If this sounds familiar, you may have an SEO and brand alignment issue. 

The misalignment of your brand and SEO strategies can cause several roadblocks on the path to your site’s success and present severe challenges to its growth. Whether its high monthly search volume (MSV) keywords not being targeted, titles and headers not being optimized to their full potential, or copy not matching to user search intent, there are plenty of pitfalls a site can experience.

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The good news is that branding and SEO do not have to be conflicting strategies in an organization. If aligned, they can come together to be a powerful force to drive an organization’s brand recognition. 

Below, we’ll talk about a few tactics you can use to bridge your brand and SEO teams’ goals together, as well as how you can win over your brand team and make them SEO converts. 

SEO and Brand Alignment Tactics

1 – Focus On Backlinks

It’s a well-held fact that backlinks are one of the most important factors of a website’s ranking and external brand visibility. To develop a cohesive backlink strategy, you will need to create quality content that will garner attention from outside publications. To do this, first look for topics where your brand can easily establish itself as a thought leader. Then, research queries, issues, and content gaps that exist in your industry where your brand can also provide meaningful insights. 

2 – Open Your Brand Up to Feedback

If your organization’s site doesn’t feature reviews or ratings, it can be a good idea to add them depending on your organization. Positive reviews and ratings are trust signals that can strengthen a brand’s perception if displayed in search results, which benefits click-through rate (CTR). They also open up the possibility of using structured data review markup, which can improve how your site’s search listings are displayed. If you want to appear unbiased, consider featuring your negative reviews as well. Doing this could make your company appear more trustworthy and give it a better chance of ranking for terms like “{Your Company}” reviews (Again, this may not always be the right move depending on your organisation, so do be sure to weigh the pros and cons here!).  

Additionally, your brand team will gain valuable insights into how customers actually view your company. They can then respond directly to these reviews with meaningful content (which is something Google likes to see). 

3 – Spring Clean Your Brand Language

You may have specific branded keywords littered throughout your site, but are users really searching for these? It’s essential that you undergo keyword research to determine what users are searching for in relation to your brand. After all, you could be missing out on traffic if your perception of how users find your company isn’t based in reality. With keyword research, you’ll have a golden opportunity to infuse SEO and optimized brand language into your organization’s marketing efforts, ensuring your content ranks for valuable high-search-volume keywords. 

Winning Over the Brand Team

1 – Listen, Talk Data, Then Listen Again

Every alignment starts with a conversation, and someone has to initiate it – so it may as well be you! Listen to what your brand team is trying to achieve and deliver data-driven examples of how your SEO optimizations can further their goals. If you show the reasoning behind your ideas – as well as how competitors are outranking you – they’re much more likely to be taken into consideration and adopted. Listen to all feedback from the brand team and then try to tailor future SEO ideas around it. 

2 – Be Persistent

If you can show your brand team the value of SEO, and continue to bring ideas to the table that can enhance the brand, you’ll eventually start seeing buy-in. To do this consistently, set up recurring meetings with your brand team, send over frequent updates on SEO wins, and pitch new ideas and opportunities when you see them.

3 – If All Else Fails, Take It to Sales!

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, you may find that your brand team isn’t buying into SEO at all. At times like these, you may need to sit down with your sales team to highlight your ideas and the data that informed them. In most organizations, the bottom line is king, and SEO is proven to drive more leads to your site, which increases sales activity. When you show this data to your sales team, they can easily become your ally. In some cases, they may be able to reaffirm your theories based on their experience with clients. 

If aligned properly, SEO can support an organization’s brand objectives. It’s important to remember, though, that this culture change won’t happen overnight. Hopefully, if you follow these tips and continue to engage with your brand team, you’ll be able to ensure that SEO will move to the forefront of your company’s future brand strategy.

Have you overcome issues aligning SEO with branding in your organization? Leave a comment below as I’d love to hear your strategies!

How to Align SEO with Brand Strategies…and Win Over Your Brand Team in the Process is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Competing against the noise without an angle 

You’ve been hard at work brainstorming and you finally have a great idea for content. However, when you check online you find it’s already been done last year, and the year before, and the year before that… you get where I’m going with this.

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If you proceed with this idea and you don’t alter it, when it comes to pitching the creative asset to journalists, you’re probably going to end up competing in a sea of noise with multiple content marketers who are pitching the same idea that’s a regular feature on their content calendars.

So what do you do? How do you get your content to stand out?

‘PIVOT!’ as Ross from Friends would say. Maybe there’s a new twist you can add to the idea or a new angle you can take to enhance it. Perhaps you can even repackage it into a different format. Repacking an old idea and doing it in a better way makes you stand out from the pack.

Not being the master of your content’s destiny 

Well, that point sounds dramatic, doesn’t it? That’s great, considering this is really important!

Picture the scene, you’ve made some great content, it’s interesting, timely, and unique. Now, it’s time to start pitching. You write your pitch email explaining what your content is and send it out to journalists. Then you wait, hoping you’ll get a response and have your content picked up and published.

If that’s all you’re doing, then you’re not being the master of your content’s destiny that you should be.

First off you don’t just want one pitch email, you want several! Make sure your pitches have different angles relating to your content targeted at different groups of journalists. The more unique angles, the more chances you have of a journalist picking your content up as your pitch is more targeted to them and their writing topics.

Get Social, and by that I mean don’t just use Facebook and Twitter! There are so many channels that you can use to start getting your content out there. Create accounts on Buzzfeed Community, Mix, Quora, StumbleUpon, and Reddit, and then start posting your content on them. Reddit, in particular, can be a treasure trove of usable channels and with new subreddits appearing every day there’s bound to be multiple subreddits you can leverage to get your content out there. Remember, journalists browse these channels too, looking for stories. If your content is absent then you’re missing out on potential opportunities.

Creating forgettable content

We’ve all been there.

We’ve been given a narrow content topic scope and anything we create we already know is doomed to fail, yet, we have that one amazing idea we know will do well, even though it’s slightly out of scope.

When this happens, put up a fight! It’s up to you as the content marketing expert to advise and persuade your client or colleague why you feel your content marketing idea is the best for them and will meet their needs. When evaluating content ideas think about it this way, would you be proud or happy to share this content on your own social media channels? If it’s not interesting you then the likelihood is that it won’t interest anyone else, and if that’s the case, why bother?

Being too corporate

So, you’re company loyal and if you’re cut, you bleed their logo colors?

That’s a good thing, but not when it comes to content! Content marketing is not advertising, the moment people see branded content they switch off and their brain marks it as an advertisement. Just think how hard YouTube adverts work to make you not skip the first 5 seconds of their adverts before you get to that video about cats you wanted to watch, a desire to skip is the same thought that will run through peoples heads when they see a company logo on that awesome graphic you created. What’s more? Corporate content isn’t going to get picked up by the media as even they will think it’s an advertisement. They offer paid services for that!

Getting comfortable

You’ve been doing content marketing a while and you’re pretty good at it, but are you still making yourself uncomfortable?

When’s the last time you pitched an idea that you weren’t sure whether it would work or not? When’s the last time you introduced a new content marketing campaign format? Being uncomfortable is the difference between good and great when it comes to content marketing, remember ‘Who Dares Wins’ as the British SAS would say.

There you have it. Always have an angle, master your content’s destiny, be unforgettable, don’t be an advertisement, and stay uncomfortable.

Wishing you a very successful year ahead of you in your content marketing!

5 Content Marketing Mistakes You’re Probably Making is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.