Use Brand Awareness for Better SEO Link Building

Chuck Forbes - April 11, 2022

As part of your SEO strategy, a great plan for link building should be implemented. Link Building allows other relevant sites to link back to your site, or specific pages, highlighting products, services, and news. Search engines can calculate the number of links connected back to your site, as well as how authoritative those sites that are linking to yours are. The more traffic and credibility the sites have, the better chance you have to rank higher and successfully use link building to gain organic visibility.

If your link building strategy is just beginning, you probably have a focus on outreach. Outreach includes a plan to approach other websites and proactively ask them to link back to yours. If you have a great piece of content, or a rare value offer – outreach may be easy, and could find yourself with an elevation in links pointing to your site over 6-9 months.

However, link building can also work in reverse. Think about this – when Apple releases a new product and builds a webpage or separate site, do you think they need to do heavy outreach to gain links? Probably not, because their brand is so well known – websites who share technology news do all the work for them. Of course, Apple is a global brand, but the concept remains true for any size company or market – SEO link building can be achieved more efficiently by building brand awareness.

When working with clients, I try to outline their digital ecosystem, not just one part of their business. Yes, you have heard that SEO and SEM work together before, but have you explored all avenues of that relationship? If you create a strong digital ecosystem, outreach for link building can become something of the past. So how should you measure brand awareness? Here are a few good tips I have worked on with clients:

• Use your SEM campaigns to measure engagement growth (impressions, clicks, time on site)
• Measure & increase social media shares of your posts
• Feature high profile guest interviews and testimonials in your content – specifically videos & blogs
• Refine your targeted keywords for your blogs and site content to rank higher for the right audience you are trying to capture

Remember, implementing brand awareness and measuring success is still a long-term goal. However, brand awareness can be instrumental is making other parts of your digital ecosystem more efficient and in some cases, like link building, work for itself at a certain point.