How to Use SEO to Boost your Brand Value

Today, branding goes far beyond choosing a logo or a company name. Your website is the epicenter of your branding efforts, your ID in this turbulent digital world. It boosts your brand’s visibility, spreads the word about your brand mission and, above all, lets you connect with the right people.

And, to get the most out of your online presence, you need to have a solid SEO strategy to support it.

Boost Brand Loyalty with Storytelling

Your brand is basically the story people remember whenever they see your logo or name. Storytelling gives your brand authority, trustworthiness, and warmth. It helps you evoke different emotions in your customers’ minds, from nostalgia to happiness, helping you raise brand awareness and loyalty. Most importantly, instead of presenting your business through mountains of boring data, you will give it a personal touch and make it more relatable.

Additionally, storytelling isn’t just about your brand’s story. It is also about the people behind your brand, your loyal customers, and ways your products helped them meet their needs. This is why you need to mind your tone and language, as well as choose those keywords that resonate with your target audience.

Build Credibility with Content Marketing

It doesn’t matter if you run an online business or use your site to promote your physical stores, you need to create top-quality content to boost your authority. By creating highly interactive, engaging, and data-backed content, you’re telling your target audience that you’re a professional and that you know what you’re doing. You will soon be seen as a relevant source of information people come back to over and over again.

Precisely because of this, you need to constantly audit your blog to see what types of content work for your target audience. Don’t limit yourself to plane articles only. Infographics, case studies, guides, videos, podcasts, and quizzes may work for you as well.

The next step is, of course, optimizing content for search engines:

• Optimize your content for the right keywords in an organic and subtle way. Using longtail keywords is always a great option, as they are more natural, less competitive and generate relevant leads.
• Come up with a killer headline. A great majority of your visitors would read only your headline and not the full text. This is why you need to write attractive, catchy, and intriguing headlines that will grab people’s attention and get them to click through your article.
• Optimize your meta tags, such as your title, header tags, alt text, and meta description. You should never overstuff them with a bunch of keywords. Instead, they should be concise, highly informative, and relevant to the people reading them.

Improve User Experience

SEO has become more user-oriented and it’s all about providing readers with a highly personalized user experience. This is exactly why UX design and SEO go hand in hand. Luckily, with the help of tools like website personalization software, creating personalized customer journey and an intuitive UX design has never been simpler.

Here are a few UX elements you need to invest in:

• Responsiveness. Ever since the introduction of their mobile-first indexing, Google assesses your site’s mobile version when indexing it. In other words, website responsiveness may make or break your rankings. It may also impact your brand image, as it shows how important your customers’ preferences are to you. Namely, 57% of searchers won’t recommend those sites that aren’t optimized for mobile.
• Speed. Your visitors expect your site to load in less than 2 seconds. If it takes more than 3 seconds to load, they will abandon it. As your bounce rates rise, Google will notice that something is wrong with your user experience. And, as an impeccable user experience is its priority, your rankings will suffer.
• Navigation should be logical, simple, and user-friendly. There are numerous alternatives to a traditional dropdown menu you should also try out.
• Make your website design SEO-friendly. Instead of overstuffing your site with a bunch of unrelated ads and links, focus on offering value. Have a sitemap, clear CTAs, lots of white space, internal links, a search box, “related content” links and similar elements searchers will help them find the content they’re looking for.

Use SEO to Boost Brand Reputation

Studies show that 88% of customers trust online reviews as much as their friends’ recommendations. Moreover, Google relies on honest customer reviews when indexing and ranking your site. So, to boost your brand reputation, you need to constantly collect your customers’ feedback. Here is how to do so:

• Register your business on all major business review platforms and motivate your customers to leave reviews.
• Connect with the influencers in your niche and ask them to review you on their blog.
• Ask customers to write testimonials.
• Use social media monitoring tools to listen to your brand or product mentions on these channels. You can even participate actively in your customers’ conversations and leave relevant feedback in real time.
• Fix negative SEO. If you notice that your site is receiving lots of poor links from spammy sites, you should disavow them.

Build Trust with Improved Website Security

With the rise of GDPR, people’s approach to their personally identifiable information has changed. Today, it’s seen as a personal asset people can preview, edit, or even remove if the need arises. Of course, knowing that their information is not safe online, your customers don’t want to leave this sort of data to anyone.

This is exactly how GDPR affects your SEO. Not being able to use your customer data, you cannot create personalized content and keep them interested in your offers, either.

Therefore, you need to reassure them that the information they give you is safe and out of hackers’ reach. Invest in the right SSL certificate and switch from HTTP to HTTPS. Together with your safety badges, the green padlock and URL also serve as a reassurance that your site can be trusted.

Use Social Networks to Improve Brand Loyalty

The majority of your customers are using at least one major social platform. When asked why they’re following brands on social media, most of them gave the following answers:

• Getting coupons and promotional offers
• Making purchases
• Participating in a rewards program
• Keeping pace with the latest content

This is why social media marketing has become a fundamental part of your branding strategy. And, to get the most out of these networks, you need to start treating them as independent search engines and have in mind that:

• Not all platforms are equal. Their purpose, content, and target audiences vary. For example, if you’ve launched a fashion brand, visual social platforms like Pinterest and Instagram should be your priority. If you, on the other hand, own a digital agency and want to connect with the professionals in your niche, LinkedIn and Twitter would work for you.
• Any aspect of your social media strategy, from the content you share to your voice and tone, needs to be consistent. These elements should help you build an authentic brand image and help you present yourself as a leader in your niche.
• Social posts drive lots of content, so you need to boost their visibility using the right keyword phrases and hashtags.
• Your customers trust social media influencers. By connecting with them, sharing their content, and getting them to share yours, you will boost your exposure to wider audiences and build trust among your buyers.

Over to You

SEO has become the foundation of your branding efforts, helping you boost your visibility and connect to your target audience in their preferred ways. Most importantly, whether you’re building links or writing product descriptions, these practices will add value to everything you do.