The promotion of a company’s website in search engines is an important area of work for any modern business. Regardless of the scale of the activity, it will be necessary for both a small company in the region and a player at the international level.
SEO is part of a comprehensive marketing strategy. The site itself, even with good traffic, is not a guarantee of sales and leads. The first lines in the search results do not guarantee customer loyalty.
Any business looking to the future should, first, promote its brand on the internet. This requires complex work that will result in more traffic.
First, let’s talk about why this is generally needed.
5 reasons why a business needs to promote a brand
- By choosing alternative offers from several sellers, in most cases, people will buy from the one whose brand is stronger.
Brand awareness provides higher loyalty from the target audience, which increases the conversion of visitors into buyers.
It becomes easier to differentiate yourself from the competition if you operate in a market where numerous sellers offer similar products.
A strong brand creates an added value effect by allowing for higher markups.
There are also non-obvious advantages, for example, it is easier to hire employees, you can get better terms from suppliers, etc.
Now let’s figure out which tools are suitable for brand promotion.
Brand promotion on the Internet: what are the differences from classic SEO?
If your goal is to promote a brand and increase company awareness, then the accents in the search engine promotion strategy should be placed in favor of the following things.
1. Focus on maximum coverage
The selection of semantics for optimizing a commercial project is based on an orientation towards commercial, maximum conversion requests. Groups (clusters) are formed from them, for which landing pages are created or existing ones are optimized.
If the goal is to increase brand awareness, then the approach will be the opposite. It is important to work out the widest possible semantics, and information queries in this context are especially interesting. By developing a thematic blog and working out information requests, you increase the coverage of your site in the target topic and build an associative link in the target audience in the format: a certain niche = your company.
At the moment when a user who has already read the information on your site more than once needs the services you offer, he will remember exactly about you.
2. Working with referral traffic
The definition of “referral traffic” includes any transitions from third-party sites. An increase in the number of referral transitions is ensured by crowd-marketing work, publications on thematic sites, as well as the company’s activity in the public space. For example, participation in a highly specialized event or their organization.
Compared to other traffic sources, the percentage of referral conversions may seem insignificant, but it is the result of the direct interest of the target audience in your brand, services, and company products. In terms of conversions, this gives good numbers.
3. Content marketing on and off the site
Reach and impact are the top goals of content marketing. This is a tool that can hardly be called optimal if you need to generate sales here and now. While on the sales funnel, a well-thought-out content strategy fits well:
Work in this direction is divided into types:
internal content marketing (articles on your site);
external content marketing (publications on other people’s resources).
If the budget is limited, then you can concentrate only on your own website. But ideally, you need to work in both directions to achieve the best effect. After all, while you raise the traffic to your site to a good level, a lot of time will pass, and publications on other people’s resources allow you to gain access to an already existing, sometimes quite large audience.
4. SERM (search reputation management)
Any brand values its reputation. But even hard work on the positioning of the company does not guarantee a clean reputation. The negative PR of competitors has a more powerful impact than successful cases.
The task of work on the management of reputation in search engines (Search Engine Reputation Management) is to monitor information on the Internet, replace the negative, prevent and solve possible problems associated with this.
At the initial stages of brand development, this may not be relevant, but over time it is worth thinking about working in this direction.
5. Focus on brand queries
A brand query is a construction of the type “keyword + brand name” in search engines.
No matter how the algorithms change or whatever strategies competitors use, the brand’s website that is searched for by such keywords will always be in the first place (or almost always).
You can increase the volume of branded traffic by actively working with external factors. Media publications, crowd marketing, social media marketing, and the company’s offline activity – that is, the same actions that were mentioned in the paragraph about referral traffic – contribute to the growth of the share of brand traffic.
It is important for any business that is committed to long-term development.
Conclusion
To summarize, the difference between website promotion and brand promotion is that in the first case we are acting in the plane of a classic SEO strategy, and in the second, we are engaged in complex search marketing.
To use the Internet as a source of customer acquisition for a business, website promotion can be an effective tool for any company. But to get the most out of it, you need to promote the brand as a whole by solving a wider range of marketing challenges.
Moreover, for many companies, the Internet in this context is even better suited than the offline environment.
Author’s Bio
David Mikulskyi is a professional technology and finance writer whose passion is to always move forward with the latest trends in the constantly changing modern world.
