How Can Branding Improve My SEO?

Branding is a website quality 'compliment' that Google and the other search engines love. Google actually gives you advantages in your market, in terms of SERP rankings, if you are an established brand. This branding can even trump other factors like website structure, content quality, and other factors that the algorithm looks at when analyzing ranking.

How Do I Prove I Am A Brand?

There are several components, including:

  • Follow the steps at the Google+ Brands page – five easy steps to make your brand social.
  • Create verified business listings on resources like Yelp, WhitePages, Foursquare, and many others
  • Get listed on web directories like Business.com and Yahoo Directories
  • Create and maintain social profiles on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest, among many others
  • Create consistent content on your website, including regular updates or fresh new articles
  • Purchasing media exposure on Facebook and Adwords

In Google+ Brands, Google even gives users additional tips on how to maximize the effectiveness of the platform. They suggest creating a YouTube channel and linking it to your business page. Remember how important social signals are, and YouTube is a great source of them. Any time a viewer likes or unikes a video, makes a comment, or does any other type of interaction available, each of those social signals gets credited to your website.

Branding across platforms also helps lend legitimacy to your website. By having a consistent look and feel, and being listed in business directories, this helps the search engines index your content, but more importantly, it builds trust and authority for your business.

SEO is Universally Effective

Digital marketing is undergoing a powerful renaissance, of sorts. Search engine optimization has paved the way for success for thousands of websites and other web properties, and the SEO tactics described here work for any kind of business.

There are many ways to get your website out to the public now, including:

  • Paid advertising
  • SEO strategies
  • Social Media marketing

These methods were unheard of even a few years ago – and now, with these tools, it is possible to gain instant global reach, targeting specific audiences if you want to conduct messaging to. The goal of search engine optimization, and why it is so important, is to get your website in front of the people who might benefit from it. If visitors cannot find your website, they will never become your customers.

SEO isn’t just about brand recognition, or simple search engine placement. It’s about connecting with people on a variety of online platforms, whether that is search engine results or social media interactions.

Engaging in a sound SEO strategy has many benefits to your company, and one of them is reducing the reach of your competitors. If your branding and SEO is better than that of your business competition, you will attract more visitors than they will, regardless of the type of business you are involved in.

SEO can be used for any business, including:

  • Brand building
  • Information products
  • Service businesses
  • Physical products
  • Affiliate partners

How Quickly Does SEO Work to Boost My Business?

This is a common question, and there is no stock answer for it. SEO can be variable in terms of results, depending on many factors. Some aspects work almost instantly, such as the performance metrics like page load speed and reducing the “bounce rate” (the rate of people leaving your site almost immediately after landing there).

The fastest ways to see improvements using SEO are:

  • Boosting page loading times
  • Increasing engagement with visitors
  • Providing rich content
  • Conducting high quality linking strategies

Other factors can take longer to have real effects on your business. Linking, in particular, can take months to be effective. Why? Google wants to see longevity – while they do give weight to new links, ones that are more established tend to be more important to the algorithm.

Some of the speed in seeing results depends on the business itself. It can be difficult to stand out from established competitors, especially if you are a new business or service. That’s why it is important to analyze your competition at every opportunity, looking for the ways they are successful and hunting for ways YOUR business can do things better.

Patience is a Virtue When It Comes to SEO

It is important to remember that search engine optimization (or any business success for that matter) is not an overnight process. From a website perspective, it is a work in progress, with steady improvements to the content, the code, and the customer engagement that pays dividends in the long run. Regardless of how long it takes to see results, SEO is a crucial component of the modern business strategy.

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