SEO Isn’t A Miracle Cure For Online Success – Start With Your Brand

January 6, 2018

I’ve had an opportunity to setup SEO (search engine optimization) and do digital marketing for clients and want to share some thoughts on why I believe you should start with your brand and prioritize SEO as secondary in your online strategy.

Image Is Important

I see the point that some people try to make, that if the product is good or unique enough it can sell itself as long as people see it. SEO will help people see your good or unique product but it doesn’t guarantee that a potential customer is going to feel comfortable enough to pull out their credit card, enter the numbers on your site and then trust that the product is going to make it to their doorstep.

Branding equates to confidence for your potential client and the experience that the customer has on your website is equal to any shopping experience they have in their lives. This drive for user experience has produced an entire segment of my industry called UX because it is so important and customers do truly value it. We all know that we have many options for restaurants and stores and the vast majority of us will usually lean towards going to the nicer or newer one to shop even if it’s out of the way.

SEO Is Passive Traffic

They call SEO a way to drive organic traffic which is great. Someone who has no idea who you are is looking for a product you offer so they type the search criteria into their Google Machine and bam your SEO strategy is incredible and you are number one on the search results page. They click and now in less than 10 seconds (per Nielsen Norman Group) on your site you have to convince your audience that staying is worth it. Now the handful that stayed will take 30 seconds more (per Nielsen Norman Group) to determine if they are going to stay and purchase your product or ride the back button to salvation and to the second listing for a more comfy and quality online shopping experience.

Would they stay on your site? Would you stay on your site?

Digital Marketing Is As Important As SEO

Your active marketing strategy is as important as your passive SEO strategy because you can select your target markets. From there you present yourself to this market as a resource for goods or services. Your markets will be judging you as a brand and may never know that you are Bob Sherman, a kind natured philanthropist who dedicates his time to helping starving children and the creator of The Miracle Leash that will cut dog walk times in half or your money back. An organized and thought out branding strategy that portrays quality will carry over to your product and ultimately equate to conversions and a win-win scenario for you and your customers.

Google Cares About Your Site’s Design

I say Google (64% market share)  because who uses Yahoo (12% market share) and Bing (20% market share) these days? Google has been driving the internet experience forward in an effort to try to standardize the security and user experience of the web which is why we in the industry us their requirements as a benchmark work. They have begun enforcing mobile requirements for websites and ranking non-mobile sites lower even if they have proper SEO keywords. They are also starting to enforce HTML5 standards, how dare they.

In short it’s time to update your site and design anyway, might as well make it look good!

In Conclusion

Ultimately branding, SEO, digital marketing and UX come together to support your business and sell your products/services. This article just helps to portray a concept that starting with branding will create a solid foundation for SEO and marketing and should come first in priority.