Why Your SEO Strategy Should Primarily Focus on Brand Building

Establishing a strong brand in the competitive arena will fuel your SEO strategy and propel your company to the top spot of every search listing – so it's kind of a win-win. Much to the chagrin of small businesses that don't exactly have a recognizable brand, Google and other relevant search engines prefer to put established, well-known and optimized brands forward simply because they provide better user experience and keep the industry growing.

This is evident in the fact that if you type "buy desk lamps" into the search bar, you're more likely to be greeted by Amazon or eBay at the top spot of the results page than, say, a website that literally bears the name "buydesklamps.com" – it's not just about using keywords in your domain name, you know. For this reason, and a myriad of others, it's essential that your SEO strategy revolves around building a strong brand the global market will know and love.

Simply put, people are far more likely to buy from established brands than their less-known counterparts, regardless of the price or quality offering. In fact, it's well-known that big brands have the popularity and recognition to overprice their products even though they are not only worth far less, but that you can probably find the same thing half price at a smaller website.

If we turn the other cheek to the seemingly unfair advantage these brands hold over the competition, the truth remains that people want and need to buy from brands they can trust. This fact is even supported by a survey conducted by Nielsen in 2013 that concludes: "Sixty percent of global consumers with Internet access prefers to buy new products from a familiar brand rather than switching to a new brand, according to a new study from Nielsen."

For an aspiring entrepreneur like you hell-bent on making it big in the modern business world, this means that you need to focus on establishing a trustworthy, relatable, and relevant brand identity that will not only resonate with the hearts and minds of your audience, but that will deem you the winner of the SEO game. Even if you don't rank first, but second or third, you are still bound to increase your CTR – such is the power of good branding.

For instance, Neil Patel is a pretty well-known guy in the online world, and in fact, the man has become a brand of its own over the years. Say you search for some online growth strategies and the first link is some website you're unfamiliar with, and the second or third option at the moment is our digital marketing guru? Which link are you more likely to click on first? Exactly, now let's move on to how Google favors the brand.

With the introduction of the auto-suggest feature that suggests a brand's website before you even finish typing, to the fact that brands will nowadays take up a much larger portion of your search results page, complemented by snippets from the same website, all of this makes it easier for established companies to dominate the online game. And conversely, for less-established brands to keep up.

Back in 2010 when Google announced they're introducing the extended search results for brands, digital marketers knew that big brands and those that have a reputation in the industry will inevitably rank higher than their smaller counterparts. Fast forward to present time, and search engines are directly trying to influence your behavior by suggesting a direct website link to a brand for you to click on instead of letting you look over a listicle search page. It should go without saying that this is one feature you definitely want to be a part of.

It doesn't really matter if you're a newcomer to the digital marketing game, or if you've been running a modern business for years now, you should know that without stellar content on your site, you cannot hope to achieve your long-term SEO goals. After all, content is king in the online world, and as such, it commands the growth of your brand in a myriad of ways.

One of these is, of course, content optimization and creation for human audiences and relevant search engines. The SEO game has become more refined and nuanced over the years, though, and nowadays only a competent SEO agency can offer a comprehensive content strategy that can put your brand on the map and more importantly, on that first spot on Google. After all, it's not just about writing blog posts and hoping people will read them, it's about disseminating these stories across the digital realm to engage your audience, and draw them in to experience your brand for all it's worth.

So how do your content and SEO strategies tie together? In short, they build your brand's visibility, recognition, identity and trustworthiness in the overly-competitive arena. By creating stellar content on a regular basis that is perfectly optimized for SERP positioning, you can not only reel audiences in with enchanting storytelling, but you can also rest assured that your content will echo throughout the industry.

Brand-building is a particular art form requiring thorough market research, creative brainstorming and planning, technical knowledge, and meticulous storytelling in order to create a complete, irresistible package the audience will simply fall in love with. Here's what you need to do:

First impressions matter most, and yes, people do judge a book by its cover. Not only does your online presentation need to boast an aesthetic design that will capture the attention of your visitors instantly, but it also needs to offer unparalleled user experience from the moment they lay their eyes on your first message. Needless to say, it should be something that offers value and incentivizes the visitor to stay and keep scrolling.

Now that you have your visuals in place and your website is optimized in terms of performance and user experience, it's time to move on to content and SEO.

Given the fact that content reigns supreme in the online universe, it's important that your content is:

• Compelling enough to capture the ever-diminishing attention spans of the modern audience

• Relevant to your brand as well as your demographic and able to provide concrete information that offers true value

• Able to tell an engaging story that will keep the reader interested, ultimately transforming your visitors into lifelong brand followers and paying customers

• Offering real value and a comprehensive solution to their problems

• Optimized for search engines in order to put your website on the proverbial map.

SEO is the backbone of all your online efforts, and you cannot hope to boost your SEO strategy if it doesn't become an inextricable part of your content creation process. By combining SEO with stellar content, you can put your brand in front of a global audience, reel them in with immaculate storytelling, and establish your brand as the leader in the industry.

To achieve this, you want to pick your niche keywords and tailor content around them for maximum effect. This directly ties into the fact that you need to pick your ideal niche, and build up your brand to become the leading authority in that niche. You can now find the relevant long tail keywords and create informative content with a unique tone of voice people will immediately associate with your brand.

Not only will this give you exposure, but it will also create a distinguishing brand identity the global audience is bound to know and love.

Content comes in a variety of forms, and it would be a crying shame if you didn't leverage other content types to extend your brand's reach and appeal to a wider audience. What's more, by diversifying your content pool you will make your (SEO) content shareable across all relevant social media platforms. See how it all ties in together?

Consider the following content types for your online presence and SEO strategy:

• Creative brand videos

• Explainer videos

• Promotional videos

• Informative infographics

• Engaging images

• Informative podcasts

• Live events and quizzes.

Last but not least, it's important to grasp the sheer size of the ever-growing social media universe and the growth potential it offers to every brand that leverages social media to its advantage. Given the fact that there are some three billion people who use social media on a daily basis, you want to use your optimized website and content to gain better exposure on all relevant SM channels and drive traffic to your amazing website.

To achieve this, focus on:

• Finding SM channels where the bulk of your audience resides

• Making your brand's visuals stand out across all platforms

• Making a detailed posting schedule that's tailored to the platform and the audience

• Using SM toolkits for businesses to better target your demographic

• Posting regularly to keep engagement levels high

• Incentivizing your audience to share your content

• Inviting your audience to find out more through a strong CTA message with every post.