Put brand SEO at the heart of your efforts

Annika says: “Make brand SEO a firm part of your analysis and strategy.

Consider brand almost as a superpower for websites and companies. I would count it as one of the three main pillars that can give you a huge competitive advantage.

The first pillar is topical authority, which is about content and content marketing within SEO. The second pillar is link authority, and the third pillar is definitely brand. Although brand is part of both of those other elements, there are ways that SEOs can analyse it and make it a firm part of their strategy.

That could be from the start – with a new website or a new client – or you can make space for brand within an ongoing strategy that you’ve already created.”

Why are topical authority, link authority, and brand SEO such key elements?

“They’re the areas of highest importance when it comes to opportunities for having a competitive advantage. Those are the areas where you can be really unique.

They also take a lot of time. In that sense, it’s not easy to build topical authority, brand authority, or link authority; it is a long process. Essentially, they are areas where you can be unique and different from your competitors – and brand is definitely one of them.

Brand is all about the distinctive qualities of your product or service, and how it differentiates from your competitors. If you think of brand conceptually, but also how important it is during the user’s journey, there’s so much that you can take control of to make sure that you’re not leaving any money or opportunities on the table.”

Why is brand so important for SEOs in 2025?

“One of the biggest reasons is that the competition in general is getting harder. There are more brands out there and more websites, and you can struggle to differentiate yourself. Consumers are super savvy now, whether they’re B2C or B2B. The buyer journey is getting longer and longer, there are more decision-making points, and those journeys have become more complex.

We often associate brand with navigational searches, and the side of search intent where the brand is already familiar to the customer, but it also comes across through informational and commercial searches. For those types of journeys, when the customer lands on your site, you need to instantly make them trust you – even if they arrive through organic informational search.

That’s not very easy to do, and the only way you can do it is with your brand. You need to present them with a level of value or quality so they can feel like, if they give their money to this brand, they know it’s going to the right place.

With navigational searches, people have so many different touchpoints with the brand, like seeing an ad on social. They get bombarded with consumer products through Instagram or Facebook, and what they do next is Google them. They want to find out if they’re a real brand and whether or not they can trust them.

Imagine how many times the consumer would do that search based on seeing the brand somewhere, or hearing about them through word of mouth. It’s quite unusual for them to make a purchase straight away, from the first instant that they come across your brand.

There are so many elements that you need to add to your strategy to make sure that they do trust you, and they can confidently say that they’re happy to put some money into the products or services that you’re offering.”

If an SEO starts working for a new brand, how do they identify that brand’s health?

“There are three key questions to answer when you start working on brand SEO. Firstly, does Google even consider you a brand? You can do that quite easily by searching the brand on Google and looking at all of the results that are available.

If nothing comes up, then you know that there’s a problem and you need to fix it. Whether it’s in traditional searches, AI overviews, images, news articles, etc. – are you visible, does Google recognise you, and do your brand signals have any power?

Once you’ve established the SERP real estate for your brand, the next question you need to ask is whether people are searching for your brand in the first place. One of the simplest metrics for finding that out is to search on a keyword research platform. Look for your brand name, look for variations of your brand keywords, and see if there are searches. You can look on Google Trends to see whether it is trending up or down. Then you understand whether your brand has some popularity in search already or if you need to push for that popularity.

The third question to ask is, do customers trust your brand? That can be answered through the metrics that you have on your site. Do people convert? Do people come back? Do they buy? You want to understand whether there’s a difference between what the user expects to see from your brand versus what you are actually offering them.”

Is there an automated scoring system that you can use for this?

“I’m sure there might be some, or there will be in the future. I’ve created a checklist that I shared at brightonSEO, and it’s quite a simple system.

As long as you know exactly what boxes you’re trying to tick, the manual work is worth it. Then you can have a discussion with your team about how your brand is doing in terms of helping your SEO performance and your successes organically. Is your brand working hard enough? Are there any elements that you need to prioritise to make sure that you’re hitting the right metrics in the right way?

Although automation is great and helps to save time, sometimes manual work is needed so that you can process it and provide some kind of audit or report to your stakeholders or your clients. It’s interesting to know what’s really going on with your brand, and you can’t necessarily automate it all.”

What are some tactics that SEOs can use to quickly improve their brand SEO?

“There are quite a few, but the quickest one is content.

When the user lands on your website, especially if it’s from a branded search, they will most likely come to your homepage. What do they actually see? What can they read? What can they see above the fold that could already make them interested in your offering?

You can’t assume that they are interested just because they came to the site. They might be comparing you to a competitor, and they might be more interested in that competitor. You need to put the messages out there that can help them with this decision-making process.

It’s also about focusing on the branded content on your site in general. Do you have a mission statement? Do you have a very comprehensive About Us page? Are there ways that you are pushing those brand signals, for both users and search engines, so that they can understand what makes you different?

The second task, and perhaps the more comprehensive and time-consuming, is building that credibility – whether it’s by getting reviews or attending awards within your industry. You want to get that visibility through external areas to show the credibility of your brand.

The third task, which can be the most time-consuming but also the most rewarding, would be the digital PR and thought leadership aspect, where you showcase your brand in specific industry publications. You’re building that expertise and showcasing that you really know what you’re talking about because you’re a thought leader in your industry.

Those are the most obvious tasks to add to your SEO strategy.”

Is this just an SEO’s job or should other marketing channels be involved with brand SEO?

“Everybody should be involved. If you look at the marketing strategy as a whole, brand is part of all of it, in terms of the kind of messaging that you’re putting out – whether it’s in ad copy, social media posts, the visual identity of the site, or the other websites that we’re happy to be associated with. It’s everywhere.

I know it can seem a bit overwhelming, and you might be wondering where to start, but that’s where the initial analysis is very important. Then, you can start bringing in information and data from other channels.

For example, you might see that your engagement rates on social media are low, which could be something that you can work on with the social media team to ensure that everybody’s following the brand guidelines. If you’re not getting any traction or the site engagement is low, maybe the brand guidelines need to be updated. It’s a very collaborative effort across the board.”

If your brand is completely consistent across other platforms like social media, does that benefit your SEO as well?

“Absolutely. The users and the search engines are not going to stop at your website. You need to ensure that everything is consistent across the board. Wherever your brand is mentioned, you need to keep up that presence and the image that you’ve built. It also makes it much easier to understand what makes you different from your competitors.

It’s really good to share those guidelines with different teams so that you don’t start building a presence in one channel that’s very different from your presence in another channel. Consistency is definitely key.”

Are the three pillars of brand SEO, topical authority, and link authority very closely linked?

“Absolutely. Brand can help both the link authority and topical authority, and vice versa.

If you’re creating content for a specific brand, you need to think about the brand’s purpose and why they’re writing that content for their audience – and the audience needs to be quite specific. You can spend hours and hours on content that you think is searched for because your keyword research tools said so, but perhaps your audience isn’t really searching for that.

You want to build authority within your industry, as a leader and an expert. Link authority comes along when you’re doing content marketing campaigns, whether it’s by being associated with another brand and getting a link from their site or through digital PR campaigns where you’re pushing your experts and spokespeople to potentially be seen as a well-known brand in the future and improve that authority.

Those mentions and the content that you create can also help your brand signals, in the long term.”

How do you sell the value of brand SEO to other people in your organisation if they haven’t bought into it yet?

“As with everything, it’s really difficult to know what the results could be in advance, but a really good way to do that is by comparing yourself to your competitors. There’s always a benchmark that you can showcase, to demonstrate that you don’t want to miss out.

One helpful metric is Share of Search. The great thing about Share of Search is that it’s a percentage of a pie. That’s a really good way to show how you’re doing against your competitors. You are able to look at the whole market and how many people are actually searching for your brand compared to your competitors.

If you’re one of the smallest slices of the pie, that means that you are literally leaving money on the table. Whenever you bring up comparisons like that, especially if you can validate it with the fact that branded traffic usually converts much better than unbranded, you’re talking about conversions, lead generation, and revenue.

That’s when shareholders perk up and they want to learn more. Competitor comparison is usually a great way to start.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“One of the things that I keep seeing, especially in the industry, is competitor analysis and content gap analysis when you are deciding what to write about. Although content gap analysis can be a good way to build your initial content strategy, if you’re using that as your only source of truth long-term, you might be heading the wrong way with your brand.

One of the things that buyers are saying, especially in B2B, is that a lot of the brands that they would want to buy from are very similar. All of the websites seem very similar and it’s hard to pinpoint any uniqueness.

That’s one of the areas where you should spend time: investigating the brand, understanding your brand, and seeing how you can make content that resonates with your audience and not your competitors’ audience. The uniqueness factor is key.”

Annika Haataja is SEO Director at Seeker Digital, and you can find her over at Seeker.Digital.