SEO for Brand Recognition and Visibility: Why is So Important & How to Start?

SEO for brand recognition. How can you optimize your brand to be identified in Google search results, to be recognized as an entity, to improve the brand rankings, and that your brand help you to establish as an authority for your non-branded targeted queries? To go through this, I have invited a couple of SEOs who I respect a lot, and I know that have been sharing a few very interesting resources about these particular topics. On one hand, I have Gianluca Fiorelli. He's an international SEO consultant and also the founder of I Love SEO. Hello, Gianluca. How are you?

I'm very fine. I'm very fine. Rested after the Christmas vacation.

Great to hear. Great to hear. On the other, we have Mordy Oberstein. He's the founder of Unify Brand Marketing. Hello, Mordy.

How are you? I'm good. Thanks so much for having me. And I know Gianluca on social media for years. It's the first conversation we're having. So thanks for being that matchmaker to make that happen.

Delighted to make this happen. So to start with today's conversation, I want to bring up the importance of this topic because this is not necessarily something new, but because of, I believe, very specific shifts and updates and also interviews that Googlers have been doing in the last year or so. It has become clear that Google wants to get rid of those middlemen from the web that were not necessarily the real companies or the real brands behind products or services, that they are looking to provide and give recognition and more visibility to brands, whether small or big. There's another point that I also highlighted a while back talking about the the challenges in SEO, that at a very, very high level, SEO is about solving 2 problems. The companies are small or a website small. The biggest SEO problem is to build your brand, build recognition that Google understands what you are doing, what you are about, to establish your popularity, your authority in your field. And when you become bigger and you're a big company, then the biggest issue tends to be more product-related, execution-related, technical-related. So it's interesting to see that brand building should be also particularly important for a lot of the companies that tend to overlook it for a long time because they're small. But in reality, this should be like the biggest area to tackle. So I wanted to ask you, how do you move the needle with your clients to make this happen?

I usually tend to work more with small to medium. So what I usually do is really try to talk to them translating everything as if they were starting or doing marketing, classic marketing offline. Let's say you are a B2B company and you already are doing things like going to trade fairs or creating visual marketing with your PDF, with your leaflet and so on. So I substantially tell what you are doing there should be translated also online because what Google is searching is to find a connection between what a company is in the real life and what a company is in the online life. So they start to understand that SEO, for instance, is not just about ranking for keyword X or keyword Y, But creating a reputation, rebuilding the same reputation they have probably already offline in the online environment.

That's such a good point, by the way. First off, on the offline-online thing, I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but it's really important for another reason, which is that your offline marketing resonates in a different way than your online marketing resonates, and that can impact what happens online, what people say about you, do with you, How they share URLs online. But I totally agree. But I'll take it like one step further back, like, because I've worked at big companies, I've worked with smaller companies, I've worked at smaller companies, and I find like there's a consistent problem, which is people don't invest in brand to begin with. And you see, by the way, you see a big part of this. I'll say there's another layer to this problem. People will label something as being brand when it's not actually brand. They'll go out there, they'll market their product, like, here's what we do with our product and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Love our product. That's product marketing. That's not brand marketing. Don't get confused between the two of them. And what happens is like, I kind of like tell people I split marketing into 2 phases. And when I'll sit down with somebody, I'll say there's 2 phases of your marketing. Phase 1 is setting the foundation and phase 2 is momentum. And phase 1 is where you're building like the big 3 in brand marketing, which is identity, positioning, and messaging. Messaging, by the way, all brands do, but it's really the least important. And I can talk about that, why that is later. And then phase 2 is where you start taking that identity and that positioning and that messaging, you try to get engagement momentum going, and that's where it impacts your performance. And what happens is brands or companies skip to phase 2 without really doing phase 1 aside from the messaging. And I'm not blaming anybody. It's a huge problem with big brands too. You're trying to get money in, so you're trying to get sales, conversions, clicks, whatever it is, and you don't want to spend time doing the things that are not going to immediately drive revenue. And you don't do them. But the problem is that it catches up with you when you don't focus on brand. The performance channels, SEO, whatever it is, they get more expensive and then they erode. And when they erode, you don't know what to do. What you end up doing is you'll look at, oh, our organic traffic has declined, or our clicks have declined. Fix that. But you don't fix the real problem. You just try to fix the immediate problem.

I think that you both covered 2 things that are critical, especially when convincing clients and new companies to invest or to align brand or take into consideration the brand for SEO, which is, oh, this is traffic that we already own anyway. Yes, the traffic might be coming from already existing customers, but if they are searching for questions about your product or service, it's because very realistically they have doubts. About switching to another solution or to see if they actually can rely on you to solve a specific problem and they are not sure. So you better tackle that to keep them happy, to keep them engaged, loyal, because it has been shown many, many, many times how it is less expensive to keep a client rather than to acquire a new one. And it was many years ago at this meetup that I had the chance to, to share a roundtable with an SEO from NetSuite. Netflix, who share something really interesting, how they were actively targeting branded queries about their service and products, because it had a very positive effect into their customer support spend. The people that they were able to provide answers to their doubts about their service, good FAQs, for example, or optimized support section of their website. Were people that they knew were not necessarily going to get in touch or wanting to get in touch with their customer support, which has a bigger cost. It's easier to minimize doubts and to tackle doubts directly by having a very well optimized presence targeting branded queries. And that is for the existing customers. Let's talk about potential new customers who are actually at the end of their customer journey, of the purchase journey. Already researching the last 2 or 3 potential products or services that they want to decide to buy from. And they start looking not into non-branded queries, but more into comparison. And I know that many companies hate the idea about doing comparison pages. I agree that there are very bad comparison pages out there, but there might be really good comparison honest pages with real testimonials, with honest implemented in a very ethical way, showing what they are actually good at and what they are not. And why customers should come their way, because they actually would like to minimize those potential customers or clients that are not necessarily a good fit, that will churn anyway. So this is a great opportunity to make the decision easier and bring more better customers that are actually a better match for them. So I love to explain that to clients showing like, no, no, this, there is a reason why you shouldn't be overlooking branded queries and only trying to grow non-branded, because when you grow the branded ones, this will be traffic that will convert much more straightforward. This is not necessarily traffic that you own anyway, unlike you think. Thank you very much. And this connects well with the next question that I had planned to ask regarding the specific steps and actions that you take with clients to develop a strategy around this. I understand that this might be very different depending on the size of client, type of clients. They already have a very well recognized brand and it's about pretty much just aligning and avoiding having a silo in SEO and having a good conversation to leverage a lot of what already exists. And it might be completely different, try to identify these opportunities for smaller companies or startups.

As I was explaining also in my very long post about SEO and brand. First of all, I don't want to overstep things that other channels, other marketers that I'm working with are doing already. So just focusing on SEO and so how search engines work, brands are entities, named entities. So the first thing that I want to optimize for is, is Google correctly identifying your brand as an entity? This means working for the knowledge graph, working with the knowledge graph implies creating a strong social media presence because Google uses social media to verify the existence of a brand. It's even more complex than it was before, which was just social media and Wikipedia. Now it's more things. It can be Crunchbase, it can be Glassdoor because Google is considering also these second-tier websites that it trusts. In order to understand the relation between entities and the nature of the entities. And then this means that also creating this kind of presence in other websites and always creating a semantic optimization of the brand citation is really important. Not just the name of a brand, but if you can already start the name of a brand with a context, semantic context of words and phrases related to what you as a brand are selling or providing to people. That is the very first foundation in the website to optimize schema. And then what we were already talking about before, managing and analyzing branded searches, both the ones that Google Search Console is already telling you. And for instance, in this case, I really love to combine with a crawler like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb and really looking in connection with the API of Search Console. So really going down and seeing the branded searches, but branded searches are not just the brand name. I would say the name of the products.

I know that we are going to talk about tools and resources that we use later, but yes, there are tools that implementing structured data like InLinks or Schema App or Wordlift that will literally crawl your website and even suggest you about the structured data and entities that you can use and pretty much generate a knowledge graph on your website, including the organization schema.

Google, it really relies on organization schema to have a sort of ID of the organization related to the website.

I wanted to jump back to something that Gianluca mentioned before about social and how social media factors in and second layers of social, second tiers of social media factor in. Because the way I approach this is I step back from channels first. Like the first and foremost, there are no channels. There's all channels because Gianluca is right. All the channels work, interact together the way I think I described the last time we talked, like Google's a moth and it likes digital light. So all the channels work together and they overlap. So what I generally find is that a lot of brands, small ones and big ones, and you know where you see this? SaaS startups or even like sometimes legacy SaaS. They don't really have a clear identity. They don't really have a strong positioning or differentiation from the other tools that are out there. And that's a huge problem because when you're trying to, let's say, get social media buzz going, momentum going, if you lack that differentiation, it doesn't happen. So I kind of break it down. Let's talk pre-channel and let's just talk about before we talk about your competitors and even your consumers. I know it's gonna sound strange. I talk with my client about who are you? What are, 'cause you have an identity, right? You have an offering. Well, who's you? Who is this you that we're talking about? And setting up an identity that's built on the way I differentiate it is built on depth versus built on like surface-like emotions. You wanna speak to something that's more integral. So things like fun are very surface-like. Things like connection and overcoming struggle, those are much deeper and those really resonate. You want to be about those things and setting up where you're talking about identity and you're creating positioning and your positioning is basically how you, now that we understand who you are, how you speak to your audience. Where do you fit in into their lives? Which should create messaging almost automatically. That's why I said before, messaging is the least important. Your messaging should almost be like natural based upon who you are and who you speak to and what they need.

I actually think that I have a great example about this and about knowing what is your brand positioning. And this is a question that we need to ask and very aligned with what is your unique selling proposition? How do you differentiate why they should choose you versus these other players for X or Y? So I had a client some time ago that was a cruise line. And literally some of the top searches about cruises is cheap cruises, like the second most popular query in the sector. And they had all of the, let's say, raw popularity in order to be able to rank for this query if they wanted. They didn't because they understood their brand positioning. They were not cheap. They didn't try to rank for cheap because they were not cheap.

Yeah.

Yeah. This word has a certain connotation regarding the quality of the service and the expectations that it can set with your potential customers. They didn't want it. And it's critical. And I wonder like how many SEOs actually have this, they go through when they do their keyword research, audience research to understand not only their behavior, but that behavior, how does it match with the actual unique selling proposition and offering of the company that they're working with in order to understand how does it match and when worth it to go for certain type of Topics, areas, depending on your unique selling proposition and positioning. 100%.

Preach. Because I don't think most brands even do that, let alone like SEOs. What happens is, so when you set up your identity, your next question that I ask is, okay, who are you for? Because you're not for everybody. If you are, and that's why identity is so important, because if you understand who you are, now you should be able to understand who you're for. And the next step is to understand, okay, like If you're for this audience, what does that audience need? What are they about? What's bothering them? What's— and I have a whole framework for this. You can find it on my website, like diving into your audience and understanding like where are they at mentally, emotionally, and what do you speak to? And if it's not cheap, then don't say cheap.

I want to highlight how important it is because I believe that at the end of the day, it starts with it. It will drive a very good part of how you perform. Your keyword and competition research, and it will end up also driving your content strategy and the content optimization process and what do you end up going for to rank. And then how, what do you measure and how do you measure success? So at the end of it, I believe that this particular question will drive a lot of it. I think that this also touches another very important topic that I see a lot of conversations about that, especially given AI overviews and the impact to informational queries and the top of the funnel content. So I see posts in LinkedIn and conversations about it's time to stop wasting your efforts and money and resources trying to go for very top of the funnel informational queries or how-tos and invest more into your money-making content, which is what eventually Google won't try to erode and negatively impact with AI overviews. And I'm like, look, wait a second. No, I mean, no, the way that you build authority subject matter expertise and to build your brand is with very well optimized informational resources that connect with the interests of your audience and show what you are good for and what you are about. And I have a couple of really good examples. Zillow, a lot of the resources that have brought traffic, backlinks that they can pass to other more money-making pages on their site, let's say. But how they have the authority is with their Zestimates pages, trying to provide a free resource to estimate the cost of properties around the US and guides about the indexes of the pricing and trends in the property industry. And they have gained recognition and they were able to establish themselves in a very competitive market by providing all of their insights and Becoming the leader in this sector is not only about a very straightforward transactional conversion that we should be able to bring, but we should be able to provide visibility to all of this stuff that these companies are doing and can make a difference.

There is always this zero-click SERP as people were just searching and clicking and stop. In reality, people are searching and what is important is the search session. So the period they dedicate to perform a search, which is not just one search. So that's why I always tell to my clients, okay, if people are starting with a search, we should see what are the potential paths, search journeys they can do starting from the search in order to always be there visible in the first page. Because it's a psychological effect. If I start always seeing you there, it's logical, psychologically true that people will start to remember you and create some connection saying, okay, if this website, aka brand, is always present in all this search journey that matters to me, that means that probably is relevant for that and will end clicking, maybe not in the first step of a search journey, but in the 15th one. And this is still a good way to take advantage of SEO. But for that, then you have to do everything you have told. So you have to target the main topic and then going down, dissecting the main topic in all the potential things that you know are important for your audience.

It's almost like SEOs feel like, oh, E-A-T or E-A-T. Like, we're just going to focus and create that. You don't create EEAT. It's the result of a brand targeting an audience and resonating with them and really speaking to them for a long period. You think like, I don't know, like a big brand, I know Coke sat down and said, we're going to work on our EEAT today.

They should already have them.

100%. Going beyond content and EEAT alignment with branding and experience, like experience, right? Do you want to be recognized as this very intrusive website showcasing ads every single scroll that doesn't allow you to even buy or convert without all of this upselling, cross-selling that makes you to just move forward with the next play. That is also part of your branding, 100%, the experience that you get. And we know how that is also even taken into consideration by Google. So I would like to hear what are those top tools, top resources that are useful for you to implement the strategy and the more tactical activities when optimizing for brand. I will say that I love a few of these features that we have in many keyword research tools that allow us to do a keyword list for any type of seed term. So what I do is to add a seed term like the name of the company, the brand of the company, get all of the query permutations around them and see which are the websites that rank for them that are not my clients to recognize what is the share of the branded traffic that is going elsewhere and what is the sentiment in this content.

100% for that very thing. I use that on the brand side also, right? So I want to see, let's say, take a competitor and take my client. What are the branded keywords that the competitor is getting? Is my client missing out? Are they— let's say there's a product that they both offer. And the competitor is getting searches for brand plus whatever product and the client's not. Like, that's a huge indicator. Wait a second, you have an identity, you might have identity issue, positioning issue. Something's not right. You offer this, you're not known for this. People aren't searching for it. Another great tool, by the way, I'll plug. So you can do that, by the way, in like all the SEO tools, Semrush, whatever, SparkToro. I like, so one of the things that if you're trying to understand like where a brand is at, where things are at, where the audience is really at rather, the sentiment of the audience, what they're looking for, what kind of other things are out there, what their interests are. So let's say you could type in that or like baseball, I always go back to sports, into SparkToro. You put a particular team in there, you put the Yankees in there. You could see, for example, SparkToro will drill down and see like, okay, here are the big name players or the big name podcasts. Here are some hidden gems. And you can start to see like, oh, people are interested in this particular, like, you know, these subset of podcasts. Why? What about those things is resonating? Why might they be resonating with my audience? Would my client also be able to resonate that same way? Are they doing that same thing? What's not happening on their side? Why are they not resonating? And what are they not doing that some of these other people are doing? So that's a good tool to use also.

Regarding competitive research, I usually, I like to use, for instance, sometimes when a new brand is proposing itself, like a new software as a service company, a new company doesn't have branded searches. So let's see, who are your competitors in the field? What are their branded searches? And so already prepare the content that could target that kind of searches for you. So this is Semrush. Ahrefs, other kind of tool. And then I return to your own Search Console with a good crawler or Search Console directly with exporting everything on BigQuery. So to have a historical of all the keywords in the case of branded queries, in order to see how they are evolving or if you are losing traffic or impression. I usually use more impression than clicks in this case to measure visibility. impression for web ranking category, why are decreasing? So let's see who is taking your impression, your clicks, and so on. For a knowledge graph that like the Google Knowledge Graph API search tool by audits.com, it's a wonderful tool for doing everything, you know, the first check of a knowledge graph.

Speaking of the Google Search Console data that, I mean, it's free data that you have already right away. I shared 2 weeks ago. In SEO FOMO, a free Looker Studio dashboard that will allow you to get insights directly splitting non-branded and branded queries. It has a configuration guide in which I show where you should add your brand terms that will be filtered out directly with a regex filter that I have already added in there. So you can monitor on an ongoing basis how it grows over time, but also allows you to easily download the One hand, the branded, on the other hand, the unbranded, along with all of the metrics in a very straightforward way and with the rank pages already directly. So that I expect that highly, highly facilitate the process. Another very useful resource speaking about the knowledge graph is the serpapi.com/knowledge-graph-free-tool, which I love that it does 2 things very, very quickly. It shows directly your, the brand SERP, so you can visualize If you are already recognized in the knowledge graph as a brand, if you have a knowledge panel, the inclusions there, and you can then realize if it is worthy for you to go and claim the entity and make suggestions in there, but also all of the information that is included in there. So you can start identifying if it is aligned with your social presence, with all of the presence that you have, if the messaging is the correct one and so on. To take that into consideration also when updating the structured data on your website and understanding also what are all of these additional sources that Google is taking into account. They are already showcasing in the knowledge panel where they are getting information from you. Let's remember that is not only what you say about you, but what others are saying about you. So it is worthy if, for example, in my case, when I do this for my own name, I see a lot of interviews that I have done in the past. In YouTube or in major publications and so on. And that is the information that is pulled out, out there. So let's extrapolate this with what we do with our clients, right? It's very well worthy many times to see the type of sources that are showcased there, even if there are no direct links, like that doesn't mean that it doesn't have value because it's how Google starts recognizing the brands that we work for and where it pulls the information about them. So validating that recognition and how you are showcased there is very important.

Importance of monitoring the branding, citation, and mention, because we know that search doesn't start on Google.

Yeah.

Especially now. So it's important. And here I'm returning to the very beginning of our conversation, to the relationship with other channel stakeholders. our social media marketing, our email marketer, and so on. Brandwatch in this case is really cool. You, Aleyda, shared in one of your presentations a tool that I started to test and I like it a lot, which is buzzabout.ai.

If you don't know BuzzAbout, go and take a look at it, buzzabout.ai. It shows the conversations about your brand in major social media platforms and Reddit and TikTok, Instagram, I believe, and so on. And it actually makes a really good use of AI, pretty much segmenting the topics and the sentiments of those conversations.

And then you can see how it's different, the conversation, depending on the social media. This is a really cool feature of the tool.

To wrap up, I would like to ask you for a last tip about brand building and brand recognition in Google. My one tip will be related to this, go and not only think about optimizing the presence within your own website, on your own website, but major presence that you have in social media, go and optimize it too accordingly. Link back to your website, please. And make sure that the description there is updated, is how you want to be recognized. And also go and take a look at which are the websites that are taken into account by Google as a source. For the knowledge panel within the knowledge graph. If you still don't have them for your own brand, go and take a look at your competitors and see which are these websites and try to get coverage there. Try to get interviews and some sort of visibility in there in case you are not yet recognized to try to, let's say, replicate and improve further your brand recognition. There is also a learningseo.io resource space, a section where I have already gathered a lot of resources, reliable resources about this topic, SEO for brand recognition and visibility from Gianluca Mordi and many other SEOs who have talked about this?

Just a couple. One, in the very beginning, when we are asking all the questions to our clients or our bosses, if we are working in-house, always ask for the latest version of a brand bible of the company because the brand bible is where Supposedly the brand, the, the company has set up all the things that Mordy is always talking about. So positioning, the identity of a brand, and also the tone of voice. Because sometimes you, if we are doing SEO-related content and we don't know really what is the tone of voice, we are going to create a big shift and disconnection between what the brands want to sound, want to be, and what we are really talking, how we are really talking. And then secondly, it's more about organizational stuff. Always work together, never work in a silo, always work together with the other people, because if not, you can incur in one channel talking and saying one thing and you talking and saying the opposite things. And this is problematic for a brand in general, but in SEO is going to be problematic because you're starting to have your SEO strategy and tactics and content totally misaligned with all the other things.

Very similar to what Gianluca is saying, like brand is like therapy. You have to do the work. It doesn't just happen. So if you're an SEO and you're working and you want to leverage the power of brand, so hold, hold your client, hold your stakeholders accountable, like in a nice way. Make sure they're doing that foundational work that's gonna help you be able to maximize the brand for the SEO or whatever performance you're trying to achieve. So if you see that they're not doing that foundational work, find a way to get them to do the work because if you don't do the work, and as I mentioned before, brands really often skip over that positioning, which is like positioning is your brand to a large extent. They skip over that, they skip right to the messaging for a variety of reasons. Hold them accountable, make them do the work. That's my tip.

Amazing. Thank you. Thank you both very much. I believe that with all of the thoughts and conversations and tips and insights resources, it will be much easier for SEOs to start taking this topic into account in an actionable way. And if you like this content, please subscribe to the Crawling Mondays channel. If you want to stay updated about this and much more, subscribe to the SEO FOMO newsletter, all for free, very straightforward, and Start following Gianluca and Mordy, who, as you can see, have a wealth of knowledge about this particular subject and beyond. Thank you. Thank you very much, Gianluca and Mordy. It has been a pleasure as usual. And until the next edition, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.