For two decades, the online landscape continues to advance to an exponential rate. It’s here that many misconceptions about brand and branding rule the airwaves. For some new businesses, they perceive it as an arcane mystery only exclusive to fortune 500. To others, who grapples with prominence, see it as advertising or logos marketing.

But, a brand is all about what your customers and visitors think about your business. Take, for instance, “Amazon.” Ask any group of people on social media what Amazon “means.” In most cases, you’ll find out that more than half share the number of “meanings” for Amazon. They will talk about value, services, quality, and more.

But, a successful business brand doesn’t build by itself. Instead, it needs a careful strategy that will fuel its lifeblood. For a brand to survive, it needs traffic, leads, and sales. So, let’s learn how you can use SEO to build your brand.

Define the purpose of your brand

Building your brand in the online landscape starts with a killer website design. Usually, the design you choose communicates what your business is all about. Your visitors will get the first impression and judge you within seconds.

By employing an SEO strategy, you can come up with an aesthetic design. A design that will help improve user friendly. Besides, visitors will develop trust with your site if the design is harmonious. Visitors want something comfortable to navigate, consistent, and authentic.

Meet visitors’ needs

Google gives priority to a website that answers searchers’ problems. In that regard, you need to analyze your target audience and then tailor your site to answer their needs. Your visitors are human; thus, they want to feel the connection and value.

Moreover, knowing your audience allows you to capture their sense of subconscious rapport. In the end, you’ll win the audience like big brands because now they feel safe.

You meet customer needs when:

• You explain in details the benefits of your products or services
• Have an FAQ section to answer all possible queries about your product or services
• Give clear directions such as a call to action, email-subscription, and more.

Content marketing for brand Identity

Content marketing is a strategy that can help the upcoming business stand out from the crowd. Usually, your visitors will keep coming to your site if you keep updating them with fresh content. Also, great content attracts backlinks, which helps boost your brand identity.

Moreover, content also helps increase engagement in your site. When visitors comment on your blog, share, or retweet, they help promote your brand. In the end, your brand will gain prominence and attracts a broad audience.

Here is how SEO and content marketing fuse to influence your brand to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Keywords

Keywords help your site have structure, be accessible, and search engine friendly. For example, you need to sprinkle keywords on the title, Meta descriptions, and posts. Doing this will make your website discoverable for the target keywords.

Also, tailoring your content with long-tail keywords brings specific visitors to your site. Besides, they help boost your rank because the competition is low. Another benefit is that you’ll be able to get visitors who are willing to buy your products.

Stellar content

We all know that quality wins, and it’s one that resonates with the audience. SEO and content marketing work hand in hand to fulfil brand goals.

First, for you to achieve quality content, you have to do ideation with your audience in mind. Besides, your content should have elements such as:

• Encourage engagements
• Entice audience because it’s useful and entertaining
• Relevant and target specific audience
• Meets cultural demands

SEO and User experience

User experience is an imperative element in SEO and helps brands get repeat clients. Online searchers don’t want to visit a site that takes long to load. Likewise, if visitors can’t process the information on your site, then you are failing. In general, the more comfortable your visitors find your website to be, the more they stick with you.

First, you need to understand your users and then get a structure that will meet their needs.

For example, bombarding your visitors with distracting content reduce engagements.

Other user experience elements include:

Information architecture

Your visitors are online because they’re seeking information. It’s essential to present to them with a website that has pleasing architecture. In short, the information you have on your site should be able to reduce the cognitive load.

Coherent design

The flow of your website should be consistent so that visitors understand your brand. Also, your site should be easy to navigate to make your visitors fulfill the journey. Moreover, you can use a visitor’s feedback to tweak your website aesthetics.

Summary

The online community can make or break your brand. Before reaching out to sell them anything, you need to ask what value you will bring.

Are you different from the competitor?

To help you answer all these questions, you need SEO as part of your strategy. You can adopt various elements of SEO to build your brand. These elements will help you establish a successful brand in the online landscape.

SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization. Usually, it’s the practice of manipulating a website’s quality and quantity for search engines.

Most business today relies much on the search engine to achieve their business goals. Notably, in 2019 we saw e-commerce smashing around $3.53 trillion in sales. Also, Google still commands worldwide search at a whopping 90%. Other studies show that a page on top of the probe has a potential 10X to get a click. Besides, a top runner on search results attracts an average click through rate of 31.7%.

With this in mind, many businesses strive to get a spot on top of search results. However, the success of your website rests on the SEO effort you formulate. For example, your site should have quality content, fast load speed, keywords in the title, and more. Better search results position brings in more traffic that generates leads and revenue.

In this article, you are going to learn more about the pros and cons of SEO. Keep reading.

Pros of SEO

Business visibility

In most cases, many businesses would want their brand to be visible to a large population. One way to target a specific audience based on location is through Google My Business.

To achieve this, you have to list your business on “Google my business.” But, that is not a guarantee that your brand will be visible to a broad audience. You’ll have to do local SEO to outrank your competitor in the same niche. With a proper regional SEO strategy, you’ll be able to get your business visible on top of the map search.

Moreover, content marketing is another strategy that can help you gain online visibility. For example, you can target a specific audience using video, info graphics, blogs, and more.

Generate traffic

You are threatening to batter your business economy to wreck and ruins without traffic. In general, your business will thrive when you have visitors coming to your site. But, for you to have more traffic, you need pages ranking on top of the search.

SEO will help your site visible on top of search and make searchers see your website. Through targeted keywords, you’ll be able to generate traffic that brings worth to your business. Besides, visitors who will come to your site were searching for those keywords.

Improve user experience

Google algorithms favor websites with good user experience because they want searchers to have value. Besides, more than 65% of searchers prefer to engage with a website that offers a better user experience.

Usually, good user experience sites will fulfil visitors’ needs. It also helps build loyalty with the product or services your businesses are offering. Moreover, it helps your website meets the customer journey to success. There are a few crucial elements to watch out when you want to achieve user experience. For example, your website should be:

• Intuitive and easy to navigate
• Well organized structures
• Visually appealing
• Responsive design
• Original and quality content

Builds trust and credibility

The bitter pill to swallow in the online landscape is that 75% of searchers never go beyond past first SERP. Besides, more than 70% of searchers ignore paid search results and goes for organic products.

The internal research team of Rankglider SEO services show that search engine optimization is the best potent ammunition to help your brand. The psychology behind this is that people perceive top results as the best. So, improve your online presence and appear on top of search at the right time to build trust. Start by having a secure site, stellar content, responsive design, and be transparent.

Another element of trust includes online reviews. Nowadays, most consumers rely on online reviews to make purchasing decisions. Ensure that you provide quality products or services to get a good reputation.

Build authority

We all know that website authority can’t be given or taken away, bought, or sold. Usually, it’s what your sites offer the people and what they believe about your site. That influence that makes people think in your website means you have expertise. Also, it means the services and products you offer are trustworthy.

SEO helps to build authority by ensuring you provide answers to searchers. Besides, if your website does not give searchers what they want, then its ranking goes down. Altogether, you might be wondering how a website such as Wikipedia builds authority. Here are some few takeaways:

• Ensure your content meets user intent
• Create usable and shareable content
• Reach out authority sites for backlinks
• Improve user experience with relevant internal links
• Be consistence

SEO puts you ahead of the competition

New businesses, just like yours, are mushrooming each day. On the other hand, some business niches are known to be very competitive.

So, how do you rise and face the challenge?

Fortunately, the search engine is a “dog-eat-dog” land. It’s a place where you can nose around your competitors and capitalizes on their weaknesses. For example, you can focus on content creation, such as blog posts or videos.

Moreover, you can unlock your success more by targeting long-tail keywords. In most cases, they are specific to a product or service you are offering. Competing here can be easy if the generic keyword is hard to rank.

Last, SEO tools allow you to monitor competitors’ backlinks and other on-site SEO activities. As a result, you’ll be able to discover competitor ranking secrets.

Cons of SEO

Takes a long time to success

Unlike PPC, which can bring results in a week, SEO can take even up to three months. Notably, Google needs much time to understand your website or the changes you have made. Again, it needs to compare your content quality and reaction from searchers over some time.

So, you have to be patient if you want to rely on organic SEO as your traffic channel.

Competition

Your competitor is also reading a “guide to SEO competition.” Again, nobody would want to start a site then leave it there to rank at the bottom. Maybe they are busy doing aggressive SEO and will catch up with you soon.

Furthermore, some keywords are hard to rank on search results. Likewise, trying to build a long-tail keyword might get you low volume traffic or none.

You don’t have control.

Google algorithm is like a chameleon it keeps on changing from time to time. A strategy that did well for you yesterday might not do well today. These updates won’t do your site a favor but tamper with its ranking factor.

As a result, this makes SEO a continuous battle that will suck all your marketing energy. Besides, Google uses a complex algorithm system that no marketer knows. Therefore, for you to stay on top, you must be ready to commit time and energy.

You risk Penalties if you use the wrong method.

Sometimes out of curiosity, you might attempt to manipulate your website rank using unethical means. For example, you might try to buy backlinks, duplicate content, internal 404s, and more. Google will take issues with your site and pull it over. As a result, you’ll have to abandon the site because fighting with Google is a waste of time.

Summary

SEO remains one of the most powerful digital marketing tools for many marketers. Many businesses that do it right receives good organic traffic and leads. But, there are pros and cons of SEO, just like any other marketing strategy. These pros and cons should be an eye-opener whether your business should focus on SEO or not.

SEO and PPC are not some chemical weapon formulae that businesses should fear. They revolve around raising site visibility in a search engine for more traffic.

SEM is a form of a marketing channel that helps boost website visibility through paid search. In most cases, you’ll find marketers referring to it as PPC or pay per click. PPC is an ad format where the advertiser pays for each ad click.

We have many forms of search engine marketing you can practice. But, the majority of marketers do devote their budget and time on paid and organic search.

Fasten your seatbelt because in this article we are going to dig more about both paths. In other words, you’ll learn SEO vs. PPC, which is better for you.

SEO VS. PPC

There are several pros and cons you need to know before considering SEO or PPC marketing. By all means, relying on lead generation data alone isn’t enough. The main issue is which one you should focus on over the other.

PPC PROS

When a visitor clicks your ads, you pay the search engine for that leads. For this reason, you benefit by:

Faster set up

If you set up your campaign today on Google, it will be live within one business day. But, this doesn’t mean you’ll start to see results trickling soon.

Increases your local business visibility

If you use PPC ads in local searches, there are high chances of acquiring more local leads. Here, a user will carry out a local search, and then the first search result they will see is your PPC. If your content is relevant, then more searchers will visit your site and bring traffic.

Ideal for targeting hard to reach keywords

In this case, you have a chance to capture new buyers by targeting broad keywords. For example, you can target keywords that are not there in the organic search. You can also target particular geographic locations where your business is providing services.

Geo-targeting

Geo-targeting is a powerful tool in PPC that can help you target within a specific area or country. It becomes helpful when your business goal is to meet customers within given limits. For example, if you have a brick and mortar, you can target people within your radius.

It also allows you to target areas within a country such as cities, provinces, or estate. Furthermore, you can target entire countries where your products have a presence.

You can scale A/B testing.

In general, A/B tests are easy when you do them with PPC. You only need to set up two ads and then analyze how each performs.

Connect searcher with your landing page

A landing page is where visitors turn to buyers and is where PPC will direct searchers. In this case, you would want them to visit the relevant landing page and fills forms.

PPC cons

Competition and cost

Pay per click is gaining much popularity but, in exchange, attracts in bidding wars. As a result, it becomes expensive to bid on specific phrases because the cost is high.

Not cost-effective for smaller companies

It becomes hard to compete if you have a small budget and a few products to sell.

Requires skills and time consuming

It requires some practice and configuration expertise to set up effective campaigns. Besides, if you have to train yourself or staff, then you have to sacrifice time. Again, you have to keep up to date with the best tools and practices.

SEO Pros

Higher click-through rate

The Click-through rate is favorable in organic search than in paid search. But, you’ve to be ranking well on the search results to see benefits.

CTR is the number of impressions and clicks they bring to your page. For example, a bad CTR is when you have thousands of impressions and zero clicks. SEO helps in optimizing CTR, which in returns brings more traffic and sales.

You don’t pay per click.

It’s a free listing that only requires you to invest time. SEO is an ongoing process that needs you to optimize pages more often to increase visibility.

Local traffic

You can optimize Google my business to bring you traffic in a particular area that you serve. As a result, you will develop long term touch with new customers.

Moreover, optimizing for local search helps local searchers finds your business location. In this case, you can build a long term relationship and answer their queries in person.

SEO promotes brand recognition

For you to rank at the top, your site must load fast, deliver valuable content, etc. These elements bring a good user experience; thus, people will love your brand.

Promotes your brand trust and credibility

Searchers trust Google, and if your brand is at the top, it increases your website trust. Also, they will buy your product and services because they see you as authentic.

SEO cons

SEO consume time

If you spend less than 10 hours per week, don’t expect to climb on top soon. In short, SEO takes more than four months to start seeing results.

Competition

Your competitors might be on a marathon SEO campaign, which can make them hard to chase.

Business owners do not realize how beneficial seo can be to their businesses. Being visible is the first factor that contributes to the growth of any business. Imagine, any form of marketing is to make the business more accessible and known to the public. Advertisement of Google and social media platforms are all geared towards awareness of the product or services offered by businesses.

Much data is available from Google about the number of searches for any keyword. It is an unprecedented opportunity to optimize the businesses for those keywords to tap the targeted traffic. We are back again to help our clients achieve the goals set for their respective businesses. We will provide great value through our posts so that medium and small businesses can reap the fruits of seo services on the websites.

Stay tuned more seo news from us.