Make friends with brand marketers

Joshua says: “Brand marketers should be SEOs’ best friends.”

Why is that?

“Brand marketing reaches where SEO can't. It drives demand, and it drives search interest.

SEO has always been an inbound channel, but lately, inbound is getting harder. With things like zero-click searches and AI overviews, the opportunities for getting the click are increasingly challenging, but brand search has always been very high intent and very high click-through rate, and it's also a ranking signal.

Working with our friends over in the brand channel, we should be devising strategies to drive more branded search, and SEO should be doing more to help the brand teams deliver on all of their work and communicate those results.”

What do brand marketers know that SEOs don't?

“They know how to generate demand, which is not particularly in an SEO's wheelhouse. Some people are good at it, but that's all that brand does. Brand also has a knack for coining a phrase.

Being able to coin a phrase that is unique to your client, intuitive to your audience, and that you can use to drive search via a keyword or search phrase that nobody else is searching for and doesn't overlap with your competitors, creates an effective moat.”

If you don't have a brand marketing team, how do you get more comfortable with that particular task?

“There are really fantastic resources out there on the web. There are some really great influencers and thought leaders in that space. I definitely advise looking them up, following them for a while, and seeing what they have to say.

There are also really great books. One of my favourites is quite an old one called Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy. It goes all the way back to one of the greatest minds in advertising, and it was written when advertising was entirely about brand. It talks about how you frame a brand, the way you convey the messaging, the way you highlight the value, and how you generate that demand.

It’s a really fantastic book, if you haven't read it, and it’s a really good way to get familiar with the mechanics of brand marketing.”

Is this still relevant in the age of agentic AI and AI search?

“It's more relevant than ever. AI search and agentic search are shifting discovery, but discovery is still happening.

It’s similar to what we saw happening on TikTok over the last five years. People were discovering brands and buying directly on TikTok, and that's not dissimilar to how we're going to be using LLMs in the future. The thing we can learn there is that effective brand visibility and brand marketing on those platforms is what drives those actions.

What we're seeing with LLMs is that people will discover on the platform, but they're still going to go back to search for that final step. It's almost like a validation step. We still have a way to go before we fully trust AI.

Being effective in your brand marketing – aiding discovery in a way that supports search, and having search be there to support those branded terms when they hit the SERP – is a really effective strategy that not a lot of people have capitalised on.”

How does SEO integrate with brand marketing?

“I'm a big fan of campaign-style project management. I love getting everybody into a room, getting all the ideas on the table, having everybody show up with their piece of research, and then talking about what it is you want to achieve, how you want to achieve it, the list of actions that have to happen, and then how you pace that appropriately.

Then, at the very end, you talk about how you are going to measure success. Different teams will measure it in different ways. I break it down into a couple of different stages. At the planning stage, SEOs should be showing up with their keyword research, competitor research, and backlinks. Who's talking about your brand, and does the brand team know about it?

In my experience, they don't really know that you're getting these spillover backlinks from third-party publishers. They want to go and get a link from The Today Show or Outdoor Life magazine. They don't see these natural backlinks that occur.

Showing up with those things and helping form the conversation – identifying gaps in where your audience is – can help them with their job of disseminating the messaging. We can be more effective at that. Coming in at the planning stage and providing all the necessary tools is really critical to getting everything off on the right foot.

At the execution stage, SEO is going to own optimizing landing pages for the branded phrases that you've helped shape with the brand team. Then, managing your SERP appearance. Maybe you have a featured snippet; maybe you want it, maybe you don't. Maybe you have site links showing up that you'd rather not show up. Maybe you don't have them showing, and you wish they would.

If you have an international site, you are making sure that the right pages are showing up for the right audience for your branded terms. You want to ensure that you get the most useful click possible. Sticking to those steps will get you 90% of the way there.

The first time you try this, it may not go perfectly. Track your learnings, track where you could do better, and have your KPIs. Remember that the reporting SEOs do is going to be very different from what brand looks at and what PR looks at. You can add some value by communicating that, while you may not have generated additional sales, beyond pure branded mentions across the web, you've increased branded search, click-through rate, on-site conversion, and changes in the backlink profile.

There's a lot of information that SEOs can use to enrich the overall marketing plan.”

How much has the user journey changed over the last couple of years, and how do you identify and plug the gaps in that journey?

“LLMs in particular have really changed it.

Something that SEOs haven't paid enough attention to is a concept that we talk about more in onsite search: there's an initial search, and then there are corresponding filtering searches. Essentially, you search once, you don't see quite the thing you’re looking for, so you search again using slightly different language. You add additional modifiers, and you get different results.

That's always happened in search. That shows up in Search Console data, and sometimes you get clicks and sometimes you don't. We analyse that very differently from how we should be analysing the LLM journey, because that's basically query fan-out.

What additional information does the user need to make an informed decision? Whatever the intent of that initial ask was, they need all of that information, and the LLM is going to try to give it to them all in one go. Then, at the end, they may take an action.

However, we have to remember that this could have started as an information-finding journey. Maybe they're not ready to purchase something, or maybe they are. That's going to be consistent across the experiences. Whether or not the person is ready to convert when they've done this search, the information gathering is now going to happen faster. They're more likely to get it all in one session, but we still have to wait for them to take action. That's where brand can step in and give them a push.

This is even a good example of where we can tap paid, and really great remarketing, If you do well enough to get them to the website – if your branded term raised an eyebrow and they clicked that result (either in SERPs or in an LLM), and you were able to cookie that browser – then you can remarket to them all day long to stay top of mind.

You can leverage that branded language to train a user’s brain for what to search in order to get them to come right back to you.”

What are the key objectives that SEO and brand should be targeting, and what can they learn from each other?

“Brand and PR look at similar things. They're looking at mentions across the web. Who's mentioning you? How much are people talking about you? What is the sentiment? Is demand growing? Search sees that information from the bottom of the funnel, where we see branded search impressions.

For a campaign like this, you'd be targeting an increase in branded search and generating more branded backlinks. You would want that branded product, that language that you're pushing out, to become anchor text on third-party websites and things like that. The checklist is pretty simple, but in terms of strategic objectives, you’re trying to strengthen the brand identity through a branded phrase that defines either you or the product.

Product branding is probably a bigger opportunity than overall branding. It's not uncommon to see brands with weak overall branding. You see this a lot in SaaS, where companies launch fast and brand identity doesn't go much further than a logo and colour scheme, but they expect it to develop over time.

You want to put in a little extra effort and really define the brand. Have branded terms for your products and your individual solutions, and then train people to search for those. That’s a great way to stand out and prevent competitors from cutting into that user journey, but it's also a great way to rank pages.

In the recent leaks, we found some interesting things regarding how Google works that focussed on things like Navboost and brand search. Somebody found a brand search patent for Google where the number of brand searches was supposed to be an intent signal and would push things up the rankings if Google could connect a branded term to a domain.

You can measure all of these as one large tableau and look at how many of them moved in a positive direction as you rolled out that campaign. Even if you don't get all of them to move up, some of these things are going to help you gain ranking over time, and subsequent iterations of your campaign should have greater success.”

What does effective product branding look like?

“You can achieve this by creating a unique branded name for your products. A really great example is Nike's Air Force Ones. If you look at search data for those, ‘Air Force One’ is the default search term. Sometimes you'll see ‘Nike’ thrown in as a modifier, but by and large, people search ‘Air Force Ones’ because it's a cornerstone brand in their entire category of shoes.

I worked at an agency where a client was a proctologist, which is a very unfun medical experience for anyone who has to go through it. People tend not to take those doctors' appointments, and it was a challenge to get people to sign up, commit, and show up.

The agency decided that they were going to brand the process in a way that made it less scary and less intimidating. They called it the ‘kinder colonoscopy’. It was on billboards, it was on paid advertising, and it was on mailers. They saw more than a 100% lift in people making appointments for this because it took away the fear, and it was simply smarter branding.

There was an actual difference in the product (they had a different process and a differentiating factor from other doctors' offices), but they were also smart enough to brand it.”

Joshua, what is a key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Clicks are eroding, and SEOs are being backed into a corner, but it's only happening where we don't push back against the limitations of our industry and our skill sets.

Stepping outside of those bounds and working with the rest of the marketing department opens up new opportunities to preserve our utility in marketing and strengthen the position of both other marketers and the businesses we work for.”

Joshua Squires is an Associate Director of SEO at Amsive. Find out more over at Joshua-Squires.com.