Something a lot of marketers tend to ignore these days is branding. SEO experts are just as much to blame. In fact, branding is an often overlooked component in SEO.
In the ever-evolving organic visibility landscape, establishing a strong and enduring presence requires a strategic focus on branding. Throughout my career, I found that building a robust brand that reaches and resonates with consumers, one that stands out in a crowded marketplace, consists of three pillars:
Awareness, Authority, and Affinity.
Let’s take a look at each one, shall we?
1. Brand Awareness
Awareness is the cornerstone of branding. Most brand campaigns revolve around this one pillar, and it’s also the KPI most brand specialists are looking for. When marketing experts talk about “branding,” they really mean “brand awareness.”
Awareness is about getting your audience to recognize your brand instantly, especially when the need presents itself. In other words, it involves expanding your brand’s visibility while ensuring it’s top-of-mind when your audience considers a solution like yours.
When your audience encounters a problem or considers ways to solve it, you want your brand (which represents, is associated with, or implies your solution) to come to mind instantly.
How do you boost your brand’s visibility? One way is to invest in diverse marketing channels to maximize exposure with campaigns tailored to reach potential customers effectively — mainly digital PR, which also helps build brand mentions.
In fact, according to many SEO experts, brand mentions are becoming increasingly important, even more important than typical backlinks, due to the rise of AI. I’ll dive into this later as the second pillar will explore this a bit more in depth.
But aside from online multichannel exposure, don’t forget traditional marketing routes, too. One idea is to launch and host engaging events (virtual or in-person). Another is to collaborate and partner with key influencers who align with your values.
The objective is to extend your brand’s reach.
However, remember that brand awareness alone won’t create more meaningful exposure. If people forget about you or if a competitor is more “sticky” than you and comes to mind first, then all that work to build awareness will be relatively meaningless.
In a book I wrote ages ago called “Power Positioning,” there was a chapter on generating top-of-mind awareness. The point wasn’t about creating awareness of your existence, which most brand marketers want to do. It’s about developing an awareness of what makes you unique or different than all the others.
As I said back then, “Don’t duplicate, differentiate!”
And that’s where the other two pillars come in.
2. Brand Authority
Authority refers to positioning your brand above competitors in your audience’s mind. It’s centred on establishing credibility and expertise within an industry, encouraging users to trust your brand.
A common practice is creating and distributing thought leadership, such as articles, white papers, tutorials, intellectual property pieces, etc. Showcasing your expertise helps your audience make informed decisions and reinforces your brand’s authority.
An idea is launching a series of webinars or workshops that address key pain points in your industry. In any of these practices, highlight success stories and case studies to build credibility for your brand.
When it comes to SEO specifically, you may have heard that some of the quality signals search engines seek from websites include what is often referred to as “E-A-T” or “E-E-A-T” (i.e., expertise or experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness).
Branding arguably plays a critical role in shaping those quality signals, especially authority ones. However, brand authority will undoubtedly become increasingly vital over time as search engines rely more and more on a brand’s authority in their search results.
The reason? Blame AI.
The world’s most popular search engines augment their searches with AI and place their results at the top of SERPs, such as Google’s AI Overviews or Bing’s Copilot. Other search engines, such as Perplexity and ChatGPT, use AI for all their search results.
Now, AI is not the death knell for SEO, as many claim — quite the contrary. First off, AI (artificial intelligence) is not some distinct thing. It’s just a broad label that we slap on various processes that learn about what people want and generate it for them. But what feeds AI are algorithms called large language models.
LLMs train their algorithms on publicly available material, such as your website and online assets. AI search results often cite their sources. Some even link to them. Therefore, increasing your brand authority will boost your chances that you appear in AI results.
And more prominently, too.
3. Brand Affinity
Affinity is about creating a positive sentiment, association, trust, and reputation around your brand. It’s the emotional connection your audience feels that can lead to brand loyalty and advocacy. And trust, if you remember, is part of SEO’s E-A-T signals.
Very early in my career, a mentor said something that profoundly and forever shaped my thinking in the marketing world, which is: “Implication is more powerful than specification.” It’s more effective to imply your superiority rather than to state it outright.
The latter appears as a boastful, self-serving claim. But the former, through the power of implication, like social proof, case studies, and human connection stories, allows your audience to come to that conclusion on their own. It’s far more credible and believable.
With branding specifically, creating and publishing authoritative content demonstrates your brand’s value without claiming it. More importantly, it helps your brand stick more firmly in the mind.
However, authoritative content doesn’t just come from content you publish and disseminate. It’s also about the content, i.e., the narrative, that people create in their own minds.
In many of my recent LinkedIn posts, I revisited a marketing trend called “high-tech, high-touch.” In the 80s, futurist John Naisbitt wrote “Megagtrends.” This trend, among the author’s top 10, made the biggest impact on my career as a marketing consultant.
For one, it predicted the rise of social media at the beginning of the commercial Internet. Why? To me, it meant that the more automated and technologically efficient we become, the more people will seek out human connection and interaction.
As AI grows exponentially, its implications for today’s digital marketing are just as important, if not more so. In a world filled with robot-generated, algorithmic, sometimes spurious content and marketing tactics, humans will increasingly seek out genuineness. To me, this applies to SEO’s evolution just as well.
This is where brand affinity lives.
You can get out there, and you can stand out. But if no one cares or makes the connection between your brand and what it means to them, it won’t help grow your brand. Not in the long run, anyway.
One way to foster brand affinity is to share authentic stories that resonate with your audience on a personal level. You can also promote a sense of community through engagement initiatives that reflect your brand’s values or align with meaningful causes.
Brand affinity is a tricky metric to track. So, how do you measure your brand’s impact? Many brand experts will tell you to use scores and surveys (like NPS and CSAT) to gauge things. And, of course, there’s also measuring branded vs. non-branded traffic.
But don’t stop there. Use tools that can help you monitor brand mentions, such as social listening tools that monitor social media mentions, alert you about them, and even give you a chance to address negative ones. Many other tools will track and measure brand sentiment to understand public perception.
In the end, remember this: Data is important. Track metrics, KPIs, and numbers all you want. But remember that behind the data are people — real human beings with lives, desires, and dislikes.
Ultimately, please pay attention to branding. It affects your entire marketing strategy, especially today’s SEO. These three pillars can significantly enhance your visibility and ensure your branding strategy is balanced and effective. Otherwise…
Nobody will know.
Nobody will remember.
And nobody will care.
