Brand SEO Strategies to Increase User Awareness

One of the biggest revelations from the Google leak of 2024 is that Google measures brand signals to rank content. The question is…

What does that mean to you as an SEO?

In this post, we’ll get into what brand SEO is and how you can use it to boost your SEO and stand out in Google and beyond.

What is brand SEO?

Brand SEO is a holistic strategy that aims to boost your brand visibility and authority in search results. In contrast to basic keyword-driven campaigns, brand SEO is meant to drive digital visibility across various channels. Building authority on the internet can increase your customer engagement and search rankings. It is about increasing website content, technical SEO, and using carefully chosen keywords that are relevant to your brand’s objectives.

At the heart of brand SEO is a content strategy that aligns with your business objectives. Taking deliberate steps to establish credibility and trust not only enhances your brand’s reputation but also positions it as a leading player in a competitive market. Mastering brand SEO can change how you strengthen your digital presence and engage with your target audience.

Why do you need SEO for your brand awareness?

Building a brand requires a blend of traditional marketing and a strong digital presence. Omitting SEO from this equation means missing critical opportunities for visibility. Here’s why SEO serves to enhance your brand:

1. Strengthens brand authority

SEO helps establish your brand as credible and reliable by making it visible in search results. When people consistently encounter your brand, it builds trust and authority. A solid SEO strategy, centered on consistent, high-quality content drives not only website traffic but also attracts an audience genuinely interested in your brand’s topics. This targeted audience fuels lead generation. Unlike paid advertising, SEO focuses on organic reach, reducing customer acquisition costs, and setting your brand on a sustainable growth trajectory.

2. Supports content distribution

SEO plays a key role in amplifying your content marketing efforts by driving valuable traffic to your content. By optimizing for relevant keywords, your blogs, videos, and other content can reach a broader audience, positioning your brand as a thought leader. Consistent exposure through SEO helps educate, engage, and nurture your audience, fostering trust and long-term loyalty brand loyalty.

How to build an SEO strategy for a brand

Developing an effective SEO strategy for your brand involves multiple stages, each designed to increase your visibility in search engines and connect with your targeted audience. Here’s how you can craft a comprehensive SEO plan:

1. Research branded keywords

Keywords are the cornerstone of any successful SEO strategy, and branded keywords play a unique role in shaping user interactions with your brand. These keywords can be divided into categories based on user intent:

• Navigational keywords: These help users find specific brand-related resources, such as your homepage or support page (e.g., ‘[Brand] login,’ ‘[Brand] support’)
• Transactional keywords: These indicate high purchase intent and often include modifiers like ‘buy,’ ‘pricing,’ or ‘discounts’ (e.g., ‘[Brand] pricing, ‘buy [Brand] online’)
• Commercial keywords: These reflect users evaluating your brand, products, or industry (e.g., ‘[Brand] reviews,’ ‘[Brand] alternatives’)

To effectively research and optimize for these branded keywords:

• Use tools like Similarweb’s Keyword Generator to analyze branded queries, including their search volume, trends, and user intent
• Study how users interact with your brand through these searches. For example, are they primarily looking for product comparisons, reviews, or customer support?
• Align your keyword insights with broader business goals to inform strategic decisions, such as identifying product opportunities or understanding customer pain points

By understanding the functions of branded keywords, you can also create content tailored to these queries. Transactional queries could inspire product pages, while informational queries might lead to blog posts or FAQs. This comprehensive approach ensures you capture traffic at every stage of the user journey.

2. Create content to answer user intent

Once you’ve identified branded keywords and categorized them by user intent, the next step is crafting content that directly addresses the needs behind each query. Every page you create should align with a specific intent category—navigational, transactional, or commercial—ensuring that users find relevant, helpful information as soon as they land on your site. Here’s a strategy to guide your content creation:

a. Navigational intent: Deliver clear, direct pathways

Navigational queries often indicate users who are already familiar with your brand and are searching for a specific page, such as a login portal, support page, or company information. To serve this intent:

• Create landing pages that are clean, straightforward, and optimized for usability
  • For example, your ‘Support’ page should include a search bar, categorized FAQs, and a clear call-to-action for contacting customer service
• Use concise meta descriptions and titles to confirm that users are in the right place (e.g., ‘Login to Your [Brand] Account’ or ‘[Brand] Customer Support – Get Help Fast’)
• Consider internal linking to improve navigation further
  • For example, a footer link to “Contact Support” ensures accessibility

b. Transactional intent: Build conversion-focused pages

Transactional queries signify high purchase intent, making this content pivotal for driving sales and leads. Here’s how to approach it:

• Product and pricing pages: Design pages that highlight key benefits, provide transparent pricing details, and offer clear CTAs like ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Start Free Trial.’ Include trust signals, such as customer reviews, awards, or guarantees, to build credibility
• Discount and promo pages: If users frequently search for deals (e.g., ‘[Brand] discounts’), create a dedicated landing page showcasing your latest offers. Update this page regularly to keep it relevant

Optimize your pages with engaging visuals, such as product images or demo videos, to capture attention and enhance the user experience.

c. Commercial intent: Establish authority and build trust

Users searching for commercial queries are evaluating your brand, products, or industry. Your content should position you as the go-to authority:

• Comparison pages: Create content comparing your products to competitors (e.g., ‘[Brand] vs. [Competitor]’). Focus on honest, data-driven insights, and emphasize your differentiators without dismissing competitor strengths
• Review pages: If ‘[Brand] reviews’ is a popular query, feature customer testimonials, case studies, and aggregated review ratings from trusted platforms like G2 or Trustpilot
• Thought leadership content: Publish educational blogs, whitepapers, or guides to address broader questions about your industry while subtly weaving in the benefits of your product or service

3. Optimize your brand SERP

According to Jason Barnard, your brand’s SERP is a digital business card. It shapes user perception before they even visit your site. Optimizing your brand SERP ensures that users encounter the most accurate, trustworthy, and engaging information about your brand. A well-curated SERP establishes authority, builds trust, and provides easy access to key resources.

Here’s how to take control of your brand SERP, including leveraging branded entities:

a. Claim and optimize key online properties

• Website: Ensure your brand’s website ranks first for branded queries by optimizing your homepage with branded keywords (e.g., ‘[Brand] official site’). Use structured data (e.g., Organization schema) to provide search engines with detailed information about your brand, such as your logo, social profiles, and contact details
• Social media profiles: Verify and optimize all major social accounts (e.g., x.com, LinkedIn, Instagram) to appear prominently in your brand SERP. Use consistent branding, clear descriptions, and regular activity to signal credibility
• Third-party platforms: Optimize your presence on directories (e.g., Google Business Profile, Yelp) and review sites (e.g., Trustpilot, G2). Encourage positive reviews and respond to user feedback to manage brand sentiment

b. Use branded entities to build contextual authority

Search engines increasingly rely on entity-based search to understand brands and their relationships to topics, industries, and competitors. By positioning your brand as a recognized entity, you can boost your SERP visibility.

• Create an entity for your brand: Use structured data (e.g., schema.org) to provide details like your company’s name, founding date, and logo. This helps Google Knowledge Graph understand your brand and display it in Knowledge Panels
• Wikidata and Wikipedia entries: For larger brands, ensuring accurate information on Wikidata or creating a Wikipedia page (if eligible) can increase entity recognition
• Topic associations: Align your brand with key topics in your industry by consistently producing high-quality, authoritative content on those topics. For example, if your brand is associated with “sustainable fashion,” publish articles, guides, and research on sustainability trends

c. Dominate with branded content

Branded content should populate as many positions as possible on your brand SERP, pushing competitors and irrelevant results further down.

• Own the narrative: Publish branded content across multiple channels, such as press releases, blog posts, podcasts, and webinars, to dominate branded searches
• Control third-party mentions: Collaborate with partners, affiliates, and influencers to publish content mentioning your brand positively. For example, guest blog on industry sites or contribute quotes to news articles
• Video and social content: Regularly upload branded videos to YouTube and social media platforms to increase your presence in video carousels and social card results.

4. Build backlinks for branded terms

Brand authority is not just about content, it is also about backlinks. You can start by identifying branding words that you need to reinforce and strengthen them. Similarweb’s Backlink Analytics can tell you which websites are linking to your brand and what relationships you could form to build your backlink profile. More often than not, this will be building links to your home page.

Reaching out to similar brands or influencers will give you valuable backlinks, which will bring you more traffic. Establishing an association between your site and backlinks will make you more influential in your field, and you’ll be able to grow steadily.

Measure brand awareness with Similarweb

If you want to know your brand reach, you need to understand how your SEO campaigns are working. Similarweb’s tools can give you metrics about brand exposure that can help you identify both successes and shortcomings:

1. Check organic traffic increase from branded terms

You can check the organic traffic change for your branded search terms with the Keyword Research Tool. Identify your branded keywords and key performance factors, including clicks, keyword difficulty (KD), average searches, and zero-clicks. Such data gives you the opportunity to gain insight into your brand and the way users interact with your content. Observing these trends over time will allow you to evaluate the performance of your SEO campaigns and find ways to expand your brand visibility.

2. See if there is a direct traffic increase

Direct traffic is another important marker of brand recognition. This information, through Similarweb’s Marketing Channels tool, can help your business determine the success of your brand promotion campaigns. A visible increase in direct traffic highlights the benefits of mixing offline and online tactics.

Understanding traffic sources and campaigns helps determine what marketing strategies need optimization for ongoing success. This data gives you a good indication of your brand’s appeal to people and will promote your values and validity across the internet.

3. Look for increased brand mentions

Tracking brand mentions across different channels gives you a more detailed picture of the brand presence on the web. Similarweb’s Keywords Research tool gives you the ability to see trends over time. This insight will show you the number of searches that were conducted for the brand name and the number of clicks your brand keyword generated.

An increase in brand mentions indicates growing interest and engagement, demonstrating the effectiveness of branding activities in capturing consumer attention. This insight can be leveraged to refine future marketing efforts, tailoring messaging and promotions to better meet customer needs and strengthen brand relationships in the marketplace.

Invest in your brand SEO to establish it as a trusted and valuable entity

Brand SEO is an investment you should make if you want to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Optimizing for search results and relevancy allows a brand to stand out, and to be perceived as a reliable and valuable source.

Similarweb gives you access to comprehensive solutions to analyze website traffic and strengthen SEO practices that improve your brand’s digital footprint. With our tools, brands develop powerful interactions and strategies for continued development. Keeping up isn’t enough for an effective SEO campaign — it’s taking the lead online. Utilizing our comprehensive tools will get your brands on the right path to success.

FAQs

How does SEO help improve brand credibility?

SEO enhances trust by boosting visibility and rankings, which build credibility with audiences. When keywords are strategically used, and content is well-curated, a brand comes across as both approachable and authoritative.

What are effective ways to boost brand visibility through SEO?

To increase visibility, focus on optimizing on-page elements like H1 tags, meta descriptions, and structured data. High-quality content combined with strategic keyword use forms the foundation of a strong content strategy.

How does brand authority impact my SEO efforts?

Building brand authority establishes your brand as a trusted and reliable name that consumers rely on for decisions. This credibility not only enhances user trust but also boosts your algorithmic standing, leading to improved rankings over time.

What role does SEO play in driving more customer satisfaction?

SEO fosters engagement by delivering valuable, targeted content. This encourages users to explore, interact, and ultimately become loyal customers, fostering long-term relationships.

Is technical SEO just as important for brand awareness?

Absolutely. Technical SEO ensures that search engines can crawl, index, and display your site effectively. Factors like mobile-friendliness, fast loading speeds, and secure connections are essential for establishing a strong and reliable brand presence online.

by Maayan Zohar Basteker

Senior SEO Specialist at Similarweb

Maayan, with 7+ years in SEO, specializes in complex research, strategy, and technical audits. She previously worked at a top digital marketing agency in Israel.