A good search engine optimization strategy involves so much more than just finding the highest traffic keywords. Search engine optimization (SEO) should be a building block in the foundation of your company’s online brand. SEO not only drives traffic to your website, it also gives you a strong web presence that builds your business’s online brand. The most prominent websites in a search engine’s results not only get the most traffic, they stand out to online users and create brand awareness.


For this reason, every small business should take care in developing a good SEO branding strategy that helps create and promote their image, while getting to the top of search engine results. To help with this, we’ve created a list of important SEO branding strategy tips to marry the concept of search engine optimization with creating an online brand.

4 SEO Branding Strategy Tips

1. Develop an Engaging Blog
   According to the blogging giant WordPress, about 409 million people go online to read blogs on the daily basis. Creating a well-written blog about subjects that relate to the market you’re in will drive traffic to your website, increase awareness of your brand, and give you an authority in your market. It also gives you a great opportunity to constantly refresh your content and keywords.
   
   
   If creating content for a blog is not in your wheelhouse, there are many affordable SEO companies who use professional writers to create blogs with strategically placed keywords that will build an engaging website and strengthen your online branding. Many times, SEO services like this cost only a few pennies per word.
2. Network With Other Blogs
   Invite other bloggers to create a guest blog post on your website, and always look for opportunities to guest post for other blogs. When you host a guest blogger, your brand awareness is increased by that blogger’s reader base. When you guest blog for another blog, it also increases your brand awareness in the same way and simultaneously increases your backlinks (links on other sites that point to your website). Backlinks are one of the factors that search engine algorithms use to calculate the ranking of a website.

   Another great way to leverage other bloggers to make a name for your brand is to write well thought out responses to other bloggers’ posts. This gives you the chance to interact with the blogger and their reader base and make your brand known, and it increases backlinks.

3. Promote Customer Interaction
   Customers are more likely to buy into a brand concept if they can interact with it. A few easy ways to do this include:
   • Activate the comment section on your website’s blog, and invite readers to comment on the subject. Respond to the comments you get so that readers know they are being heard.
   • Enable social media sharing buttons. This is a powerful tool. As your customers promote your business on their own social media accounts, they take personal ownership for your brand, which builds their loyalty. It also spreads your brand awareness to their friends and followers. This is the modern age’s word-of-mouth marketing.
   • Enable “Contact Us” forms, and faithfully respond to any emails you get, so users know that they are being heard.

   The longer a user stays on your page, and the more they click around (such as adding comments or sending messages through your “Contact Us” form), the strong your bounce rate is, another number that the search engine algorithm uses to rank websites.

4. Get Active on Social Media
   
   Social media should be every small business’s marketing best friend. Every social media platform that your business is active in expands the number of users who will come across your brand. When a customer likes one of social media pages, it is automatically promoted to all of their friends and followers. You can’t buy that kind of advertisement. Circling back to the subject SEO, having a great social media presence increases your prominence online and helps you get a higher ranking with the search engine gods.

   You might be excellent at providing the service your business offers, but less excellent at being a social media star. This is another SEO branding strategy that can be inexpensively covered by a professional firm if it isn’t your thing.