns like gas. You can't run an engine for long without both.
Many businesses, particularly startups and growth-stage companies, fall into the trap of prioritizing immediate results through performance marketing while neglecting their brand. This approach is akin to constantly filling your car with gas while ignoring the oil level – the risk being, you don’t gain any marginal economic gains by investing more.
What are we even talking about here when we say “brand”?
This is not a new term. Marketers have been measuring brand awareness, strength, and preference for decades. There are already processes for this that SEOs do not need to reinvent.
“Unaided brand recognition” is a measurement marketers use to measure brand awareness. It’s a paid survey done through companies like Nielsen.
Brand strength is a combination of awareness and affinity – the knowledge of the brand plus the preference to choose them. This is much harder to measure and even harder to build from scratch.
Brand strength is when a user has developed trust in the brand to the extent where they’d do fewer comparison and are less apt to switch, and are also willing to pay more for a similar service.
Example: Wells Fargo decimates competitors even with 10x the fees
Working with a money transfer publisher, we created a comparison table full of remittance brands and their information for sending money internationally. All were relatively new, online brands with very low or no fees.
We put in Wells Fargo with a whopping $40 fee to create a price anchor. We highlighted how expensive it was, how much the bank would take and highlight how uch the user would save by choosing alternate brands with intro offers and low fees.
The table did generate more clicks… But all to Wells Fargo and it massively took clicks from all the other brands. Even at 10x the cost.
Even with a fraudulent account scandal hanging a dark cloud over their brand, Wells Fargo survived that crisis with just a scratch.
Brand can either hurt or help marketing performance
Remember that a rising tide raises all boats – an investment in brand can improve overall trust and awareness – and therefore performance, across all other campaigns and channels, especially paid.
The data supports this synergy: studies have shown that strong brands typically achieve higher click-through rates, lower cost-per-acquisition, and better conversion rates across their performance marketing efforts.
Specifically strengthening brand can save thousands across all marketing channels.
Strong brands get higher clicks and more conversions, meaning every ounce of trust you build leads toward better results across the board.
We can agree on one assumption
Our prospects will most likely google us and visit our website before the conversion, and usually before booking the call. Investing in the entire digital footprint – or not – will have a conversion impact across all marketing activities.
When potential customers encounter your brand through a paid ad, they're rarely making instant decisions. Instead, they're beginning a journey of discovery and validation.
Remember the rule of 7?
Before making a purchase decision, prospects typically interact with your brand across many touchpoints and formats. They might first see a paid social ad, then search for reviews, visit your website, read your content, and check your social media presence. Each interaction either builds or erodes trust – I consider neutral a negative.
In SEO, brand means preferential clicks
We know from Pagerank that some websites are more important than others. Like Google, users have preferences and biases. Brand recognition alone is enough to generate trust in comparison to another brand that’s unknown.
In the SERPs, this plays out as someone clicking on the result they recognize and trust, even if it’s not in position 1. This generates positive user signals that are sent back to Google to validate that the page is helpful and solves the user’s query, creating a positive feedback loop where brand > clicks > rankings > more traffic > brand and around and around again.
Grow brand to grow brand searches
Growing your brand should in theory lead to more branded searches, but doesn’t always. Two ways to generate more branded searches:
Capture competitor brand traffic by writing about them.
Companies that utilize mass outreach, cold email, or Linkedin prospecting, can look forward to a lot of unsure people googling them to find out exactly what your company does.
Pitting paid against organic is like the snake eating itself
The mistake many organizations make is viewing brand building and performance marketing as competing interests fighting for the same budget. Instead, they should be seen as complementary forces that amplify each other's impact.
Brand building creates the foundation of trust and recognition that makes performance marketing more efficient, while performance marketing provides the immediate results and data insights that can inform brand strategy.
To implement a more holistic approach:
Develop clear brand guidelines and messaging that remain consistent across all channels.
Allocate budget for both long-term brand building (eg: awards shows) and short-term performance campaigns.
Measure the impact of brand initiatives on performance marketing metrics over time.
Create content that always does triple-duty: Serves to build trust and support the brand, while also has organic search volume, or is shareable, is pitchable for links, or any other way your content can be leveraged in multiple places.
Ensure all customer touchpoints reflect your brand values, voice, and messaging. Especially when salespeople are writing their own emails.
The question isn't whether to invest in brand or something else – it's how to build brand in everything you do
Don’t ask your performance and SEO teams to raise KPIs without supporting them in growing your brand through various kinds of proof.
Every business’ goal is to create more predictable and repeatable marketing engine, that create profitable revenue streams. And every business wonders how and where to focus.
It’s simply beautiful how well the 80/20 rule can be applied to anything. If you aren’t sure where to start, start with 20%. In reality, so much of what we do in marketing, SEO, and content, supports brand building, that it’s not really a separate thing from marketing. We just simply stopped asking shitty questions, like “Will this Clutch profile review campaign generate leads?” I don’t know, but I do know that having it is better than not.
You can measure what happens when you do it, but you will not be able to measure the gaping hole it left if you don’t.
As your company grows over time, likely you will need to invest in different things – brand defense, for instance, like trademarks. Your 80/20 ratio may shift again.
