Let’s face it, building your brand presence online is a lot of work, and the competition you have to face in terms of fighting for the top of the search results is probably intimidating. Because of this, you’ve probably asked yourself at point whether SEO (generic keywords) or brand building (brand keywords) is more important for getting your brand out and known on the web. Although it may seem difficult to choose between the two in terms of leading your business in a successful direction, there are ways to identify which route would be more valuable for your company in the long run.
Base Your Choice on Your Long Term Sights
If you’re having trouble trying to choose whether you’d like to target your brand’s keyword or generic keyword, there’s a simple way that you can look at it. This method is by looking into the future and envisioning where you see your business.
If you’re looking to strengthen your brand and help it climb to the top of the ladder in its industry, you will not want to neglect targeting your brand name in your keywords. However, those who are online merely for extra cash (ex. ad revenue) may want to consider generic keyword research. For example, by using keyword research, it would be necessary to target the keyword, “32GB MP3 player” rather than “Best Buy.”
Brand building, however, would focus more on targeting its own brand keyword. That way, when a user searches for that specific company name in a search engine, your business’s content would have a higher chance of appearing at the top of the SERPs (search engine results page).
Don’t Forget About Personalized Search
With the recent launch of personalized search from Google, crafting your content to perform well under personalized search results is also equally as important as SEO or brand building.
If you’re not familiar with personalized search yet, it is an emerging, new way for users to search the web more efficiently. If you were to search the internet for “gardening advice,” you would be first shown “personal results,” or results that were found in the content you or your friends interact with via social networking. This makes it easy to deliver content to you that would logically seem more relevant.
This can hold extreme potential for you if blogs or websites are likely to talk about your business. This also makes it easier to build your brand without having to target your brand keyword so much. What’s best, though, is that with personal search, you don’t have to worry about ranking high in the SERPs because you are already associated with personal results that the user knows and trusts.
Finding a Balance Between the Two
For most businesses, SEO and brand building are both important to their marketing strategies. They both have their benefits, and they can both be equally focused on without neglect of one or the other.
Remember, if you’re solely interested in a quick, insignificant stream of income, generic SEO keyword targeting is probably the best route. However, if your websites are quite high for your company, brand building is more important. Base your focus more on where and how you’d like to see your website/business progress.
However, the more popular your brand keyword is, the less work you’ll have to do with generic SEO. As you keep moving to the top of the SERPs for your brand’s keyword, you probably will need to focus less and less on your generic search keywords. T his is simply because your branding will be able to support your traffic rather than keyword research in your niche.
Julia is a SEO/Social Media consultant at InMotion Hosting, a virtual private servers solutions company based in Los Angeles, Ca.
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