In the past, brands succeeded in growing their influence using one traditional channel. Let’s take a PR campaign as an example. However, today it is extremely difficult to gain customers' attention because of technology.
You have ten seconds to either gain a prospect's attention or lose them. That’s why brands have been diversifying the way they gain customers.
Building a brand is the number one priority of any company. However, now they have realized how much their potential customers depend on search engines for their day-to-day life.
Most companies have a website, but only a few websites are optimized to be found on search engine result pages. If you do that, you will have thousands or millions of visitors to your company website, and a fraction of them will convert to paying customers. That’s why companies have been using SEO for brand awareness campaigns.
Visit any successful company in your industry, and you will see that they have some kind of blog or knowledge base where they publish content. This content increases the chances of the brand being visible on search engines.
Over 8.5 billion searches are done on Google daily, and there are a lot of opportunities for your business if you can get organic traffic. Here is how you can start using SEO for brand awareness campaign.
1. Create a keyword strategy for your target terms
Selecting the right set of keywords is the first step toward appearing in the SERPs.
You must choose these keywords and use them in relevant content on your own site or someone else’s. You may already know how people refer to your brand or your highest-selling product. Those can be a few of the selected keywords.
You can use any professional keyword research tool to select the rest of the keywords. When you type a keyword, in the results, you will see the search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, and web pages that rank for the same.
If a keyword matches your niche, you should choose the one with the lowest keyword difficulty and a decent amount of search volume.
This way, you ensure that it is not extremely difficult to rank; if you do rank, you will get a good amount of organic traffic. Behind each search is an intent, which is visible for each keyword. Once your keyword list is complete, you can create a content plan to address all those keywords.
2. Optimize a content plan to reach new customers
When you are done with your keywords, create a content marketing strategy that includes creating content that keeps your potential customers engaged and increases brand visibility. Performing an analysis of your competitor’s content is the right way to ensure that your content strategy is perfect.
Check out the content your competitor ranks for and then see if they have missed out on anything in that content. Is there anything you can do better? If yes, you should repurpose that content.
You can also create video content to engage with your customers. Use the topic research tool to come up with content topics that will do well with your target audience.
3. Find third-party websites willing to make an honorable mention of your brand
There are many types of blogs on the internet, and some of these third-party blogs mention other brands. Their goal can be a paid partnership, but they mostly want to provide useful content to their audience.
It is not necessary for your site to be on top of every search result, but you can be mentioned by the site that is ranked. This is known as surround sound SEO.
For example, if some product review site mentions your product in the top ten products of the industry, your brand will gain momentum. If you keep this long-term strategy, your brand becomes impossible to ignore.
Find blogs, youtube channels, or other websites that mention your competition since they are willing to mention brands. You can reach out to them and communicate that you want to be mentioned on their website.
Most of the time, these third-party sites will rank for the same keywords you wish to rank for, so it should be easy to find them. Remember that you may have to reach out to dozens of such creators for a partnership, and many will ignore you.
However, do not give up, as you do not know when you may receive a positive reply. Depending on the industry, this strategy is one you should use. You should use surround sound SEO for brand awareness.
4. Create and scale a link-building strategy
The brand awareness you can gain from surround sound SEO is great but requires a lot of outreach communication, similar to link building.
However, you do not have to send mass emails to get started with link building. For a start, you can honestly communicate with a few other website owners.
While creating content on your website is awesome, the problem is that consumers are generally skeptical as they think you always have something to sell at the end of the blog. Even if you provide useful information, they will think you have something to sell.
This is why being mentioned by websites that do not sell anything is great for your brand. Link building works similarly. Research high-impact sites in your niche and start creating content for them.
This way, the other site owner gets valuable content from you, which their audience will appreciate, and you get a link-building opportunity.
What can you offer them?
- A well-written guest post
- A snippet of text that they can add to an existing article
- A free sample of your product
- An invitation for them to guest post on your site and other collaborations can also increase their brand authority.
If your website is linked to other sites, search engines think that it is a valuable resource, and its DA increases. The higher the DA, the easier it becomes to use SEO for brand awareness.
When you reach out to someone for a link-building opportunity, they also have something to gain. Present your ideas of what partnership you want to build, and take their ideas.
If they prefer something else, let them have it. You should let the link-building methods vary according to the person you are dealing with, and if you are too strict, you may lose some excellent opportunities.
Most so-called SEO experts just focus on getting links for the site but do not focus on the quality of the link. Is the link even relevant to your website? Treat the links as you would treat PR connections.
SEO for brand awareness is a necessity
Being in the right place at the right time is difficult, but you can gain many new customers if you master SEO. That is why companies are now willing to spend a lot of money on SEO professionals who know how to get their sites on the top ten SERPs.
With the help of an integrated SEO strategy, your brand has the best chance of creating organic outreach. Your SEO staff should also know how to reach out to people and have some talents that PR professionals do.
Treating some third-party SEO techniques as PR opportunities makes you more likely to succeed. It is difficult but doable, best of luck!
