Simple Branding Tips for Increasing Brand Awareness through Search Marketing
As a small business owner, your brand is everything. It’s the culmination of all of your hard work and dedication that encourages consumers to purchase your product or service. When a prospective customer sees or hears one of your brand elements, they’ll immediately associate it with the product or service you offer. While there are dozens of different ways to increase brand awareness, the most effective solution is search marketing.
Here are a few very simple branding tips to improve your search visibility:
Branded Domain Name
If you haven’t done so already, scoop up the domain name for your brand (e.g. yourbrand.com). It should come as little-to-no surprise that Google, Bing, Yahoo and even the smaller search engines view domain names as a ranking signal, meaning you are more likely to achieve a top search ranking for keywords associated with your brand if you register and use your brand’s domain name.
Don’t limit yourself just to the dot com, but also register the dot net and dot org, as well. These are generally viewed as the most essential domain extensions. While Google has said that it treats all extensions the same, numerous studies have found dot com, net and org to yield the most value in terms of SEO.
Web Content
Of course, the single most important step towards increasing brand awareness in the search results is to publish high-quality content on your brand’s website. Doing so will encourage search engines to scan and crawl your pages, which should in turn boost your site’s search ranking. And when your site ranks higher in the search results, it will take up more “search engine real estate” for terms related to your brand. Just remember to include brand-specific terms in your content, such as your business’s name, tagline, address, email address, etc.
PPC Marketing for Branded Terms
If you really want to go the extra mile, try purchasing pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements for your brand name. There are several benefits associated with bidding on your brand name, one of which is the simple fact that it creates a new listing in the search results. Furthermore, brand terms usually have minimal competition; thus, they cost a fraction of the price of “regular” keywords.
Many people feel that paying for branded terms simply cannibalizes their organic traffic. There have been plenty of studies that disprove this common misconception. There are many reasons that paying for branded terms can benefit your business here are a few more if you don’t feel convinced:
According to a Think With Google study focusing on B2B sites:
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12 percent of conversions come from paid branded terms.
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Branded keywords have 2X higher conversion rate.
SwellPath ran an interesting study to see how much traffic they were losing or cannibalizing by bidding on branded terms to find that they generated 40% more valid traffic by bidding on their branded terms. WOW!
Google Alerts
Google alerts is an invaluable tool for tips on increasing brand awareness in the search engines. This free-to-use service will send notifications to your email anytime your brand name is mentioned online. By identifying new “mentions” of your brand, you can respond to customer reviews, questions, comments and more in a timely manner.
