What do you think of when you hear the words search engine optimisation?

Let me guess? Keyword, right? 

However, SEO is so much more than just stuffing a bunch of keywords and phrases into your content. It’s about the overall user experience. 

Google uses user experience to gauge whether your site is the best to show, so it’s essential to optimise your site to increase your brand’s awareness from the beginning as it will save you time in the long run. 

So what should your brand consider when it comes to SEO to increase brand awareness? 

1. User Experience

According to Peter Morville, the user experience can be broken down into seven categories. As you’ll see, some dovetail with elements of SEO: 

•    Useful – Your content should be high-quality and relevant.
•    Usable – Your site should be easy to navigate. 
•    Desirable – Your design should connect to your audience. 
•    Findable – Finding content on the site should be easy and enjoyable. 
•    Accessible – Your site should be accessible to everyone. 
•    Credible – Your brand must show trust and authority. 

A closer inspection of the list above shows that SEO dovetails with parts of UX. For instance, writing relevant content is a significant part of SEO. Crafting a site that’s easy to navigate and has findable content takes planning, which requires SEO implementation in your content.

2. Inbound Marketing

To create strong brand awareness, you’ll have to understand your audience. Inbound marketing is the process of drawing customers to your brand when they need information during the buying journey. 

According to online reports, 84% of small business uses inbound marketing to increase leads. To attract customers to your brand, you need to produce relevant, high-quality content. Your content will be created for the four parts of the buyer’s journey. 

•    Attract – customers find you through organic search results or social media. 
•    Convert – providing value to customers with content they need in exchange for an email address. 
•    Close – making an offer to close a sale. 
•    Delight – provide the material they need to solve their problem.

Building a site that is optimised leads to more traffic and leads. Crafting high-quality content leads to backlinks, which helps you rank higher in search engines. Additionally, bridging these two areas of SEO with a solid social media strategy can produce higher engagement leading to brand awareness. 

3. Keyword Research

Performing keyword search is a given when we mention SEO. A new site may have a hard time competing against more established sites for keyword phrases. In this instance, it makes more sense to target longtail keywords. 

You can use sites like Ahrefs, Moz, or Ubersuggest to look up keywords. From there, you want to look for keywords with a high search volume and low SD. The lower, the better. You may also want to look up questions related to the keyword that you could use in headers. 

Brand Awareness Starts With SEO

Using SEO to help attract leads to your site is the best way to build your brand awareness over time. With the right keywords, high-quality content, and an overall good user experience, you’ll develop leads and close sales using SEO.