Branding is a huge factor in your business success for many reasons. Strong brand messaging helps customers know what to expect from you and what makes you stand out from your competitors. Brand awareness can translate to loyal customers. Brand awareness means people know about your brand. Because of that, people may choose to buy from you or become a client because they know of you.  If they enjoyed their experience, there’s a good chance they will come back for more and become a loyal customer. 

Most importantly, ethical branding helps you attract the right audience. I say ethical because as a B Corp certified business, we believe that you need to be honest about who you are to reach the right people whose values align with yours. 

How to Create an SEO Branding Strategy

Creating a strong branding strategy and keeping it up to date is key for having your branding efforts pay off. As you work on your branding, don’t forget SEO. It seems hard to imagine how the two intersect, but the truth is that you need to consider SEO in every branding decision you make. Optimizing  your brand for search engines increases your results immensely. You are looking at more website traffic, social media followers and engagement, brand awareness and revenue. Let’s look at how to incorporate SEO into your branding strategy.

Brand Messaging

When creating your brand messaging, there are a lot of things to consider. Included at the top of the list are what makes you unique and what are your values. Once you can describe  who you are, it’s time to look at SEO. The easiest way to incorporate SEO into brand messaging is through keyword research. Let’s pretend you are a B Corp certified makeup company and one of the most important values for your company is your environmental impact. If that’s the case, your keywords should reflect that. Your company should be doing keyword research based on terms such as “environmentally friendly makeup,” “sustainable makeup,” and “cosmetics environmental impact.” If your makeup and packaging is zero waste, research keywords like “plastic free makeup packaging” or “zero waste makeup.” 

Now that you have keywords that match your brand messaging, it’s time to look at how to use them in a way that will lead to the most success. The best channels are your website and social media. Optimize your metadata and title tags for all your website pages using these keywords and any others that align with your brand values. Let’s take a quick look at what metadata and title tags are. To put it simply, they are the results that appear when someone searches for something. Here is an example:

The first line, in purple and a larger font, is the title tag, a short title for the page. The writing below is the meta description. It gives people a one to two sentence description of what the page is about. This example leads to the home page for Colibri Digital Marketing so the metadata describes the brand and includes the tagline. 

Returning to SEO and brand messaging, we are going to look at blogs. Writing blogs about things related to your brand will help you use utilize keywords. For our imaginary makeup company, they could write about things like the impact of cosmetics on the environment to use the keyword “cosmetics environmental impact” or produce a guide to reducing your waste and utilize the keyword “zero waste makeup”. 

When looking at your branding messaging and SEO in terms of social media, use keywords in your bio and posts. If you post something about B Corps and the triple bottom line, include a link back to your website for a relevant page. The hashtags you use should also reflect the keywords that align with your brand messaging. 

Brand Voice

Brand voice is pretty self explanatory. It’s how you sound. It’s your tone. Are you funny, friendly, or informative? Maybe all three. Brand voice matters for your social media, tagline, blogs, newsletter and product naming. Incorporating SEO into your brand voice is pretty similar to brand messaging. You want to use keywords that reflect your value and, on top of that, keywords that match your tone. Let’s harken back to the zero waste makeup company example. Our hypothetical makeup company is preparing for the release of a new concealer and are trying to decide what to call it. Their brand tone is friendly and kind so they decide on a name that matches that and also incorporates SEO. They choose Morning Dew Natural Concealer. It reflects their friendly tone, is relevant to the product because it promises a dewy look,  and incorporates SEO through the use of the term “natural concealer.”. 

Brand Name 

Having a brand name that is search engine optimized will greatly increase your reach. Why? If your brand name is searchable, meaning it has a term that people often search for when looking for products or companies such as yours, you will get more website visitors. Let’s look at the search funnel. 

When people first start looking for a product or service they need online they start with a question, such as “how to write off mileage for a work vehicle”. In this example someone needs a truck for work Once they find answers they start narrowing in their search. Their next search is more narrowed in. They might have found the answer they were looking for and now want to buy a truck so they search “Ford vs. Chevy truck” Their next search will be even more narrowed in. Let’s say they have decided to go with a Ford truck. Now they will search for a certain product or brand name, such as “Ford F150 dealership near me”. Incorporating SEO into your brand name will help your brand  be discovered in the first step of the search process instead of the last. 

Brand Awareness

Last, but certainly not least, is brand awareness. You want people to know who you are and have loyal customers. Everything that goes into your ethical brand strategy works towards brand awareness, so how do you incorporate SEO into this aspect of your strategy? Link building! To build brand awareness you have to put yourself out there. 

Doing a guest blog post exchange or link exchange with other brands is the easiest way to link build. Another way to increase brand awareness is keyword optimization. Appearing at the top of the search funnel will help you get more brand recognition. Having a strong social media presence will also increase your brand awareness. 

Takeaways 

Every decision you make in your brand strategy should include an aspect of SEO. In many ways, the two go hand in hand. Without a strong brand identity and strategy your SEO  will not reach the right audience because you won’t know who you’re looking for and vice versa, if your SEO strategy is not incorporated into your branding, no matter how good your branding is, you just won’t reach people. 
Colibri Digital Marketing, based in San Francisco, believes in business for the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit. If you’re ready to work with San Francisco’s first and only full-service B Corp-Certified digital marketing agency, drop us a line to schedule a free digital marketing strategy session!