Brand SEO – What Is It and How Does It Affect You?
Brand SEO – What Is It and How Does It Affect You?
If you’ve been online, or spoken to your SocialCRM Support Agent lately, Brand SEO is a term you’ve likely seen and/or heard quite often. But what does it mean? And why does it matter?
Let’s break it down:
Brand: A Brand is a type of product manufactured by a particular company under a particular name, or a particular identity or image regarded as an asset. Simply, a Brand is you, your company, the product or service you sell, what you stand for, how you communicate, etc., along with the image you put out and what stands behind it. What makes Apple distinctly different from Microsoft, or Ford different from Chevrolet, is branding. You send out a message with every interaction, and what that message says is your Brand.
SEO: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or Web page in a search engine’s natural (unpaid) search results. This includes the formulas and algorithms used to determine if you show up in search results, and if you do, what shows up. Google has a network of “spiders” that troll the Web for activity associated with your name. Then, based on that activity, they decide whether or not they like you. Those spiders have recently been reprogrammed to favor Brands. Everything you do (or don’t do) on the Web has an impact on your SEO value.
Now let’s put it together: Brand SEO = The image you, or your company, presents to the public, and the relevance and material attached to that image on the Web.
Now you may be asking, Why does this matter to me? I don’t use the Internet (much). The answer is that it matters because your customers, and future customers, do use the Internet, and they are looking you up whether you know it or not. They are also looking up your competition. The image you portray (or do not portray) on the Internet may not be important you to, but it is important to them, and so can impact your future business potential.
While you may not be able to control how many other shops in your area are competing for ranking in local search-term related SEO (more to come on that), you do have some control over what appears in the search results when a consumer types your name into their browser’s search bar.
Here’s an example: Do you have some bad reviews on Yelp from two years ago that you wish would go away? Well they won’t. However, you can promote your more current (therefore more relevant) SureCritic Reviews by promoting your Business Review Page (BRP) to ensure it has a higher SEO ranking than your Yelp page. How do you do this? Easy! Respond to your customer reviews, link your BRP to your website using the pre-made plugins, and share, share, share! Feel free to contact your SocialCRM Support Agent for help with this.
The more engaged you are, the higher SEO value will be attached to the Web page you are promoting, and therefore the higher it will show up in the search results. That pesky Yelp page will not go away forever (wouldn’t that be nice), but with enough effort invested into other sites, it can be buried deep into the rarely-seen pages of the search results. Of course, the glue that holds this all together is ensuring that your Brand Name is consistent across the Web. Without consistency there is no strength in the Brand.