It's obvious that the technology behind search engines' ability to determine and understand web entities is gradually leaning towards how real people will normally perceive things from a traditional marketing perspective.
The emphasis on E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) from Google's recently updated Quality Rating Guide shows that search engines are shifting towards brand-related metrics to identify sites/pages that deserve to be more visible in search results.
Online branding, or authority building, is quite similar to the traditional SEO practices that many of us have already been accustomed with.
Building a stronger brand presence online and improving a site's search visibility both require two major processes: the things you implement on the site and the things you do outside of the site.
This is where several of the more advanced aspects of SEO can blend perfectly with online branding when implemented the right way. In this post, I'll use some examples from my own experience to show you how.
Pick a niche and excel
Building on your brand's topical expertise is probably the fastest way to go when you're looking to build a name for yourself or your business in a very competitive industry.
There are a few reasons why:
- Proving your field expertise in one or two areas of your industry can be a strong unique selling point (USP) for your brand.
- It's easier to expand and delve into the deeper and more competitive parts of your industry once you've already established yourself as an expert in your chosen field.
- Obviously, search engines favour brands known to be experts in their respective fields.
Just to give a brief example, when I started blogging back in 2010, I was all over the place. Then, a few months later, I decided to focus on one specific area of SEO—link building—and wrote dozens of guides on how I do it.
By aiming to build my blog's brand identity to become a prime destination for link building tutorials, it became a lot easier for me to sell my ideas on the other aspects of inbound marketing to my continuously growing audience (from technical SEO to social media, content marketing, email marketing and more).
Strengthening your brand starts with the quality of your brand's content, whether it's your product/service or the plethora of information available on your website.
You can start by assessing the categories where you're getting the most traction in terms of natural link acquisitions, social shares, conversions, and/or sales.
Prioritize your content development efforts on the niche where your brand can genuinely compete in and will have a better fighting chance to dominate the market. It's the smartest way to stand out and scale, especially when you're still in your campaign's early stages.
Optimize for semantic search and knowledge graph
In the past, most webmasters and publishers would rely on the usage of generic keywords/terms in optimizing their website's content to make it easier for search engines to understand what they are about.
But now, while the continuously evolving technologies behind search may seem to make the optimization process more complicated, the fact is that it may just reward those who pursue high-level trustworthy marketing efforts to stand out in the search results.
These technologies and factors for determining relevance—which include entity recognition and disambiguation (ERD), structured data or schema markups, natural language processing (NLP), phrase-based indexing for co-occurrence and co-citations, concept matching, and a lot more—are all driven by branding campaigns and how an average human would normally find, talk, or ask about a certain thing.
Easily identifiable brands will surely win in this type of setup.
Where to start? See if Google already knows what your brand is about.
How to optimize your site for the Knowledge Graph and at the same time build it as an authority online
1. Provide the best and the most precise answers to the "who, what, why, and how" queries that people might look for in your space.
Razvan Gavrilas did an extensive study on how Google's Answer Boxes work. Getting listed in the answer box will not just drive more traffic and conversions to a business, but can also help position a brand on a higher level in its industry.
But of course, getting one of your entries placed for Google's answer boxes for certain queries will also require other authority signals (like natural links, domain authority, etc.).
But what search crawlers would typically search for to evaluate whether a page's content is appropriate to be displayed in the answer boxes (according to Razvan's post):
- If the page selected for the answer contains the question in a very similar (if not exact) form, along with the answer, at a short distance from the question (repeating at least some of the words from the question) and
- If the page selected for the answer belongs to a trustworthy website. So most of the times, if it's not Wikipedia, it will be a site that it can consider a non-biased third party, such as is the case with a lot of ".edu" sites, or news organization websites.
Although, John Mueller mentioned recently that Knowledge Graph listings should not be branded, in which you might think that the approach and effort will be for nothing.
But wait, just think about it—the intent alone of optimizing your content for Google's Knowledge Graph will allow you to serve better content to your users (which is what Google rewards the most these days, so it's still the soundest action to take if you want to really build a solid brand, right?).
2. Clearly define your brand's identity to your audience.
Being remarkable and being able to separate your brand from your competitors is crucial in online marketing (be it through your content or the experience people feel when they're using your site/service/product).
Optimizing for humans through branding allows you to condition the way people will talk about you. This factor is very important when you're aiming to get more brand mentions that would really impact your site's SEO efforts, branding, and conversions.
The more search engines are getting signals (even unlinked mentions) that verify that you're an authority in your field, the more your brand will be trusted and rank your pages well on SERPs.
3. Build a strong authorship portfolio.
Author photos/badges may have been taken down from the search results a few weeks ago, but it doesn't mean that authorship markup no longer has value.
Both Mark Traphagen and Bill Slawski have shared why authorship markup still matters. And clearly, an author's authority will still be a viable search ranking factor, given that it enables Google to easily identify topical experts and credible documents available around the web.
It will continue to help tie entities (publishers and brands) to their respective industries, which may still accumulate scores over time based on the popularity and reception from the author's works (AuthorRank).
This approach is a great complement to personal brand building, especially when you're expanding your content marketing efforts' reach through guest blogging on industry-specific blogs where you can really absorb more new readers and followers.
There's certainly more to implement under Knowledge Graph Optimization, and here's a short list from what AJ Kohn has already shared on his blog earlier this year, which are all still useful to this day:
- Use entities (aka Nouns) in your writing
- Get connected and link out to relevant sites
- Implement Structured Data to increase entity detection
- Use the sameAs property
- Optimize your Google+ presence
- Get exposure on Wikipedia
- Edit and update your Freebase entry
Online branding through scalable link building
The right relationships make link building scalable.
In the past, many link builders believed that it's best to have thousands of links from diversified sources, which apparently forced a lot of early practitioners to resort to tactics focused on manually dropping links to thousands of unique domains (and spamming).
And, unfortunately, guest blogging as a link building tactic has eventually become a part of this craze.
I've mentioned this dozens of times before, and I'm going to say it one more time: It's better to have multiple links from a few link sources that are highly trusted than having hundreds of one-off links from several mediocre sites.
Focus on building signals that will strongly indicate relationships, because it's probably the most powerful off-site signal you can build out there.
When other influential entities in your space are vouching for your brand (whether it's through links, social shares, or even unlinked brand mentions), it allows you to somehow become a part of the list of sites that will most likely be trusted by search engines.
It can most definitely impact how people will see your brand as an authority as well, when they see that you're being trusted by other credible brands in your industry.
These relationships can also open a lot of opportunities for natural link acquisitions and lead generation, knowing that some of the most trusted brands in your space trust you.
Making all of this actionable
1. Identify and make a list of the top domains and publishers in your industry, particularly those that have high search share.
There are so many tools that you can use to get these data, like SEMRush, Compete.com, and/or Alexa.com.
You can also use Google Search and SEOQuake to make a list of sites that are performing well on search for your industry's head terms (given that Google is displaying better search results these days, it's probably one of the best prospecting tools you can use).
I also use other free tools in doing this type of prospecting, particularly in cleaning up the list (in removing duplicate domains, and extracting unique hostnames; and in filtering out highly authoritative sites that are clearly irrelevant for the task, such as ranking pages from Facebook, Wikipedia, and other popular news sites).
2. Try to penetrate at least 2 high authority sites from the first 50 websites on your list—and become a regular contributor for them.
Start engaging them by genuinely participating in their existing communities.
The process shouldn't stop with you contributing content for them on a regular basis, as along the way you can initiate collaborative tasks, such as inviting them to publish content on your site as well.
This can help draw more traffic (and links) from their end, and can exponentially improve the perceived value of your brand as a publisher (based on your relationships with other influential entities in your industry).
These kinds of relationships will make the latter part of your link building campaign less stressful. As soon as you get to build a strong footing with your brand's existing relationships and content portfolio (in and out of your site), it'll be a lot easier for you to pitch and get published on other authoritative industry-specific publications (or even in getting interview opportunities).
3. Write the types of content that your target influencers are usually reading.
Stalk your target influencers on social networks, and take note of the topics/ideas that interest them the most (related to your industry). See what type of content they usually share to their followers.
Knowing these things will give you ton of ideas on how you can effectively approach your content development efforts and can help you come up with content ideas that are most likely to be read, shared, and linked to.
You can also go the extra mile by knowing which sites they mostly link out to or use as reference for their own works (use ScreamingFrog).
4. Take advantage of your own existing community (or others' as well).
Collaborate with the people who are already participating in your brand's online community (blog comments, social networks, discussions, etc.). Identify those who truly contribute and really add value to the discussions, and see if they run their own websites or work for a company that's also in your industry.
Leverage these interactions, as these can form long-term relationships that can also be beneficial to both parties (for instance, inviting them to write for you or having you write for their blog, and/or cross-promote your works/services).
And perhaps, you can also use this approach to other brands' communities as well, like reaching out to people you see who have really smart inputs about your industry (that'll you see on other blog's comment sections) and asking them if they'll be interested to talk/share more about that topic and have it published on your website instead.
Building a solid community can easily help automate link building, but more importantly, it can surely help strengthen a brand's online presence.
Conclusion
SEO can be a tremendous help to your online branding efforts. Likewise, branding can be a tremendous help to your SEO efforts. Alignment and integration of both practices is what keeps winners winning in this game (just look at Moz).
If you liked this post or have any questions, let me know in the comments below, and you can find me on Twitter @jasonacidre.
I love to see more and more of these types of posts on "SEO" blogs on the topics of branding and traditional marketing. Here's the feeling that I've been developing on the industry.
Say, ten years ago, "SEOs" were focused on techie things: keyword research, sitemaps, site hierarchy, site speed, backlinks, and a lot more. Then, as Google became smarter and the industry become more and more mature, "SEOs" woke up one day and realized that online marketers need to think, you know, like marketers. Now, I get the sense that digital marketers are trying to learn all about traditional marketing as much as possible because, in the end, all marketing is about people -- not machines and algorithms. What the f&*# is a positioning statement? What is a pitch? I just wish "SEOs" had done this from the beginning.
Of course, the same thing has been occurring in the inverse in the traditional marketing world. Traditional marketers have usually focused on these types of things: messaging documents, media lists, promotional campaigns, the 4 Ps, and SWOT analyses. Then, as more human activity moved to the Internet, they also woke up one day and saw an anarchic set of communications channels that operate under different sets of rules. Now, on the other end, I get the sense that traditional marketers are trying to learn all about "SEO" and digital marketing as much as possible. What the f&^% is a rel=canonical tag? What is Google+ authorship? I just wish traditional marketers had done this from the start.
Moving forward, the key, I guess, is to integrate the two "communities" into just "marketing." As in, no longer making a distinction between "online" and "traditional" marketing. Ugh. I feel like I'm repeating myself sometimes. Maybe I'll just compile all of my thoughts on this complicated topic into a YouMoz post. :)
Regardless, thank you, Jason! Any post that pushes the online marketing community to think more like traditional marketers is aces in my book. (And I say the same thing in the opposite context.)
I couldn't agree more which is why I keep pushing in-house search marketers over agencies all day long. You get exposed to the entire marketing strategy of a company that way and you build up valuable skills outside of the search bubble. Of course there is always a need to outsource to experts but for me any company which has say at least 5 people in their marketing team should be looking to hire an in-house search expert.
Thanks for the very insightful comment Samuel! (And I strongly agree that you definitely have to write those thoughts into a full-length blog post - and I'll definitely read it) :)
Obviously, digital marketing will always have to look back to the things that have already existed way even before digital marketing existed (knowing that "marketing" is really all about people, and understanding the things that will really switch their interests on). Google is certainly on this same path, and I'm sure that many of us have already sensed that in the past few years while they're launching several algorithmic updates that apparently have devastated a lot of sites accustomed to the old popular SEO ("shortcuts") practices.
It may be sad to see a lot of pre-panda practitioners quit doing SEO (because it's getting tougher each day), but you really have to be the fittest to survive in marketing - and SEO is a marketing practice.
Actually, good digital marketing was always focussed on business ROI for the company concerned - hence human 'conversion' was always important. Search is also only one segment of digital marketing.
In search, digital marketing practitioners used to be strongly focussed on 'techie' things to achieve relevant organic search traffic because Google was: Ignoring what Google wanted resulted in lower ROI. Google is a bit more sophisticated now but it can still only rank based on what it can measure online.
Many of the changes in Google search over the past 2 years have also tilted the competition in favour of large companies because their resources allow them to product more content and put more effort into social networking. This doesn't help me as the searcher for a specialist service / product provider in a small niche. The aims of the changes in Google's search algorithm were good but the end result is search results that are different but not necessarily better.
To gain maximum client benefit from digital marketing is getting more 'techie' with an ever rising need for more complex measurement and insight driven segmentation and iteration to achieve optimal business ROI for the client. Are the days of the traditional marketer returning? I think not - the buyer has moved on and also increasingly outflanks outbound marketing approaches
Wow, did not know about Alexa's list of Top Sites By Category (with drill down options into sub-categories). Great find, Jason.
Also love seeing another SEO refer to SEOquake! Honestly, I forgot I had that plug-in installed in my browser, it's been so long! Time to get refreshed with that great free tool.
Yeah, SEOQuake is one of my top 3 favorite SEO tools, been using it ever since I started doing SEO, and I've found some of its features really useful to other inbound marketing tasks that you wouldn't really expect :)
Thanks Brady!
I really love this blog, if we want more popularity and authority and google trust, we have to improve our seo strategy.
1. Use Google Authorship
2. Use Link Building on those sites which have minimum 35 Domain Authority rank in moz rank checker
2. Use all platform ppt, pdf, text, image, video for popularity
3. Use all link building technique like directory, article, press release, blog, forum, citations, blog comment etc.
4. Use all social media like facebook, twitter, linkedin, google plus, pinterest, scoop.it etc. regularly.
well said CgColors, The new SEO bee always looking the same tips from the Big G experts. :-)
Good Article..Though linking yourself to the "industry leaders" idea is quite a bit old now and everyone knows the importance of getting yourself connected with the big wigs of the industry. It can be a good practice if we are providing valuable information to the readers that is uncommon and unique rather than rewriting the existing topics that most of the SEOers trying to seek attention.
Its better to do a deep analysis and research on the current topic by yourself, see what exclusive you have found and share it with the world. At last we all have our own own perceptions and different insights on different situations.
SO Be a contributor, a valuable resource, information provider..!!
That's one perfect reason why content marketing (as a practice) is thriving these days. The quality of the ideas/information that a brand can provide to its target audience really plays a big role - not just in digital, since it's very much applicable to traditional marketing as well (effective brand messaging).
And the best way to really get connected with other trusted brands is to exemplify that you're on the same level as them.
Thanks Jason I love to see these types of SEO Posts Related with Brand Authority!
It's very nice for me how i can optimize my website for the Knowledge Graph and Build Online Authority at the same time. Try to implement "who, what, why, and how" in Titles or Call To Action, because this type of queries that people might look for in your space.
Nice Presentation with Infographic Images.
SEO has always shown some or the other patterns that webmasters explored and sometimes exploited for gaining ranking as well as authority. Link building through guest blogging was also a similar pattern that reached it crest and the went down the hill to say still at a place where guest blogging is minimized and only the very best of the content is being published by blogs from guests.
Google has always managed to control the exploitation of an option to gain ranking and so guest blogging is also done under controlled measures now, which is good in the sense that the link juice flows only to deserving sites.
Nice post, thanks for sharing.
Agree and thanks for the comment Manish :)
Jason, you made some useful points regarding Brand marketing and authority improvement. I liked the idea of making Wikipedia presence and that will easily cause Knowledge Graph presence online of Brand name.
Using Schema.org, RDF or Good Relations vocabularies for explicitly notifying Google and Other SEs about your Site's data is always great; Though it's Google thing to show it on SERP or not but we must try for it.
You were right that proper Google+ activity also supports Branding; I am also in favor of the thing that Writer's resource Box or Introduction must be highly optimized - No use on commercial term in hyperlink but keeping commercial term near the writer's name is useful and using proper noun is also important.
Nice stuff Jason! I am really looking forward for your next Stuffs here.
Strongly agree with using branded terms (as anchor texts) for author bios instead, and the proximity of the key terms that help describe the brand is certainly a factor (co-occurrence) that search engines can also use to better understand what the brand is really about (and that could be the future of link building).
Wow Jason, that was awesome! you are definitely mirroring the online sentiment that I've been reading over and over...search is going to reward honest hard work rather than cheap tricks for ranking. I'm a little disheartened because I'm a newbie to publicizing my Internet Marketing Company and Blog, it's going to take a lot of hard work to become an authority. However, I'm excited and happy to know that the World Wide Web is starting to get it right and will hopefully start returning the "best" and most "trusted" answers to questions. I really like Authorship ranking, that makes a lot of sense to me. Great write up and thanks for a good morning read!
Thanks Andrew!
I'm sure that you'll do well as long as you're really passionate with what you're doing (solving other businesses' problems). There are so many factors to consider when it comes to gauging a brand's authority, and you can certainly demonstrate and prove it in so many ways - and I guess that's something that get many of us really excited about. SEO is a very competitive practice, and that's one thing that I'm personally proud of with what we are doing, and I really hope that it continues to be that way :D
Useful post, this was a really interesting read!!!
Thanks.
Hello,
I have a new website on Soccer News. I have fit all ON PAGE SEO that the website need like you show Keyword research, Google Analysis, Mega description and others.
Don't I don't understand how to start SEO and get good traffic for my site. Can you suggest any idea? My Site: https://www.soccerfield24.com/world-cup-2018
Have you taken a look at the Beginner's Guide to SEO?
https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
Very useful information, thanks for sharing!
That was awesome article, Jason! Thanks for sharing it....
Nice write up Jason! One of your biggest fan here :)
Branding has become one of the main part in SEO strategy nowadays to be honest! Now people just don't buy from first ranking website because they have had bad experiences already! At this time, branding + SEO to gather can prove game changing combo!
Good Job mate!
Thanks Sagar!
Branding will always be the best way to go (whether it's offline or online marketing). In a world without Google and SEO, brands will still exist and continue to crush it :)
Very nice post
Most of the time Google does not show schema.org in the search results. Alternatively, Using Social
Media sites is a great way to improve brand popularity.
Agree. And social can definitely make a bigger impact in the coming years. It's a different beast on its own, but definitely complements with what search is aiming to achieve - so it'll still be a vital metric that search engines might still pursue in the future - especially in monitoring brand-related metrics.
Thanks for sharing this! I've read this late, but the modern SEO is still going on :-).
Very good article overall. I especially liked rediscover tools like Alexa top list ...
In short, a beautiful reminder of the fundamental!
Brand building is link building!
Great info, as always.
For people who are just starting out internet marketing find this super confusing. What I have always taught at Wealthy New You is that you should definitely work on great content and then work on your SEO. Having good traffic to crappy content is pointless. So building your brand with good quality content, with the correct keywords you find in your keyword research should always come first. With your content you obviously need to do some research on keywords, which is a good chunk already done with SEO, while your creating and correcting. But once you get your articles/content drafted, re-read, and corrected, then work on driving traffic and working on the rest of the seo work. Some people try doing it all at once and always get caught up and never get anywhere.
Un articulo Impresionante. El SeoQuake es uno de mis herramientas favoritas..creo que es lo primero que instalé en mi barra;) Toda esto es como una mina de oro de conocimiento.
Branding plays an important role in the recent era of SEO. The website which have strongest Branding comes up in top Page ranking.
Thank you for posting such a great post.....
Helpful post.Building Brand Authority is really necessary.
Nice posting and very informative..Thanks
I love the positivity in this post. Thanks for sharing the awesome tips.
Thanks Syed! Glad you liked it.
Thanks for a good read. I am constantly working on promoting our own brand, and initially just tried to make sure that our company name appeared properly in the search engines.
I totally concour with you tactics!
Thanks for the comment. Hope everything's working well for you guys :)
It surely is Jason, thanks for asking! Hope that things are going forward for you too!
Wow, fantastic article, what a read and being new to SEO this is like a gold mine of knowledge. Thank you for taking the time to write this post I will be bookmarking it as a reference for sure. Kudos...
Glad you found this useful David :)
Nice and constructive topic presentation!
First things first, great article Jason! It gave me so many new ideas, I can't wait to get started.
At the beginning you recommended to focus on a specific niche - I couldn't agree more. You also said that "Associate your brand with other entities, that will help it become more authoritative". That might work for you because with MOZ, buffer Unbounce etc., you have hardcore high DA outreach options.
But my industry is structured differently. In my niche there are only blogs an magazines with a DA lower than 40. Also they are in a different language than English, so the potential/market/content ist considerably smaller. The only other high DA outreach partners are huge newssites, which are very difficult to land a link (also because my niche is not their focus).
I know DA is probably not all that counts for true authority in a space. But I would be interested in you opinion as a link building expert in this situation. Maybe I should widen my niche and go broader?
Yeah, looking at your industry horizontally and seeing other possible niches where your potential customers might be also interested in would be a good option to start a productive campaign.
As for metrics (for link building), you could also consider other things to measure for your prospects, such as:
- is the site getting good search traffic (so that in case you start publishing content for them you can assure that your content will get constant traffic through search, and eventually pass on traffic back to your site). I use SEMRush and/or Alexa to validate if the prospected site is getting good traffic (especially from countries that the business is mainly targeting).
- engagement is also another metric to consider - do they have a strong community and readership on their site/blog (in terms of social shares, ave. # of comments per post, ave # links per post, etc...). Since these things can assure that getting coverage from them will result to more brand impression and/or leads.
I'm a SEO beginner and have been reading a ton of blog posts from various sources over the past 2 months. One thing I've picked up between the lines is that a successful SEO strategy involves building relationships with the right people and quality vs quantity rather than trying to impress google's search system. I'm glad this article brought that up and confirmed my observations.
Glad I was able to help verify that :)
I was just looking for information about it so thank you for this very complete article.
Great Post Jason! I totally agree about link building tactics by dropping off your links to different domains. This will help you to attract traffic, yet it depends on your content. Choose catchy and ideal terms provided in your every post. Thanks a lot!
This is an amazing blog post with great substance on an increasingly important subject. SEO needs to be more closely integrated into the development of marketing plans, with an understanding of the impact on building a brand. Thanks Jason, for putting so much thought into this post. I will definitely be referencing this with my client base.
Thanks! Brand building always play a huge role in any form of marketing - and the way it impacts SEO these days is very apparent. Which is why investing on it is really crucial to be really able to compete, especially when you're in the business for the long-haul.
I notice a big shift in SEO and websites that are targeting BRANDING more then anything. Conversions are still the goal, but people are happy these days just geting there name ranked for relevant terms, more so now then ever.
And brands have more ability to convert traffic as well, especially when people genuinely believe and vouch for their products/services.
Building brand authority has always been important for making a business successful. Liked the explanation of how to rank in Google's Answer Box. Thanks @Jason
Thanks Rank Watch :)
Absolutely true, your niche content is the biggest help to create your online branding which is also consider as your online brand authority. The whole branding depends upon the quality and flow of the content and the information that your are sharing.
Jason - well described the topic, your presentation is very to understand but its very very effectively done. Now days we can't ignore the Online Brand authority. Indirectly, branding gives reflects your authorization.
I'll definitely make this post as a reference for providing Quality Online Branding. Very useful information and this will surely help other SEOs to reach their target readers and more valuable traffic. Thank you so much Jason!
Thanks Aris! Would definitely be awesome if you can start implementing these things to your clients as well :)
useful information to me especially great written jaso
Usefull information but I want tutorial
There's some good actionable information at "Making all of this actionable" that walks you through some things to do.
Thanks Keri!