Branding
With the UK economy slipping slightly this year, UK companies have shied away from considering brand development and rebranding initiatives. Shifting brands or rebranding is a risky proposition at a time when companies are simply trying to retain their current customers.
Instead, companies are putting their effort into leveraging their current brand power, especially on their web sites. You may have a lot of dormant brand power out there in the consumer marketplace. If this is the case, you may only need to get access to consumers to leverage its power. If your current Web site doesn't project your brand(s) well, you might consider creating new web sites.
With search engines, having more than one web site is effective. Not only do you have additional presence for your targeted keywords, the sites can actually support each others rankings well. Whether with one site or many, SEO is the most cost effective solution for getting in front of customer prospects and to make contact with current and former customers. High search engine rankings are a great way to remind them that you are still here open for business.
The War between Branding and SEO
It is not uncommon to see corporate marketing departments reject Search engine optimisation altogether because SEO practices can't be applied to rigidly templated web sites. SEO forums are filled with comments on this topic. The resulting loss for the company is staggering.
If a web site was built with the intention of being a promotional brochure, it indeed can present strong challenges for anyone to infuse the copy with appropriate keywords and utilize sophisticated linking strategies that enhance ranking power.
What changes the situation for branding efforts and brand management is that the brand by itself isn't generating customers. If your site has a full page Flash movie, you may have noticed you have almost no search engine rankings. Graphics and slogans may improve customer loyalty but a brand rarely creates a customer online. If you're looking to search engine marketing solutions, you may have found that what is missing is the initial reach to consumers. Online consumers are in control. They tell us what they want when the type it into Google search or Yahoo search boxes.
That means the brand experience needs to be adjusted in order to let the corporate or ecommerce site compete for rankings and get in front of consumers. After the prospect arrives at the site, there are ways of managing their brand experience. Keywords are powerful forces on the Web and getting a brand associated with a keyword phase is incredibly powerful branding. Top websites such as news.com, travel.com, cheapflights.com, ticketmaster.co.uk.
The key to integrating SEO with Branding is make keywords look interesting and sexy, even they aren't A talented designer on a mission to make keywords look good and page coding SEO empowered, along with an SEO copywriter that uses keywords in strategically important areas can get the job done. The end goal for SEO campaigns is high traffic and customer loyalty. |