Author: Mordy Oberstein
Brand and SEO, it’s all the rage—and when I say ‘rage’, I don’t mean the sudden popularity that ‘brand’ has within the world of SEO. Rather, I’m referring to the rage I have about how performance marketers of all kinds interpret branding.
As someone who has straddled both sides of the fence over the last decade, I’m in a unique position to view the topic of brand marketing with regard to SEO from a slightly different vantage point.
With that, I’d like to explore where SEO fits into brand marketing with a level of conceptual nuance that I feel has yet to be presented to the industry.
It’s all the rage...
Which comes first, SEO or branding?
For me, this is the seminal question: How does your brand help SEO? Or, how does SEO help your brand?
I ask this because the general sentiment I’ve come across within the SEO industry is that SEO helps you build a brand. As organic marketers, we see SEO as the primary starting point that holds the keys to the kingdom and success on the internet.
Why SEO is a poor way to build a brand
I’d like to tell you that, while SEO can help with your brand efforts, it's terribly ineffective at this. In fact, the opposite is true: brand power helps SEO, not the other way around.
But before we get into how brand marketing amplifies your SEO efforts (which I will get to later on), let’s rock the boat with why SEO is a bad way to build a brand.
Before we do that let me loosely define what ‘brand’ is. Different marketers will take this in different directions.
For me, brand is the connection between your identity and your audience’s ‘self’ (or identity). The point of contact between who you are and who your audience is—that is your brand. Brand is the intersection of who you are and what you do in the context of who your audience is and what they need/want.
At its very core, branding is connective. In that regard, how does SEO stack up? Not very well.
SEO lacks narrative: The primary issue with using organic rankings to build a brand is that it is impossible to purposefully build a narrative. If brand is all about connection, then it’s also all about persona (or more technically, brand identity). In terms of branding, search is entirely piecemeal. You do not control any narrative because there is no narrative. From a brand POV, you’re getting a random person landing on a random page. It’s not only possible, but also likely that users who land on one of your pages will not understand who you are as a brand. Search leans towards utility. Its users want an answer or a product/service and then they want to move on.
Yes, they may enjoy your content, see you on other SERPs and build an affinity towards your brand. But what happens is that SEOs co-opt this scenario and use it to define the effectiveness of SEO on brand building, when, in truth, this is more the exception than the rule.
Not only does a lot have to go your way for this scenario to play out, it's not even strategic. Even if you had a brand strategy that included staunch brand identity, strong positioning, and crisp messaging, you would hardly be able to communicate that via search. You don’t know what page the user will end up on or which keyword you will even rank for in the end (or for how long). So even if you had a brand strategy, I’m not even sure why you would rely on SEO to be the vehicle to communicate it? (Let alone the sheer amount of time it would take.)
We’re already touching on my next point…
SEO as a vehicle for branding is inconsistent: You can’t build a brand strategy around something as inconsistent as search because determining who will see what content (and when) is not very straightforward. Google may see your site as relevant for one subset of keywords, but not for another. Your site may excel at bringing in clicks from the SERP for a certain subtopic, but not for another. Or, just when you’re ranking for a certain cluster of keywords, an algorithm change occurs and that advantage diminishes for a few weeks until Google’s testing phase is over and you go back to normal (if you’re that lucky).
This is a terrible way to build a brand. It’s far too inconsistent and piecemeal—after all, consistency is the only way your brand will have any cache amongst potential customers. None of it speaks, at its core, to being able to communicate a certain narrative in a logical and methodical way.
Can it happen with SEO, though? Like I said before, yes, but doubling down on how SEO will build your brand is literally ignoring the conceptual structure of what brand building is.
Which leads well to my next point...
SEO is not connective: Fundamentally, there is a barrier between you and the audience—that barrier is the search engine. You are not connecting with them directly. It’s very hard for you to be seen with any vitality or even as an entity when you ‘build your brand from SEO’. It’s not hard to see why this is: Leaving the medium (which is a big factor) aside, you’re not creating content for an audience. Unlike assets (e.g., a podcast, newsletter), when you create content to rank, there’s an extra layer between you and the audience. This makes it harder to take feedback or follow up with questions using your SEO strategy than it might be with something like a podcast or a newsletter.
For the SERP’s Up podcast, we’ve taken listener questions from previous episodes and created new ones to answer them. That’s communicating. Even if you did follow up with a new piece of content, under an SEO-led initiative, the user would have to Google the query and then find you again, which is very unlikely.
Lastly, you’re writing content in an effort to rank. Yes, of course, you have your audience in mind, but you’re fundamentally trying to rank—not resonate.
That last point is more powerful than most people appreciate. It’s trying to build your brand with your arms tied behind your back.
So no matter how many SEOs tell you that you can build a brand via SEO, you can’t. It’s just not how brand marketing conceptually works.
Why brand logically comes before SEO
Let’s look at this question (of whether brand marketing or SEO is primary) from another angle: logic.
Thinking of a brand from an SEO-first perspective assumes that folks here, there, and everywhere will see your content, come to your site, and you will become a ‘brand’ that they are now aware of.
But let me just ask, who is this ‘you’ that we’re referring to? Who is this mysterious ‘you’ that ‘your’ audience is going to become aware of?
SEO, from a purely logical point of view, cannot be the starting point for brand building. You have to establish who the brand is, and that happens way before SEO is even a consideration. This means you need to develop who ‘you’ are at the brand level.
What is your brand’s overarching purpose and mission?
What is its core identity?
Does that identity have enough depth, clarity, and differentiation?
How does your brand’s identity align with (and hopefully connect with) who the audience is?
There has to be a ‘you’ that is firmly established before a particular strategy is put into place—SEO included.
And no, an SEO strategy will not answer these questions or deal with these topics with enough depth. There is a process to marketing and if you take a closer look at that process, the notion of brand being built by SEO becomes an inept one.
The two phases of marketing: Where brand & SEO fit in
A lot of what I advocated above has to do with the fact that marketing has a process that is more or less universal. While you can break down the marketing process into an infinite number of parts, at minimum, there are two: the foundational phase and the momentum phase.
Branding defines the foundational phase of marketing
As I alluded to above, before you can get into specific strategies (such as an SEO strategy), you need to define exactly who this ‘you’ actually is.
The building blocks that form the rest of your marketing efforts come together throughout this process. Unfortunately, it’s a process many companies do not invest in enough. In fact, I would say there is a tendency to skimp on the foundational phase (or skip it altogether) because we’d all love to jump straight to building some momentum.
Unfortunately, that’s not usually possible. So, let’s first define what we are trying to do in the foundational phase.
For our purposes, let’s view this process as three major stages: identity, positioning, and messaging (with messaging being the smallest of these three, as I’ll explain).
Set your brand identity
Absolutely everything starts from here. If your brand isn’t in touch with who it is and what it wants and needs, it’s going to lack direction that will have a negative butterfly effect on all things marketing and sales.
There are few things to keep in mind when trying to set your brand identity. First and foremost, you cannot ‘put lipstick on a pig’ (although the notion sounds incredibly entertaining). Just like in real life, you are who you are. Your brand identity has to be rooted in reality.
Truth be told, this process should almost be therapeutic in a way. You’re not a marketer at this point, you're a therapist trying to help the brand see itself for who it is.
In that sense, you are not creating brand identity as much as you are simply tapping into it.
In my opinion, this mindset is make-or-break.
On a more pragmatic level, here are a few things you want to ensure:
Depth of branding — Brand identity without meaning is utterly pointless. If your brand lacks meaning, it inherently lacks the ability to connect. The concept that your brand represents—that it basically lives—has to have some sort of emotional depth (existential depth is even better).
What does that even mean?
There are emotional concepts and constructs that are more or less integral to the human experience (e.g., community, connection, support). Your brand identity should be attached to and framed in a way that speaks to one of those more integral human experiences.
The example I always give is ‘fun’. I didn’t have fun today. I probably won’t have fun tomorrow (I’m writing this on a Sunday). I may not have fun until the weekend, and I can live with that because ‘fun’ is a surface-level human experience.
Connection, on the other hand, is not surface-level. I need to feel connected to something or someone each and every day. If I don’t feel connected, I won’t be able to function.
So imagine your business is an amusement park and you say “We’re all about giving our consumers a fun time”—you’re basically saying that you are not integral. If you were to reframe how you thought of yourself and, instead of being about ‘fun’, you said that your mission is to “help people reconnect to who they truly are by being joyous,” that’s a heck of a lot more substantial than ‘fun’, isn’t it?
Clarity of identity — To effectively communicate who your brand is, the underlying concepts must be refined and crystallized. A vague sense of brand identity, no matter how meaningful, won’t translate. The more crisp and clear your vision of your brand is, the more effectively you will be able to impart that to an audience.
Differentiation of branding — The brand meaning you establish for yourself should also have market differentiation (it’s entirely possible to create something that is meaningful, but not differentiated). So before you lock down your brand identity concept, have a look around just to make sure you are distinct enough. I do not advise starting the brand identity process here at all. So many brands make this mistake. I cannot tell you how often I see people recommend starting the branding process with competitor analysis. However, like I said earlier, you are who you are and that’s regardless of the competition.
If you start here, as counterintuitive as it sounds, you’ll most likely end up sounding just like your competition. It will have the exact opposite effect.
Establish your market positioning
The second stage of the foundational phase of marketing is when you set brand positioning. Positioning is when the identity of your brand and its products/services are contextualized by the needs of your audience.
In English, that means positioning is how you (and your offering) slide into the context of your audience’s lives. It transcends your USP.
A USP is simply a proposition. It’s a reason why your audience may choose your product or service. Positioning is how your audience associates to and connects with you and your offering once the proposition has been made.
Your brand identity and positioning should naturally flow into each other.
Using our amusement park example from earlier, if your business is about rediscovering the joyous part of who you really are, then you are positioning yourself as a place to reconnect.
That assumes your audience wants to reconnect, sees you as a way to do so, etc.
Thus, the first step after establishing your identity is to understand your audience’s life context:
What are your audience’s life experiences?
What’s happening around them so that they experience life this way?
Within this context, what are their needs?
Does your offering speak to these needs? If so, how? In what way?
Does this reflect a layer of market differentiation?
This line of thinking will help you create and cement your positioning. Again, the goal is to create an intersection between who you are, what you offer, who your audience is, and what their emotional needs are.
In my honest opinion, positioning is where your brand actually lives. It encompasses brand identity and is where the connection between your brand and your audience begins.
It also naturally (and latently) speaks to the specific messaging you’ll use to communicate.
Craft authentic brand messaging
I always felt this was the least important stage to focus on. Not because messaging isn’t important per se—rather, if you get the brand identity and subsequently the brand positioning right, your brand messaging should be obvious.
Ironically, messaging is where many brands tend to spend the most time. This isn’t because they value brand fundamentals (i.e., identity and positioning), but because there is no way around it.
If you’re going to promote your offering or create content assets of whatever variety, you’re going to need wording and phraseology.
So, brands will spend a lot of resources and effort on messaging—but messaging without establishing identity and positioning beforehand is likely to flop.
Again, let’s continue with the case of our fictional amusement park. If the brand, as we’ve said, is all about ‘reconnecting with joy’ (i.e., the brand identity) and helping people rediscover their joyous selves (i.e., the brand positioning), what should the messaging be?
It’s kind of obvious (as it should be).
Whatever it may be, the messaging should revolve around ‘forgetting the stress of daily life for a day and rediscovering yourself’.
The goal then of the messaging phase is to pin down the exact tone and phraseology you think will be most effective (and that can often depend on the asset, medium, etc).
The main point is that your messaging aligns with the positioning you established. Oftentimes (and this is something SEOs need to watch out for), the brand will veer away from positioning-aligned messaging in order to incentivize a click or conversion, for example.
This is an extremely slippery slope because in no time flat your entire messaging construct can become misaligned. That leads to inconsistency and fractures your branding efforts.
It makes good sense to audit your messaging at regular intervals to determine how aligned it is with your brand.
Misaligned messaging | Partially aligned messaging | Aligned messaging | Strongly aligned messaging | Completely aligned messaging |
Contradicts brand identity | Secondary elements align but the core messaging as a whole does not | Messaging generally aligns (even though secondary elements may be misaligned) | The messaging clearly and distinctly advances the brand’s core goals | All facets of messaging promote brand identity in a way that deeply resonates with the audience (it may even take your branding to the next logical stage of its evolution) |
The momentum phase: Where performance & SEO enter the picture
All of the work I outlined above in the foundation section is meant to be the catalyst of your momentum. I abide by the outlook that marketing is all about momentum—and that momentum allows for performance marketing tactics to take hold.
Momentum relies on connection.
It’s fundamentally about making people feel engaged by your brand and connected to you. Think about it like a podcast: We get all sorts of comments, requests, and interactions when we share the SERP’s Up podcast on social media. It gives the show a certain momentum, but that momentum came from the connection Crystal Carter (my co-host) and I established with the audience.
Momentum is the outcome of a brand strategy that has substance. Like your core brand strategy, it relies on connection and engagement to gain traction, which means you can’t genuinely generate momentum if you skip the foundational phase of the marketing process.
For your brand to generate momentum, there are some ‘prerequisites’ that you need to meet.
Ensure your ‘gaps’ are filled and that you are consistent across the board.
Do your creative assets resonate with your audience?
Is your design collateral, from your website to media kits, aligned with your brand?
Are you focused on the channels where your audience actually lives?
Do you have the right infrastructure in place?
Topic focus | At this point, you need to create a very tight topical plan. If the topics you address are all over the place, the identity you established early on will become diluted. |
Asset creation | Now is the time to get into the nitty-gritty of the assets and activities your brand will engage in. What is their purpose? Where will they live? Who will they target and when? What balance of sales content versus educational content will you produce? |
Cadence and distribution | So you know what you’re going to say, where you’re going to say it, and to whom… But, how often? And more importantly, how will you get it out there without just peeing into the wind? |
I do want to pause for a second and point out that the ‘marketing strategy’ (as we traditionally refer to it) is starting to take shape. It’s all part of the plan.
To the latter point about cadence and distribution, momentum is about engagement. This is where your marketing strategy is going to really start getting into the weeds—it’s where your hardcore marketing strategist shines the most, in my opinion.
At this stage, you really have to understand what does (and doesn’t) resonate and when and where it does (or doesn’t) resonate.
You then need to hunt for opportunities (with the goal in mind that more momentum will produce more opportunities). This is where you have to get a bit creative with how you can engage with an audience.
I break down this process into four core elements:
Offline activities — It’s incredibly important to think about real-world marketing activities. All sorts of opportunities develop from real world connection and the ability to resonate with an audience is off the charts relative to digital.
Community engagement — Getting into the weeds of your industry’s community is at the core of generating engagement. It’s possible to do this as the brand itself, but is generally more effective when representatives or advocates from the company can jump in.
Educational content — Creating educational content (not informational content— educational content because it has to be genuine and not part of a marketing ploy) should be at the absolute core of every brand’s strategy. As a former teacher, I will tell you there is only one relationship that comes close to the power of a parent-child dynamic, and that is the teacher-student relationship. You are not only positioning yourself to be an authority, but more so you are creating trust and connection. You are genuinely helping your audience and that matters so much. Your educational content is what allows you to create sales content that can resonate.
Partnerships — To expand your reach and ability to resonate, you need to get out of your own bubble. Partner with other complementary brands. However, be cautious because who you partner with says a lot about you. Partnering with the wrong person or organization (putting reputation issues aside for now) could signal that your own offering is for a specific audience (which it may not be). There are a lot of latent signals sent here, so thoroughly consider the implications your partnerships may have on your audience.
For the record, these elements can all overlap. You can partner with someone to conduct an offline activity that is all about education. That should be obvious, but I felt I had to reinforce it.
The net result and the great SEO connection
You mean we’re finally going to talk about SEO? Yes, my deepest apologies for creating a knowledge scheme and not starting off with ‘5 Ways Your Branding Efforts Build Up Your SEO’. Forgive me.
Let’s recap what we outlined until now and then discuss the likely outcomes:
Establish a core brand identity that has depth and meaning.
Identify audience needs and how brand as well as product/service identity addresses those needs (i.e., positioning).
Develop specific messaging to communicate the established positioning.
Ready the brand to develop momentum by ensuring brand alignment, etc.
Set topical focus(es)
Develop a strategy to engage and resonate with an audience (i.e., achieve momentum)
Now before we get into the outcomes, I want to remind you that we already established that both brand and momentum demand connection. So there’s no shortcut or easy way out. You have to go through some version of the process I laid out here.
OK, now we can talk about outcomes. If all goes according to plan, your brand will have:
Produced assets for specific channels around targeted topics with messaging that deeply resonates with your audience
Engaged in offline activities that created new connections and new levels of resonance
Integrated (at some level) with your industry’s community and began to create a direct conversation with your audience
Developed educational content that positioned you as a trusted authority and overall helper
Expanded your reach and resonance by strategically collaborating with a variety of partners
Let’s talk about these outcomes in a more practical way, with a bit more marketing lingo sprinkled in:
You chose a target audience and refined your topical focus.
You created content and messaging that resonates with them.
You began to develop awareness via community engagement.
You developed trust and authority via your educational content.
You added to that authority, but this time with additional reach via collaboration.
What practical goals does this help you achieve?
If more people are engaged with you because you have a core identity, strong positioning, are partnering with more people, and producing targeted content that has value, then you should see:
Increased mentions across the web
Increased backlinks
Increased branded searches
Increased topical focus
Increased authority and trustworthiness around your topic
I could go on.
Brand or SEO—Who is the primary helper?
Let me ask again: Is it SEO that helps branding? Or, maybe it’s branding that helps SEO?
With what I’ve outlined above, your overall digital presence increases as a result of brand marketing, thereby increasing the chance for Google to pick up on a variety of signals (i.e., links, mentions, branded searches, etc). At the same time, the process should refine your topical focus and give you an air of authority. SEOs may know this as E-E-A-T, and in reality, E-E-A-T is the by-product of months (if not years) of foundational work, much as I’ve described in this article.
Now, please go ahead and tell me that brand does all of this, yet SEO is what helps brand because some random searcher might find some random page and repeat this process until they come to the epiphany that you are a noteworthy brand related to whatever it is you do.
*Scoff*
Mordy is the Head of SEO Branding at Wix. Concurrently he also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is one of the organizers of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Twitter | Linkedin