Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is probably one of the most commonly used terminologies when it comes to online marketing. While many of us know the benefits, we might not be using it effectively as a digital branding exercise. But before that, how many of us actually understand digital branding and how SEO impacts that?
Well, to better grasp this concept, let’s begin with a basic introduction to SEO and digital branding.
What is SEO?
SEO is the process of optimizing a website or a web page through tools and best practices, in order to rank better organically in search results. There is a multitude of rewarding results to this process, including increased traffic, brand awareness, generating more leads and revenue, and so on.
How Does SEO Work?
There are various levels of optimization, but here’s the basis on which it works.
Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo use crawlers that index web pages. These crawlers use certain ranking signals to serve up the most relevant content for any given search or query. Some of the most important ranking signals include backlinks, keyword density, comprehensiveness, page speed, and mobile-friendliness, among other things.
SEO is all about optimizing web pages and working on making them show up in the top results of any relevant search string.
What Is Digital Branding?
Many a time, digital branding can be easily confused with digital marketing. In reality, digital marketing refers to what you do to promote your brand or business online. On the other hand, digital branding deals with consumer perception and your brand’s/business’ image in the digital space. In other words, it’s your brand’s online personality.
Why Is Digital Branding Important?
In today’s day and age, digital engagement has shot up exponentially. In an infographic on Social Media Today, it is observed that teenagers spend up to 9 hours a day on social media. Brands and businesses are taking advantage of this, introducing themselves to a huge audience through targeted ads.
This is where digital branding starts to make a difference. In an endless sea of marketing cliches, digital branding aims to convey a brand’s story in a unique way that resonates with its target audience. Consequently, this helps people form a positive notion about the brand, and that in turn nurtures engagement and loyalty towards it. In a nutshell, digital branding helps people feel good about a brand or a business before they even interact with it.
Now that we’ve covered the basics of SEO and digital branding, let’s move on to the more important question.
How Does SEO Impact Digital Branding?
SEO plays a significant role in how your business shapes its personality online, and how you understand and approach customers. Let’s take a look at some of the key areas of digital branding that are impacted by SEO.
- Social media SEO helps you analyze what’s trending in your industry, what people are saying about it, and how industry leaders are responding to it. You can use this data to spot trends and determine the needs of your target audience, which will help define your brand’s approach to digital branding.
- In the realm of search engine optimization, social proof is a significant contributing factor to a business’ digital brand. It mostly comprises of social signals such as likes, dislikes, shares, pins, views, followers, etc. The better the social signals, the more credible the social proof. Consequently, this affects the quality of your digital branding as well.
- Image SEO helps you convey your brand’s story better by making it visually engaging to an extent where it demands a response or an opinion.
- SEO helps your brand reach out to your target group better, leading to higher conversion rates and reduced marketing spends.
- It also helps your brand provide a better user experience across all digital platforms. This directly affects your brand’s image and also helps shape your digital branding.
- SEO also helps your brand’s digital branding by merely doing what it’s meant to, which is to enhance online visibility for your brand. This helps propagate your branding strategy better and maximize its impact.
- Local SEO aids discovery when it comes to localized searches, giving your brand a certain amount of leverage to form long-lasting customer relationships.
So, there you have it! We hope this helped refine your view of SEO, and why you should use it as a starting point to shape your digital branding.