Ranking Through Brand Building: Off-Page SEO

 

When trying to rank well on search engines, the marketing strategy needs to focus on more than on-page SEO and technical SEO. While these techniques are greatly beneficial, a website cannot rank as highly without the additional tactics from off-page SEO.

What Is Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO includes any techniques that occur off the website itself. In other words, “As a simple explanation of off-page SEO, this covers any tactics that you use that don’t involve making changes to your own website or publishing content on your own site.” Off-page SEO is something a company can always be working on and improving, as they continue to create quality content through on-page SEO and increase the website’s functioning through technical SEO.

The following are 13 off-page SEO techniques that work well:

1. Link Building

2. Brand Building

3. Content Marketing

4. PR

5. Local SEO

6. Social Media

7. Forums

8. Influencer Marketing

9. Events

10. Guest Posting

11. Podcasts

12. Reviews

13. Content Syndication (Varagouli, 2020).

For this blog post, I will focus on the power of brand building and how this can elevate a company’s website’s ranking on search engines.

What Is Brand Building

Brand building is defines as the “communication and creation of customer value. It includes all those ingredients that customer feel and experience when interacting with your business. In other words, it has a positive impact on brand equity using different promotional strategies and campaigns (Marketing Tutor, n.d.). It is very important in overall business development for a company, but it is also important in website development and ranking, because Google shows preference to those with a strong brand reputation (Varagouli, 2020). The following are seven ways a brand can define itself:

1. Disruptive Brand

2. Individual Brand

3. Service Brand

4. Geographical Brand

5. Personal Brand

6. Corporate Brand

7. Cobranding Brand (Marketing Tutor, n.d.).

How Brand Building Helps Your Website Rank

When a brand is well known, it is easier to search for it, which means more organic traffic will be sent to it. This means that the website will rank higher. An easy way to track the growth of your brand reputation is through SEMrush. The keyword overview tool in SEMrush lets you search for a brand name. When you search, a trends box will appear that shows the volume of searches for this keyword over a set time period. If you’re not ready to invest in SEMrush, you can also track brand growth on Google Trends, even comparing it to competitors within the same industry with the compare tool. At the very least, the keywords a company will want to rank for are its brand name, products, and domain name.

One of the main reasons a marketing team should focus on brand building for off-page SEO are brand SERPs. A SERP is a search engine results page. In other words, the page that appears after you complete a Google search. In an interview with SEMrush, Jason Barnard said, “Search queries in the SERPs for your brand name are vital touch-points for both people and machines and are therefore absolutely essential to your business. You should be tracking, evaluating, and improving them consistently.” Later he said, “The first pages of results for the search query {Brand} indicate how well Google understands your brand, and the first 2-3 pages of results for the search query {brand + review} indicate Google’s assessment of your credibility” (Varagouli, 2020). In other words, SERPs reveal how well-represented your brand is on Google and how Google views the authenticity of your brand.

How do You Create a Brand Building Strategy That Works

Brand building is the task of brand managers and marketers. These teams collaborate to create brand building strategies that work, based on the following off-page SEO techniques.

1. Link Building – The more websites or blogs that link back to yours leads to a higher SERP, which leads to higher brand awareness.

2. Optimizing Keyword Phrases – This technique increases organic search traffic. It’s important to focus on long-tail keywords, rather than short ones, because this has been proven to boost the click-through-rate by 3-5%.

3. Utilize Local SEO – Data shows that 46% of search queries have local intent. By using geo-targeted keywords. This will generate reviews, which improve both a brands reputation and overall public trust.

4. Integrate Channels With SEO – Lee Wilson, Head of Services at Vertical Leap described how they integrate channels by saying, “Integrated work between SEO and PPC to reduce paid brand bidding and still maximize total brand visibility within the SERPs is one of the first things I like to experiment with when we are exploring brand exposure in this way. The tactic involves systematic and planned testing of increasing organic brand focus both on-page and off-page, with the incremental reduction (on keyword-by-keyword basis, or campaign level for larger accounts) of paid CPC. You will get to a pivot point whereby you can often increase the combined impressions and clicks for brand terms, decrease the paid spend, and therefore maximize the total return on advertising over both channels. As a side effect of this, you can frequently improve further (even with brand) the quality scores as well as the wider website impact on brand power” (Laughton, n.d.).

You can also use social media to improve SEO. Although they don’t directly relate, social media can greatly grow brand awareness and link back to content, adding brand authority (Laughton, n.d.).

Are There Any Negatives to This Approach?

In general, there aren’t any negatives to focusing on brand-building off-page SEO. As can be seen, brand building techniques are generally inexpensive in comparison to other off-page techniques and focus on building relationships with others in the industry and your target audience. One potential negative to using social media as a brand building tool is how uncontrollable a social media audience is. People can say what they want to say about your brand without you being able to hide it. All you can do is respond. But the benefits outweigh the possible pitfalls. Brand building can greatly increase your SERPs ranking and is worth investing in as an off-page SEO technique.

References

Varagouli, Erika. (2020). What is off-page SEO? A comprehensive guide. Semrush Blog. Retrieved from https://www.semrush.com/blog/off-page-seo/?kw=&cmp=US_SRCH_DSA_Blog_Core_BU_EN&label=dsa_pagefeed&Network=g&Device=c&utm_content=484020087585&kwid=dsa-1057183193515&cmpid=11769537497&agpid=117334832151&BU=Core&extid=23669721304&adpos=&gclid=CjwKCAiAgbiQBhAHEiwAuQ6Bkv77k3ZqiHLPWJvUt9IUsv5P8A-H0m8hroztk5CCbxn9VGL1bffULRoCvM8QAvD_BwE.

Laughton, Fiona. (n.d.). How to use SEO to build company brand awareness [Updated]. Latana. Retrieved from https://neilpatel.com/blog/how-to-use-seo-to-build-your-brand/.

Marketing Tutor. (n.d.). Brand building definition and strategies. Retrieved from https://www.marketingtutor.net/brand-building-definition-strategies/.