Increased Brand Awareness via PPC and SEO - Increasing Brand Power with Effective Search Engine Marketing
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Within the search engine marketing arena, branding takes the form of a new art. First, it is not enough only to promote a site, via SEO efforts, to top organic results. You need to add paid listings into the advertising mix. Why? You want consumers to see as much of the brand name as possible among all possible results. You want to conquer as much visual space on the SERP as possible. And, as with banner ads that are used to maintain and increase brand awareness among Web users, you want to put in a logo or an image of the trademark besides the search engine listings whenever possible. Many PPC programs today allow you to do that for a premium fee.
So let's see what you can do.
Optimizing a Brand Name within the Title
The first SEO-related action you should take is in your title. Usually, when promoting a brand name within a certain target market, the competition will be hard if not fierce. If the brand is already known and trusted, you want to differentiate your listing from all the search engine results that are viewed by the user. For example, if you search the incredibly competitive search term of “search engine optimization” and examine the results on the first page, you may see that bruceclay.com and High Rankings stick out a little more than the rest despite the fact that neither are ranked within the first three organic results. In effect, some people recognize their names and I bet that they get more clicks because of that.
But what happens if you’re optimizing a site that is just starting to promote a brand and no one really knows it? That’s a harder case. First, go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and type in your brand name. Now look under "Similar Keywords." At best, the major search terms that you would like to target appear in the list –- and the higher, the better, since that means that Google sees your brand name as being closely associated with your targeted term (e.g. “Absolut” as a brand name is related to “vodka” as the main term you plan on targeting).
However, if your brand is new, it is most likely that Google will not show any terms that you planned on targeting. In that case, you need to decide whether to compromise keyword targeting focus for the sake of showing your brand name in the Title, or whether you focus on your term without having any unrelated words of a brand name within your Title. Personally, I would recommend the latter approach until building some critical mass of incoming and effective traffic to the site before wasting any characters within the Title. Once that mass of incoming and effective traffic is achieved, I would start pushing the brand name.
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