Online searches offer an abundance of options for consumers, making it highly competitive for brands to get their attention. Search engines offer search results extending for pages. A simple search can warrant billions of results. Simply showing up as one of the options on a search engine result page, aka SERP, is not enough to grab a potential customer’s attention. The power of search engine optimization (SEO) offers the ability to improve your brand’s positioning, increasing the odds you grab someone’s attention.

This SERP shows the difference between organic search results and paid search results.

Only 66% of Google searches result in a click, leaving a good amount of searchers still hunting for a solution. Improved SEO ranking means increasing the discoverability of your website, driving organic traffic. No matter the function of your website, increasing traffic is always a plus.

Improving your brand’s search rank on Google involves several components, which can be daunting. To help you embark on your SEO journey, we’ve narrowed down the best places to start.

Keywords: The basics

What exactly is “quality” content? In Google’s eyes, it’s content that their algorithm can easily navigate, looks professional, and solves a problem. In other words, bots and humans can easily understand it. Keywords are the driving force in content SEO strategy, they offer hints to Google’s bots as to what your website is all about. With this knowledge, they are able to properly populate user searches with relevant content. Relevant content that any website, including your brands, can provide.

These keywords appear for a Wordtracker search of the term ‘water bottle’

The first step to creating content to improve your site’s SEO ranking is to narrow down what you want to rank for. Within your brand’s industry, figure out what questions your content can answer. Use tools like Moz, Google Keyword Planner, and Wordtracker to conduct keyword research. These tools can offer insights on how words or short phrases perform on Google, measured through search volume. Along with search volume, pay attention to how competitive the terms are. Though it might be tempting to target high volume keywords, keep in mind that these typically have high competition. Instead, utilize keywords with a slightly lower search volume (still over 1,000). These lower search volume options tend to have lower competition, making it easier for your website to improve it’s SERP ranking.

If you’re finding it hard to narrow down what you might want to rank for, use Moz to figure out what your competitors are up to. You can use their free domain analysis tool to see what keywords your competitors are using. With this information, you can either compete for the same keywords they are targeting, or use them as a starting point to generate your own intentional keywords.

Using your keywords

You’ve chosen some words and phrases, now what? Allow them to drive the content featured on your website. Without being obvious, find places where they naturally fit in. Some main strategies for this involve using your chosen keywords in blogs and customer testimonials. These are word-dense sections of your website, where you can demonstrate your expertise and introduce the good or service you sell. It’s these sections that tie your brand to what potential customers are typing into their search bar. Understand your customers potential problems, clearly spell out your solution, and sprinkle in some keywords.

Don’t neglect technical SEO

Dig deeper into your website than what the everyday searcher blatantly sees. Collaborate with your website designer to include your chosen keywords in meta descriptions, URLs, and as titles for your landing pages. Find places where they can serve as alt text descriptions for any images on your website. This provides Google’s bots even more evidence as to what your content is all about and is another factor in increasing your ranking.

Building trust: Google and potential customers

Backlinks are links that direct customers from one website or page to another, and can be very powerful for driving traffic to the linked website. Additionally, Google crawls the web for backlinks, using them as an indication that the linked site is a trustworthy source. So, not only do they drive traffic from the website with the link, they also increase your SEO rank with Google.

A great way to build backlinks for your website is to write guest blogs. Nail down some quality blogs that are relevant to your industry and locate the owners contact information. Work with them to generate a topic that is relevant to their content and your brand. From there, write the blog for them and get a nice backlink when they credit you or your company. If none of your team members are up for blog writing, narrow the focus of your influencer marketing strategy to include influencers who write strong, intentional blogs. When your brand is ready to activate these influencers, see if they have any blog posts coming up that might be relevant to your brand. If so, see if they are willing to include a link to your brand’s website somewhere in an upcoming post.

Gaining Google’s trust is essential for improving your SERP position, but it is also important to gain the trust of your potential customers. By using backlinks, you can increase brand awareness. More people see the name of your brand popping up and might start to recognize your name or logo. They have a reason to trust you, because you were, in a way, recommended.

Social media

Along with backlinks, social media is a powerful tool to build brand recognition and drive traffic. Create content that is relevant to your target audience and is easily shareable. Recruit influencers and other brands to collaborate with, and have them post about your brand on their page. Think back to your keywords and use them in your post descriptions or as hashtags.

Social media also provides analytics that indicate what customers in your industry are looking for. You can track engagement on certain posts and understand what works for your target audience. From there, hop on the popular trends by expanding your keywords and highlighting them on your website.

The first step to optimizing your brand’s SEO might just mean slightly changing the way you approach your blog or your social media. Or, it could mean the implementation of a new strategy we suggested above. Whether it's a little tweak or a big change, use this guide to strengthen your SEO strategy.

Most importantly, don’t lose sight of the benefits of SEO improvement. In the end, improving your rank doesn’t just increase brand awareness, it increases your chance of converting searchers into customers.