How SEO Can Increase Brand Awareness

Building brand awareness through SEO involves strategically optimising your online presence to increase visibility in search engines. Brand awareness is the extent to which your customer base is familiar with your brand and its products or services. By ranking higher on search engines, you can expose your brand to more people who may not know your existence or offerings. In this blog, we have explained how SEO can help increase your brand awareness.

Target Relevant Keywords

Doing keyword research on what your potential customers are searching for and optimising your site for these terms will help with your SEO and your chances of appearing in the SERPs ( Search Engine Results Page) for these terms. The more often and higher you appear in the SERPs, the more your site visibility will increase, which will help increase your brand awareness. 

Not only should you be targeting your primary keywords, but you should also be including secondary keywords on your site. Secondary keywords may have lower search volumes than primary ones, but they often come with less competition, making it easier for your website to rank for them. Integrating these secondary keywords throughout your website content can attract niche audiences and capture valuable traffic. 

Furthermore, including your USPs in keyword optimisation will highlight what differentiates your brand from competitors. By aligning your chosen keywords with your brand’s unique strengths, values, or offerings, you will enhance your SEO and reinforce your brand identity.

Target Branded Keywords

As well as targeting relevant keywords, it is essential to look at branded terms you may need to look at. Ideally, if a user searches for your brand name, your website should show up. However, competitors often opt for their site or bid on competitive brand keywords.  

Ensuring you have optimised your site for your brand name and including any questions related to your brand will help boost brand awareness and visibility when people search for you. 

Examples of content or pages that can be created to target your brand name are: 

• [Brand] Reviews
• [Brand] Discounts/Offers
• [Brand] Size Guides
• How to use [Brand]

Apart from helping you rank for your brand term, one key reason why you want to do this is so you can own the narrative around the brand. You want to ensure you are the source of truth for everything related to the brand and prevent people from visiting other sites (competitors or stockists), which may lead to losing customers or reducing conversions.

Create Content to Target the Entire Customer Journey

As we mentioned, targeting keywords will increase your chances of being shown in the SERPs. One of the most effective ways to target these keywords is by creating content such as blogs, guides and educational pieces. Content should be created to target users at each stage of the customer’s journey and meet user search intent. The customer journey includes the following stages: 

• Research 
• Awareness
• Consideration 
• Conversion 
• Post conversion 

Understanding the customer journey is essential for creating targeted and effective content that resonates with your audience at every stage of their buying process. An example of how you can map your content to the customer journey can be seen below.

By mapping out the customer journey and tailoring content to each stage, businesses can effectively guide prospects through the sales funnel and build long-lasting relationships with their audience. 

If you want to implement a content strategy to help with your SEO, then take a look at our blog to understand why content is good for SEO.

Integrate SEO with Social Media Platforms

Any effective marketing strategy will integrate different marketing channels. This will help you share and reinforce the same message across all your channels and repurpose helpful information. Once you have created content on your site, this can be reshared across your social media platform. Sharing content across your social media can encourage engagement by leading followers to comment, repost/share your content or mention your brand. This can lead to a positive impact on your brand’s authority and presence.  

Not only can you share content from your site across your social media channels, but you can also make changes onsite that reflect and support your social media channels. A good example of this is the growing increase of “As seen on TikTok/Instagram” page. There may be people who discover you through TikTok or Instagram and then will visit your site trying to find the certain product they have seen on your Titktok or Instagram. This will help them easily find what they are looking for and improve overall user experience.

Local SEO Optimisation

If you have a physical store, then local SEO can help you increase your brand awareness. To do this, you should optimise your site for local keywords. For example, if you offer a service that is available in a specific location, you can include that within your on-page content, for example, “photographers in Sheffield”. Creating content around local topics and events will improve your local SEO and create a Google My Business (GMB) to help your local users learn important details about your business and to build credivility. This is particularly important for businesses with a physical store that wants to increase footfall.

Digital PR

A digital PR strategy is an essential aspect of building brand awareness. You can increase your brand’s visibility beyond your current audience through strategic partnerships, collaborations, and media outreach. You can tap into new demographics and expand your brand’s reach by targeting new and different publications and blogs, which will enable you to connect with potential customers and increase your brand awareness. 

Digital PR will also enhance your website’s search engine rankings by acquiring high-quality backlinks from authoritative sources. Backlinks are a key factor in Google’s ranking algorithm, signalling your website’s credibility and relevance to search engines.

This is because when reputable websites link to your content, it boosts your site’s authority and establishes trust with search engines. These high-authority backlinks act as a signal to search engines that your website is a credible source of information. 

In addition to authority, relevance is a crucial factor in SEO. Digital PR efforts focus on securing placements in publications and websites that are relevant to your industry, target audience, and niche. By aligning your brand with relevant content and audiences, you enhance the likelihood of attracting qualified traffic and improving your website’s visibility in relevant search queries.

With SEO and digital PR, the quality of backlinks outweighs the quantity. Acquiring high-quality backlinks from reputable sources rather than simply pursuing a large volume of low-quality links. A few authoritative backlinks from trusted websites can significantly impact your search engine rankings more than numerous low-quality links.

 If you want to understand how SEO can help increase your brand awareness, contact us.