We asked 10+ SEO Experts from all over the world about 'Does Branding Works In SEO In 2019? Let's see and learn from them the SEO's and how does branding really work in boosting SEO!!
Let's find-out experts got to say on this lit topic.
10+ SEO Expert Roundups: Does Branding Works In SEO In 2019?
1) Mike Khorev
Blog: https://ninepeaksmedia.com/Mike Khorev: Mike Khorev is a SaaS Marketing and SEO expert at Nine Peaks Media, a digital marketing company that helps Software and IT companies to generate more leads and grow revenue online.
Mike's Expert Opinion:
In my opinion, branding is actually very important for SEO nowadays due to the recent changes in SEO, especially on how Google is now strongly heading towards "zero-click" results-that is, results where the user wouldn't essentially need to click on the link to our site-, like the featured rich snippets, voice SEO results, and Google maps results.
Since these results eliminate the need for users to visit our site-where the branding usually happens-, we now need to think of ways to incorporate branding elements while optimizing for these featured snippets.
Thankfully, Google didn't turn a blind eye on this fact, as now we can easily see websites logos on the new layout of mobile search results, giving us a new branding opportunity-which also means we now need to have an easily distinguishable small logo-. In the future, Google also promised new branding opportunities like this for both mobile and desktop searches, for example with AR in search results ( https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/7/18528209/google-lens-ar-search-augmented-reality-camera-adroid-assistant-photos-app-io-2019).
These facts will arguably make SEO more difficult than it already is: sites with strong branding and strong followings will stay on top, but those that are just starting will have an even harder time to climb. On the other hand, this will also mean that all of the hard work to finally reach the first page (or top 3 spots) will have a bigger payoff, as we'll get a more sustainable, long-term result.
2) Douglas Karr
Blog: https://martech.zone/Douglas Karr: Marketing and Technology Strategic Consultant, Speaker, and Author.
Douglas' Expert Opinion:
Search engines are research engines for consumers and businesses alike. Not only does branding work when it comes to SEO, it's an absolute imperative to ensure your brand is visible, trusted, and displaying authority within your industry.
Don't limit your visibility to the features and benefits of your own products or services... focus on keeping visible for any question that your targeted audience are seeking online.
3) Lars Lofgren
Lars Lofgren: Lars was the former Director of Growth at KISSmetrics and I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Lars currently leads Quick Sprout as CEO.
Lars' Expert Opinion:
Yes, branding absolutely works in SEO and can be a huge advantage. People are more likely to click on search results when they appear in Google, users stay on your site and trust it more, and outreach gets a lot easier with an established brand.
In other words, branding makes every marketing task easier and more effective, including SEO. I'd had great brands on every major site I've worked on which has always given me a massive advantage.
The downside is that you can't directly measure or feel the impact of the brand. If you asked me for the ROI of branding, I wouldn't be able to give you one. But I've seen the power enough times to know it's there.
It's also really difficult to build a brand. It takes forever, requires years of doing great work, and there's no real metric to gauge your success along the way. It requires a qualitative judgment.
Is your audience super-engaged? Are they loving the work that you're shipping? Do your customers leave extremely positive reviews? Are inbound opportunities coming your way? Do third-parties mention you at all?
You should have positive signals in all these areas.
As for how to build a brand, do a better job than anyone else in your space. Make your content better, make your product better, respond to more emails, and be more helpful than the rest of your industry. Yes, it is a lot of work. But brands are only built by going further than anyone else.
If you're willing to put in the effort over many years to build a brand, it will absolutely help you with SEO.
4) Brendan Hufford
Brendan Hufford: Brendan Hufford learned everything he knows about digital marketing by putting some skin in the game and starting his own company. He's currently the SEO Director at Clique Studios and the founder of SEO for the Rest of Us.
Blog: https://brendanhufford.com and Cliquestudios.com
Brendan's Expert Opinion:
Google is factoring branded search more and more into the authority of entities. The real key to branding yourself for search is not only to create a personal brand, or overarching brand but to brand your ideas and processes.
We see this with Moz branding "10X content" and other similar examples. For example, my framework for SEO is the "I AM SEO Framework": intent, asset, and medium.
5) iEva Zelca
iEva Zelca: iEva Zelca is Chief Marketing Officer at AccuRanker. iEva is a global citizen, having lived in 5 countries: Latvia, UK, France, USA and Denmark, and has over 7 years of experience within Marketing from various industries including SaaS, tourism, hospitality, and apparel & fashion. She is passionate about digital marketing and helping brands grow.
Branding works in SEO, especially if you are a market leader. People need to search for, and then click on your brand. To do this, you need to provide Google with evidence that you're preferred by searchers, making brand recognition crucial for getting clicks.
Blog: https://www.accuranker.com/People are more likely to buy new products from brands they trust - this also applies to organic traffic as searchers are more likely to click brands they recognise in SERP results. Brand recognition and trust are important factors when buying in-store, for online sales and organic search results.
How can you measure if branding works in SEO? Start by looking at your brand and product search volume, for example: "Nike sneakers". When tracking keywords in AccuRanker you can add tags to your brand keywords as well as long-tail keywords which contain your brand name and product. This lets you easily filter the data.
You can also compare the average ranking position to click-through-rate (CTR) to see how your keywords are ranking, and how many people click.
SERP features are taking up more space on the search engine results pages, moving the traditional results (blue links) down. If your content appears as a featured snippet, it's possible to position your site and brand as an authority while boosting the visibility of your brand.
In AccuRanker you can track which SERP features and traditional organic results appear in the SERP for your keyword. This lets you find out which SERP features are present for the keywords you're tracking, creating an opportunity to attract more traffic to your brand. To go one step further, you can filter the keywords list to show which keywords have certain SERP features available.
6) John Rampton
John Rampton: John Rampton is a serial entrepreneur, speaker, author, and connector.
John's Expert Opinion:
Branding can be incorporated into SEO strategies by identifying those keywords and concepts that align with your brand identity, values, and solution.
Blog: www.johnrampton.comThis helps branding and SEO simultaneously by targeting the most appropriate audience to your content who shares the same values and who seeks a solution like yours for their problem/pain point. This is also a way to differentiate your brand from others by selecting some very specific and unique keywords that your competition has not.
That's why I like to use tools like SEMRush because they offer a way to see the SEO strategies of my competition so I can opt for different keywords that represent my brand and that set me apart.
7) Sean Si
Sean Si: Sean Si is the CEO and Founder of SEO Hacker, Qeryz, Sigil, and Workplays. A start-up, data analysis and urgency junkie who spends his time inspiring young entrepreneurs through talks and seminars.
Sean's Expert Opinion:
Branding is an important facet of SEO since you can't solely rely on ranking high all the time. All of your strategies from link building to content marketing should have, at the very least, a secondary purpose of fostering brand awareness, recognition, or recollection from the users that see what you've built.
For new business websites, it's imperative for you to start optimizing and ranking for brand-match keywords since this is the first step to increasing brand awareness.
Blog: https://seo-hacker.net/Showing up in the search results every your brand is searched is very important since the users are most probably looking to make a transaction through your website. Not showing up makes you lose chances of making a sale which is very important for any business.
For old, authoritative websites, it's relatively common to rank for your brand match keywords even if you're not putting in the effort to rank for these keywords. This is where your link building strategies and content marketing strategies come into play where you hard sell or at least make your brand known to the users that see the links you've built or the content you've published.
8) Bill Slawski
Bill Slawski: Bill Slawski is the author at SEObythesea.com and the director of SEO Research at Go Fish Digital. He has been promoting websites since 1996 and writes about search-related patents and whitepapers.
Google does reward entities, and most of the things that look like they might be rewarding brands, are really about an entity (things and not strings) approach to search. They are a search engine, and not a marketing engine. Submitting your entity information into Google's Knowledge Graph could have a positive impact in search results that include the name of your local business entity.
9) Bill Sebald
Blog: http://www.seobythesea.comBill Sebald: Owner of Greenlane. Speaker, blogger, and SEO.
Bill's Expert Opinion:
With the number of time users spends in Google each day, there's plenty of branding opportunity. As people search, they tend to refine their search as they go. If your brand is constantly visible with each new query, that's a part of branding. It's a semi-conscious feeling that the constant rankings equal high value.
The repetition also helps brand recall.
If you're trying to cement your name to your target audience, and you want to be where they are, knowing their search behavior is vital to knowing where you should try to rank. Also, knowing their common results might suggest a need to be on the sites that currently rank if possible (like Internet Yellow Pages, Top 10 sites, etc.).
Once you know where your audience is, you can then build the strategy to target them. Without that intel, you could have a widely untargeted strategy.
Blog: https://www.greenlanemarketing.com/10) Steven Macdonald
Steve Macdonald: Steven Macdonald is a digital marketer based in Tallinn, Estonia. You can follow Steven on Twitter @ StevenMacd0nald
Steven's Expert Opinion:
Absolutely! Google is showing a strong preference for brands, so if you can leverage branding and your brand name to drive Google searches then you will be rewarded with a positive increase in organic search traffic.
But, that's not all. I've seen evidence that branding can have a huge impact on non-branded keyword searches as well, so it's in your best interest to include branding in your SEO strategy.
11) James Reynolds
Blog: https://autoclipping.comJames Reynolds: James is the founder of SEO Sherpa an organic search engine marketing agency servicing enterprise clients like HSBC, Standard Chartered, Nissan, Guinness World Records, and Bulletproof. In 2018 SEO Sherpa was awarded Best Large Agency and Best SEO Campaign at the MENA Search Awards.
James' Expert Opinion:
Branding has a significant impact on SEO. Here are three reasons why:
1) When you have a recognizable brand, you'll win more clicks in SERPs.
It's a simple case of human psychology; users scanning search results pages are much much more likely to choose a result from a brand they recognize, than one they don't. In short, branding helps you win a higher CTR, which, due to Rank Brain, in turn, helps to improve your ranking too.
2) When you have a well-known brand website owners are more likely to link to you.
Consider this, you're creating a blog post, and you have the choice to reference site A (well-known brand) or site B (unknown brand), which do you choose? If all else is equal, I bet my bottom dollar you'd choose site A.
3) There's strong evidence that branded search volume affects non-brand rankings.
Blog: https://seosherpa.com/Here's an example of how this 'might' work. Google measures the volume of searches for a range of keywords. In doing so, Google notices there are lots of searches for "tods shoes" a branded search. It concludes that "Tods" must be famous for "shoes " and in turn gives it a ranking boost for the non-branded search "shoes".
As we move into the future, I'm confident Google will be exploring more ways to assess reputation, and brand is an important part of that.
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Conclusion: 10+ SEO Expert Roundups On Does Branding Works In SEO In 2019?
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