
Branding is the process of establishing a specific brand image, communicating the business’s values, and creating a strong perception by the target audience.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process that involves improving the technical, on-page, and off-page elements of your site with the goal of appearing higher in search engine result pages (SERPs) and, thus, increasing the site’s visibility on the web.
Although these two terms seem unrelated at a glimpse, they deeply intersect. When combined, these two strategies can help you establish trust and authority that will fuel your business. Continue reading to find efficient tips for SEO branding!
SEO and Branding: The Link and Mutual Importance
Optimization and high SEO rankings you achieve through your effort boost your business’s visibility and credibility. This helps you get in front of your target audience and attract traffic.
Additionally, content optimized for Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) quality guidelines not only sets you apart as an expert in the field but also helps reinforce brand messaging. In the long run, SEO helps make your business more notable and appealing, thus helping your branding efforts.
The role of branding and brand awareness for SEO is also huge. While SEO helps you establish authority and drive traffic, good branding helps you retain traffic, improve engagement metrics, and receive backlinks more easily. All these things signal the relevance and trustworthiness of your site to search engines, further improving your SEO.
How to Build Website Authority and Trust With SEO Branding
As you already know, SEO and branding are closely connected. They both help you grow your business and can reinforce each other if you take the right approach. In the guide below, we will give you practical tips for using these two tactics together to build trust!
Tip # 1: Earn Trust By Delivering Top-Notch Content
For businesses, content gives an opportunity to establish an online presence, boost awareness, create leads and sales, and build a certain reputation. Moreover, the content you provide on your company’s site can help you establish trust and credibility.
To tap into these goals, follow these baseline rules of content creation:
- Research your audience well to ensure you know their interests and pain points and can cater to them.
- Focus on crafting content that serves your audience and solves their problems.
- Conduct in-depth research and use reliable sources of information to ensure the accuracy of data and statements in your content.
- Leverage your unique vision, knowledge, and experience to add value and expertise.
- Establish a distinct company voice and keep it consistent in all content you deliver.
Additionally, while crafting your copy, don’t forget about optimization. Good SEO content should be:
- High-quality
- Tailored to users’
- Mobile-friendly
- Readable
- With embedded images and other media
- With internal and external links
Last but not least important, of course, SEO content must be optimized for your target keywords. Leverage keyword research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner to target relevant queries that align with your business. Then, integrate them into your content’s headings, subheadings, body text, meta tags, and descriptions. Also, integrate keywords into URLs, image alt names, file names, etc.
Tip # 2: Establish Website Authority Through Backlinks
Backlinks are links placed on other websites pointing to your pages or content. They offer you another opportunity to boost your SEO rankings, as well as reinforce your image and grow trust.
Basically, backlinks that come from high domain authority websites serve as votes for your business both in the eyes of your target audience and search engines.
They signal that your site and content are credible and trustworthy. Hence, they help you appear higher in SERPs while also looking more authoritative for your prospects.
So, how to build SEO tactics for scoring quality backlinks, you may wonder? To do this, first, you have to recognize the three core features of a quality backlink:
- It comes from an authoritative and competitive site
- It aligns with your niche, target audience, and content well
- It has an anchor that’s optimized with your target keywords or brand name
Then, you need to leverage link-building tactics that work for you. These involve:
- Broken link-building
- Guest blogging
- Creating share-worthy content
Use a combination of approaches to achieve the best outcomes. Most importantly, focus on crafting content that works well for link-building, such as in-depth guides, tutorials, original research and data, infographics, visuals, case studies, success stories, and interactive content.
And don’t forget to measure the results by tracking your links and domain authority. Leverage tools that will offer you a comprehensive look into your website authority and backlink profile.
For example, a Domain Authority Checker by NinjaReports gives you insights into everything that affects your credibility, including the number of backlinks and referring domains. With its help, you can track your link-building efforts while also measuring how your authority changes over time.
Tip # 3: Build and Implement a Local SEO Strategy for Community Recognition
While traditional search engine optimization is crucial for businesses, it aims to make you generally visible on the web. However, it has a subdivision that focuses on making your businesses visible in a particular geographic area.
With local SEO, your business can be found in local search and on the map, which can help bring more targeted leads both to your site and to your company’s doors offline. Additionally, local optimization greatly helps branding by ensuring your company always has up-to-date and consistent information across all mediums.
Here are a few tips for establishing a solid local SEO brand:
- Conduct research to understand local communities and their needs and behaviors better.
- Research location-specific keywords and target them by analyzing search volume and competition.
- Create a Google Business profile. Optimize your profile by adding quality and attention-grabbing images and videos. Come up with a detailed and relevant description of your business, enhancing it with local keywords. Also, integrate up-to-date NAP data (Name, Address, Phone Number) and make sure you keep it relevant. And finally, encourage your customers to rate your business, share their reviews, and answer feedback effectively; this should help you gain more trust and appear more authoritative.
- Create listings on various online directories, including Facebook, Yelp, and Apple Maps. You can also create listings on directories specific to your niche if possible.
- Craft high-quality SEO content targeted to your local community. This includes local landing pages, as well as local blog or news content optimized with geo-specific keywords.
- Implement the branding SEO tips for link-building shared earlier to gain mentions from local companies, blogs, news sites, and other resources.
Tip # 4: Keep Focus on Branding Signals That Reinforce SEO
While earlier we focused more on SEO as a marketing strategy and using it for growing awareness, credibility, and trust, now, let’s explore the primary branding signals that will also help you reinforce your optimization efforts:
- Branded search – The more people are looking particularly for your company on the web, the more authoritative and popular you appear to search engines. Hence, using branded keywords (e.g., “Adidas running shoes”) on your website and working on recognition can help you boost rankings.
- Consistent NAP – The uniformity of a business’s contact data is pivotal for its image. Hence, keeping your NAP data updated and consistent across all mediums can help establish legitimacy and support local optimization efforts.
- Social media presence – With 63.8% of the world’s population being on social media, establishing your company’s presence on such platforms is pivotal for creating awareness, driving traffic, and engaging with your prospects. And it also helps your SEO by demonstrating your social signals like likes and shares to search engines.
- Backlinks and domain authority – A strong and widely recognized brand always receives backlinks that signal its relevance and authority. Use the tips on how to increase domain authority with backlinks shared earlier to appear as a more trustworthy company.
- Online reputation – Quality branding also results in high ratings and positive customer reviews, which improves SEO. Effectively engage with your customers and work on local SEO to create and maintain a positive reputation.
Tip # 5: Implement Continuous Results Tracking for Success
Now that you know how to combine your efforts to appear as a professional, credible, and reliable business, let us give you one final tip – don’t stop there. Leverage reliable analytical tools to continuously monitor your key metrics and measure the outcomes of your branding and SEO efforts. For example, Google Analytics is one of the best tools to have in your marketer’s toolkit.
Keep an eye on metrics like:
- Organic traffic
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Dwell time
- Bounce rate
- Domain authority
- Backlinks
- And others
Use these to assess the effectiveness of your strategies and make improvements to achieve even greater outcomes!
Conclusion
Awareness, SEO authority, and trust – all these things are pivotal for making your business stand out from the pack and fueling its growth. By combining branding and SEO efforts, you can achieve these goals and boost the trust index for your company. And now you know how!
Follow the SEO branding tips we shared here to get in front of your audience, get noticed, and drive leads and sales to ensure the success of your business.