3 Ways SEO Builds a Business Brand

An Optimized Website Kills 2 Birds with 1 Stone

You expect your SEO efforts to pay off in higher search engine rankings and increased quantity and quality of traffic to your website. But there are additional rewards that, although they don’t appear as statistics in SEO tracking reports, can have an equally important impact on your business.

1. Brand awareness.

How many of your potential customers know you exist? Which is another way of asking how much business you’ll be doing in the future. An SEO website is more visible, thus more likely to be remembered and sought out when prospects are ready to buy. Increased brand awareness may not be reflected in more sales or leads right now, but it will pay off in the long term.

How can you tell if SEO is improving your brand awareness? Honestly, it’s very difficult to measure. But one tracking number you can look at is search impressions (as opposed to click-throughs). That’s the total number of people who saw your website in their search results; they may not have clicked on it, but they have become aware of your existence.

2. Brand opinion.

Getting prospective customers to know your name is only half the battle: you also want them to have a favorable opinion of you. SEO tactics can help with this aspect of your branding strategy as well.

Your off-site SEO campaigns will play the major role in establishing your reputation as a good company to do business with: knowledgeable, caring and reliable. Posts on industry forums, social media pages, etc., not only fulfill their original purpose of driving traffic to your site, they also help sell that traffic before you even make contact.

3. Website opinion.

It’s well documented that a business is judged by its website. If that website is slow, hard to read and hard to navigate, visitors are likely to assume that the business is also unprofessional, outdated, difficult to work with. So, while you’re SEOing your site functionality, you’ll also be improving users’ opinion of your entire brand.

Google paradigms for good user experience include fast and complete page loads, simple navigation and intuitive layouts. Content should not be duplicated on multiple pages. Page titles and meta descriptions should be optimized to give users an accurate overview before they click through.

These 3 “side-effects” of search engine optimization won’t show up as numbers in your Google Analytics report. But when you’re asking yourself, “How can I cost-effectively build my business brand,” an SEO campaign is an excellent answer.