TL;DR? Grow your brand equity and your SEO will grow alongside it.
The long version
For many, the art/science blend of SEO remains shrouded in some mystery. ‘What’s a crawl budget and why should I care?’ or ‘what the hell is the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers update?!’. Or the old chestnut, ‘why does it take so long to see my SEO performance improve?’. It’s easy to see why in 2021, it’s still really something for specialists, and not for Joe Bloggs, Managing Director.
Marketers (like me, even!) will explain that there’s lots to do. Controlling server crawl rates, canonicalisation, link building, and the hundreds of other tactics you can — and should — employ to help search engines better read and understand your content will all go some way to stacking up that juicy visibility, rankings, and revenue.
But the one thing that time after time makes the biggest difference is growing your brand.
Think that’s a bold claim? It’s an old one but a good one, from Google themselves.
Powerful stuff. Think about it, Google now has hundreds of signals to qualify what constitutes a ‘good’ website. In fact, in the original PageRank specification (which essentially defines how Google ranks pages), Google notes that one of the core functionalities of PageRank is to “help assign “a global ‘importance’ ranking of every web page,”. How best to do that other than know who the big fish are?
Google prioritises big brands within search results because brand familiarity yields more clicks, and likely, more satisfied users.
And as much as we, as marketers try to persuade you with offers in ad headlines, tempting meta descriptions, and gorgeous product photography, time and time again studies show how brand affinity massively impacts CTR.
Given all things equal, can you really believe that Google will regularly overlook prioritising BIGBRAND.COM in favour of companyyouveneverheardof.com in search results? Even the most carefully crafted product description, internal linking, and page speed isn’t going to win there. And as a user, shouldn’t that be the case?
Users want to see familiarity in search results. Imagine searching ‘buy a wardrobe’ and NOT seeing ikea.com? If the 10 results were all companies you’d never heard of, you’d think Google had messed up. And in turn, more people click on the results they know, making them rank higher, which yields more clicks, and so on. This is how search engines are working in 2021/have always worked, and unfortunately, there’s no shortcut to improving that brand recall.
When searching online, people tend to click on brands they know, recognise and trust.
— Me, 2021
And it’s getting worse. Once upon a time search engines found it more difficult to distinguish between a known brand and a little feisty startup. And that’s why tactics like keyword stuffing in the 90s used to actually work. Search engines just weren’t sophisticated enough. Things have changed a lot since then.
But Google can now can look at your GMB listing (is this a legit business?), social signals (are people talking about this company elsewhere online?), reviews (are people satisfied with this company?) and dozens of other signals to determine the punching power of your brand.
Becoming The Generic
If enough people search for ‘cordless vacuum cleaner’ and click on the dyson.com result, Google says ‘hey! It looks like people who want vacuums like to go to dyson.com’ (incredibly simplified version!). It rewards those clicks with better rankings for the user’s search term — hence, cordless vacuums = Dyson.
The end goal for many brands is, like Dyson, to become a generic synonymous with the product(s) they offer. You don’t even want customers searching ‘vaccum cleaners’. In reality, you can quash the entire competition if your customers simple search ‘Dyson’ instead. Doesn’t that sound a bit like an SEO strategy you might have even suggested a while back? SEO and brand are intrinsically linked, and need a cohesive approach to improve both.
So what to do?
Agencies love to sell technical SEO, and scaremonger about limited content, and toxic link profiles. In many cases, these are valid concerns! And if you’re in a space where your USP is strong enough and you do have a chance to compete, problems like this should definitely be addressed.
But while you’re doing this, never forget the critical importance of growing a brand. Your brand grows, and your site and your visibility and your online revenue grow. (Most of the time, and with caveats) it’s really that simple.
How can SEO help you do this? Think about top-of-funnel queries, when users are first researching products, how can you help them at that point? If you can get that critical ‘first click’ from someone online (think: improved relevancy and click-worthy meta titles and descriptions), how can you retain their attention and keep them coming back for more? Perhaps it’s being more visible for long-tail queries which bigbrand.com hasn’t thought about (or just doesn’t care to compete in) — because their brand equity is so strong. Perhaps it’s improving your visibility on third-party sites. Perhaps it’s writing more engaging category and product content on your site to make your click sticky.
But don’t expect to easily rank for ‘womens going out dress’ without your brand already being somewhat known for selling women’s going out dresses. That’s gonna take a long time, and that’s (one) part of why SEO takes a long time.
It’s a complex web, sure. But that’s what we do. Let’s talk if you want to know more.
Further reading
https://econsultancy.com/seo-ranking-factors-analysed-the-importance-of-brand-relevancy/
https://www.marketingweek.com/brands-are-returning-to-brand-building-says-google/
Nielsen ‘Beyond Clicks and Impressions’
