Your site’s search engine optimisation can and should achieve things for you well beyond your rankings. If used well, your SEO campaign can further your brand presence on the net, which will in turn aid your other marketing campaigns.

SEO and branding should go hand in hand, but few companies use either to aid the other. You can talk to our experts at SEO Consult about using SEO for more than search. Before your optimisation can help your brand, however, you need to define your brand and its relationship with SEO. Here’s how, in five easy steps.

1. Don’t leave brand considerations out of SEO. This might seem like an odd point to start with, but many businesses are overwhelmed by the technical details of search engine optimisation. This leads to SEO techniques being imposed over the top of a site. One of the main drawbacks of keywords is that they are generic. They can’t completely sell your site. Your titles are a great place to feature your keywords. They’re also a great place to push your brand. The one doesn’t have to cancel out the other.

2. Define your brand. This is a lot harder than it sounds. You might feel you’ve got enough definition by simply offering a quality service in your industry, but this doesn’t help your business to stand out. It can help to choose a niche or aspect of your target market and focus your brand power on that. For example, if you sell computer hardware, it might be worth considering branding yourself as a supplier of one particular brand, or of second-hand computer hardware. You don’t have to abandon your other areas of expertise, but a specific focus can help you win over your target market.

3. Become an emblem. Once you’ve decided on a niche for your brand, you need to specifically identify what it is about your business that is so special. Focus on that. This is often called the ‘unique value proposition’ in marketing. By identifying what you represent, you have something solid to sell to your site’s users. For example with the computer hardware store above you might represent ‘the best in do-it-yourself computer repairs.’ This gives users something to focus on instead of generalities.

4. Use your branding and SEO to create a unique experience. One thing that Google forces the SEO industry to focus on time and again is the creation of a valuable experience for site users. Being forced to do this is no bad thing. If your site’s users have a good experience with your site, they’ll come back. Working with your keywords and your brand image can help you to produce a unique, interesting site that provides a value-based experience.

5. Corner some authority. The success of most brands rests on the fact that people attribute brands with authority. A brand like Kleenex markets itself as the top of the tissue market, but that’s not necessarily objectively true. Off-page SEO should be used to associate your brand with all that’s best in your industry.

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