SEO & Branding: How They Work Together

By combining SEO with branding, businesses can utilise the psychological impact of their brand’s identity to enhance their visibility and authority.

SEO and branding are intertwined, working together on the same goals - improving visibility and building meaningful, loyal relationships with customers.

Let’s explore how the psychology behind branding can enhance your business’ SEO, and how they work together to overall strengthen your brand’s presence…

What are SEO and Branding?

SEO focuses on helping to attract more organic traffic to a website by increasing its visibility in search results. It involves optimising key elements of the website such as the content and site architecture.?

Contrastingly, branding refers to a company’s identity. Think about all the distinct aspects of the companies you know best. What comes to mind? Some key examples of aspects of a company’s identity are its name, the symbols and colours used in its logo, or particular features of its products.

Below is a helpful video by Zima Media on SEO and branding:

When SEO and branding are used together as part of an overall marketing strategy, the emotional connection people make with a brand can enhance SEO.

3 Ways SEO and Branding Work Together

Here are 3 key ways in which SEO and branding interlink:

1. Brand Credibility Boosts Click-Through Rate?

The credibility of your brand is an incredibly important aspect of SEO.

It is part of Google’s E-E-A-T criteria used when evaluating search results and deciding rankings. E-E-A-T stands for expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

Brand credibility focuses on the trustworthiness criteria as it refers to consumers’ perceptions of your brand as trustworthy.

Users will be more inclined to click on your website in search results as psychologically, we like to seek what we recognise and trust.?

Therefore, it is key to create helpful and reliable content, and present yourself as a brand that is reliable and delivers on its promises.?

This will subsequently increase your website’s click-through rate, signalling to Google that your content is high-quality and relevant. This is like music to Google’s ears, helping them consider your website as deserving of high rankings.

Interestingly, the more familiar users become with seeing your website on search, the more likely they are to click on it too as we tend to develop a preference for things we are familiar with. This is called the mere-exposure effect and it presents how intertwined SEO and branding are.

2. Emotional Connections Drive Higher Engagement

Branding helps foster emotional connections with consumers. Often, customers feel they relate to a brand’s purpose and values, helping develop an emotional connection.??

Even specific brand elements, such as colours, can evoke specific emotions. For example, blue evokes a calm feeling, purple suggests superiority and expertise, and green signifies growth and prosperity. Since colour can increase brand recognition by 80% and aid in building emotional connections, it is a brilliant idea to incorporate colour psychology into your branding.

The emotional connections created lead to higher engagement. For example, a user is likely to spend more time browsing the website of a? brand that emotionally resonates with them, increasing dwell time and reducing bounce rates. They are also more likely to make purchases as they feel invested in the brand.

This enhances SEO as it shows to search engines that the website offers valuable, engaging content.

3. Consistency Increases Branded Searches

When you have a cohesive brand presence across all platforms, such as your website and social media, your brand identity becomes reinforced often. This makes it easier for customers to remember your brand and search for it by name, which is referred to as branded searches.

Humans seek predictability and consistency is a great way to address this need within your marketing strategy. Remain consistent with your brand’s logo, fonts, colours, symbols and values.?

Once customers perceive your brand as predictable and begin to make these branded searches, it will positively affect your SEO.

Branded searches will increase high-quality, targeted traffic to your website, full of customers who are already interested in your content, products or services as they searched for you specifically. This will improve your conversion rate as users will often be intending to search for you as they’d like to work with you or purchase your products.

Branded searches are a key indicator of brand strength, popularity and authority in your industry. Your company is being remembered and looked for by name, which will significantly increase your rankings as Google would like to make your brand easier to find.

How Lumen SEO Can Help

We at Lumen SEO can take care of your whole SEO strategy, including keyword research, link building, content writing and technical SEO.? You can learn more about what an SEO agency, like ours does, here.

If you like the sound of working with us, we offer free, no-obligation SEO audits on business websites. To claim yours, simply enter your details here and we’ll get a free SEO audit to you within 7 days. It will include the strengths and weaknesses of your website along with the top three aspects you should focus on improving, in order to enhance your business’ ranking.

For a friendly chat about the SEO services we provide here at Lumen SEO, contact our SEO consultants today. Alternatively, you can message us on either our LinkedIn or Instagram pages.

Written by Viktoria, for Lumen SEO.