What is a more important marketing strategy in 2016: branding or search engine marketing?
Many expert advertising firms will tell you that a successful marketing campaign is all about branding, while many SEO marketing companies will tell you that 93% of online experiences start with a search engine, and you need SEO services or bust.
Of course, this is a false choice. Increasingly, our Arizona SEO firm tells potential clients that the best search engine optimization strategies support your branding, and vice versa. What you need is an SEO branding strategy that’s designed to build your brand in the online space.
So how do you develop an SEO branding strategy that works for you?
Step 1. Understand How an SEO Company Can Help Build Your Brand
The PEW Research Center’s Internet division recently reported that 58% of people research services and products online, so even if your company doesn’t interact with customers online, they’re interacting with you online.
And search engine marketing is all about making your brand more visible when they do. When an SEO campaign works, consumers will be more likely to find your website in the first place. Other SEO techniques, like link building, also help make your brand more visible online.
Step 2. Decide Which SEO Strategies Support Your Brand Best
More than 27 million pieces of unique content shared online every day. While there are countless news sites publishing content, there are also countless brands who are using content marketing as one of their digital marketing tactics.
Not only does having a blog on your website give you more indexed pages on your domain, but it also helps support link building campaigns. Yet, content marketing is just one possible plank of an SEO branding strategy.
While some brands might want to emphasize content marketing, another might decide social media marketing or eye-catching web design is the best fit for their brand.
Here’s a stellar example of the latter, from the MIT Underworlds project. The Underworlds project is a creation of two MIT researchers who believe they can use sewer robots to sift through raw sewage to gather data about public health. For instance, they could track or predict a virus outbreak before it reaches crisis levels by using custom designed smart sewer robots.
While it’s a noble cause, a project based around raw sewage isn’t the most attractive concept. And yet look at the Underworlds website; it’s absolutely gorgeous. In this case, the researchers used modern web design techniques and unique content to build their brand online, overcoming the negative association with words like viruses and raw sewage.
Step 3. It’s Not All of the Above
It might be tempting to say, if content marketing, web design, social media, and link building work, then let’s just do all of the above. While these strategies can all be an important part of an SEO branding strategy, ultimately successful SEO branding campaigns will play to their strengths.
Rather than just throwing a bunch of SEO spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, a search engine marketing firm should help you develop a branding strategy that will work for you.
