Imagine a situation: you look at your favorite news tapes before leaving for work. And then notice the advertisement of a new book on financial planning. Then go to a specialized forum related to your work, and there someone already discusses this book. Then you go to Amazon.com or another popular resource to select some interesting reading materials at the weekend and meet the same name again in the list recommended in the “weekly sampling” section. And then you start to really wonder what kind of book is it, who is its author, but you do not have time for further study.
When you arrive at the office, you check the mail and find out that Gmail also displays an ad about that same book, and you begin to feel that it is haunting you everywhere. Returning home this evening, you are looking for information for tomorrow’s presentation on the trends of planning the family budget, and the first site that you visit, also publishes its review. All, you can not stand this anymore. You just need to get to know her better. You drive the title of the book into the Google search box and find a page with information about the credibility and undoubted benefits of this publication, then immediately place an order for a copy of the book in the online store or even immediately download a copy to your Kindle or iPad.
The situation with the book is a typical example of the complementary use of SEO tools and brand promotion on the Internet. Search promotion, multiplied by branding, multiplies the interest to your brand, goods and services, which is expressed in the digital equivalent – sales growth.
Choose the right Internet strategy
Every seriously minded entrepreneur who is looking for the most effective methods of using search engine optimization understands that people do not make purchasing decisions based on objective facts. They rely on their own point of view, interpreting information about what they know about the product. People “digest” the accumulated knowledge about the product on an emotional level. But their knowledge really can (and should) be managed, and it depends on the wisdom of the Internet strategy that you choose as a model of behavior in the online environment. What does it mean? Expressed simpler: the use of only classic SEO tools gives you a place in the top, but does not give the main thing – increasing the credibility of your brand. You need to establish contact with the audience – the issue of positioning your brand should become one of the basic for you not only at the level of content on the site, you need to attract as many channels of influence to the audience, use PR tools to increase the loyalty of potential customers to your company and emotional contact with people.
In modern conditions, search engine promotion can not be just a search engine promotion. Those who want real results (not in words, but in figures expressing an increase in the conversion of the site and growth of the company’s profits) must move in all directions. To help them in this movement, to orient in the right direction, to cut off unnecessary channels of influence on the audience and to recommend a useful and modern professional SEO agency.
This SEO agency is always engaged in solving long-term strategic tasks of developing the client’s business.
But now most SEO consultants focus only on the technical aspects of obtaining the highest possible places in the SERP. At the same time, they ignore a much more significant thing – the correct supply of information about the brand on the pages of the site and the search for effective solutions to expand channels of influence on the target audience for the development of the company.
Why do SEO and branding at the same time? Both of these tools, applied competently, contribute not only to brand recognition, but also form and consolidate the credibility of your company. SEO + branding is a formula for success for many companies with serious development potential. You grow not only due to the primitive seizure of the top positions of search results, but also due to the information that spreads about you on the network and positively influences the image of the company, you use all sources of information about your company available to you (and promotion of the brand on the Internet, and conversion content of your own site, and search engine promotion tools), and then communicate to the potential customers and partners exactly the information you want to convey.
Inattention to branding is a costly mistake
Think of branding all the time. How does the brand information appear on the pages of your own website? How does your brand position on third-party sites? Affect this. Put all these tasks before your SEO-agency.
Do you think that in the eyes of the majority of your potential customers the first places in search results for the key queries for you also mean the high quality of your services or products? This is not so at the same time. Recently, more and more often consumers, before they buy anything, conduct their online research. Moreover, their decision to buy is influenced not so much by the high positions in search results, how much they read on the pages of your site, how satisfied they are with the information received, and what others say about your business or product.
Marketing in social networks and the media in our time is also becoming more and more important. Satisfied customers “work” free agents of your business and exchange links with hundreds of friends who, in turn, will distribute information about you among thousands of potential customers without paying for advertising. All you need to do is give them the right tools (texts, keywords and information) and then just walk away from their path!
This is literally inbound marketing, which, together with competent search engine promotion, provides “explosive” business growth.
Build your brand without buying “billboards”
Buying billboards for ads has already firmly established itself in the tradition of big business. As a rule, they worked on the development of the trademark by creating “advertising noise” on the roads and in crowded urban areas. However, the display of advertising provided the positioning of the brand, product or business only in the short term.
Common sense prompted SEO-optimizers that branding in a virtual universe should be conducted by other methods.
The combination of advertising and SEO can win decisive victories over the most effective offline PR-companies because of one significant difference – online advertising is always shown only at the right time and in the right place!
If you do not use a strategic approach to buying advertising space on the Internet, even if not on the most rated resources, this will resemble the work of billboards on the high-speed highway. A potential buyer may simply not notice the banner for which you paid thousands of dollars. However, by combining your marketing efforts with SEO, you will be sure that the ad will be shown to the potential customer exactly at the moment when he will be ready to respond to it.
However, the success of such an approach will only be possible if you fully understand the importance of the SEO component in the information research cycle and deciding on the purchase of your potential client.
How to Create a Successful Blog Strategy SEO
A strategically thought-out SEO promotion will help you build a trusting relationship with the audience, penetrate the mind of a potential customer and sow the seeds that will grow over time into a money tree.
Modern SEO works exactly the same. Therefore, any branding or PR campaign that ignores the role of SEO, are doomed to failure, or at least lose their serious potential. Today, launching a promotion campaign without a thought-out SEO strategy is tantamount to driving a car on a high-speed highway in a second gear.
Maybe you will reach your destination, but spend more fuel, it will take more time, and probably thoroughly worn out your equipment. This is simply unprofitable and inefficient. If you have six gears, you need to use all of them on the track, depending on the circumstances.
Your SEO efforts are the same fishing net with one exception – you catch people. The right people. Potential customers who are interested in what you can offer them. If they are looking for solutions to their problems, they should think that you can help them solve them, besides, they should think that you understand them deeply, empathize with them and tell the truth on your website. Only in this way will you be able to attract your ideal target audience and convert it to customers, customers and fans of the brand.
Synchronize marketing with SEO
Often recently there are discussions in the network in which participants talk about the choice that needs to be made in the marketing strategy between SEO and branding, proving that one is better than the other.
Unfortunately, this artificial separation leads only to bad results for your site. Both SEO and branding can work together, complementing each other and creating a synchronously much more powerful effect than individually. The impact of SEO-promotion, multiplied by branding, can be long, measurable and goal-oriented.
If the company does not make efforts to synchronize the actions for SEO and branding, then in the end, low-hanging fruits remain unassembled. The explosive growth of business does not happen.
Image credit: DavidRockDesign