SEO is Branding

Guest Poster: Ben McKay, Freelance Search Marketing Consultant, Just Me and My

Ben McKay has been in marketing since 2001, in various online and offline campaign management roles. In the last 3 years he has made a more permanent move into search marketing, working in-house and on a consultancy basis for various marketing and web design agencies

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Lately, I’ve been developing ideas around the ideas of how it would be best to ‘teach’ someone SEO. It has always occurred to me that because of the intricacies and the continual evolution of search marketing and SEO more specifically, it really must be quite difficult to pin down in regards to methodology or content to teach.

I’m self-taught, like most of the people out there…well actually I say self-taught, there are a number of SEO heroes that I like to thank now and then. ;)

Marketing > SEO

I regard the SEO consultancy that I do as heavily influenced by my previous life in marketing management roles, as opposed to a strictly scientific or techy role. It’s funny because most people get into SEO by accident – e.g. only 3% of SEO’s plan to take SEO as a career – what a surprise!! Ultimately this shows us that there isn’t a clear route into the career, maybe we were involved in Web design, copywriting, PPC, agency account management or traditional forms of marketing previously?

In a similar way, as there are so many different streams into this career there are so many different backgrounds of which people derive their skills…which makes the work of SEOs very difficult to describe as there are so many variances. That’s perfectly fine by me – it means we’re not all clones churning out the same ideas, and makes following conversations on Twitter rather fun at times!

For me though, SEO is all about creative marketing, looking at tools, research, analytics with marketing-tinted glasses. And this is where the brand analogy comes from.

How does SEO work in the same way as a brand?

Search engine optimisation is no longer an exercise of matching keywords onsite/offsite to that of the search query. It’s a game of inferred meaning (latent semantics). Meaning must be found throughout all aspects of the site – and literally everything should be used to communicate consistent, yet subtle, meaning to the search engines. And in my mind, brands are managed in the same way. A brand is:

The set of physical attributes of a product or service, together with the beliefs and expectations surrounding it – a unique combination which the name or logo of the product or service should evoke in the mind of the audience.

Chartered Institute of Marketing

That’s helpful, because in the same way that SEO communicates to search engines, it highlights that meaning is found in more aspects than physical observations, but content that is given priority in the navigation, site structure, page layout, etc…here’s a direct comparison…

• Brands – every public activity, either physical or not, communicates something to consumers.
• SEO-ing a Website – every implicit or explicit activity, made on and off the site, does or could communicate something to the search engine.

If we think of search engine optimisation as branding, I think this can help to teach people about it. There are a great deal of items that are inferred, implied, suggested, implicit in the way that SEOs operate – so much of it is beyond number-crunching and keyword usage, and requires a degree of marketing flare to be truly successful. Just like brands do.

SEO Leaps Beyond Tools and Techniques

The idea that SEO is marketing has been agreed far and wide, something that is unlikely to be disputed, but we do however slip into talking about techniques and tools far more than we do about inferred meaning from decisions made on our site, and I regard this as very important…For instance, some of the greatest artists take great pride in the detail…and this is simply what makes them the best. It is not necessarily their brushes, but their vision and insight, and how they pull together meaning from so many brush strokes.

A Professor of Cybermetrics technologies even states that:

The search engine optimisation profession is very much an art rather than a science.

Mike Thelwall

As SEO’s, I believe it’s worth bearing this kind of logic in mind, as it’s so often the attention to detail and intuition where the quality and meaning is found.

Subtle SEO Branding Not Over-Branding

Remember, it is possible to over-optimise – this is called spam! But really, you can pass algorithmic thresholds – stick to clearly, but not excessively, communicating your SEO goals via all forms of on-site SEO branding, and work hard to influence as many of your off-site factors regarding how they are communicated to search engines…if your inbound link is next to content about Viagra, then ask the webmaster to move it to more preferred content. Relevancy / meaning / semantics is inferred in all these decisions. SEO decisions are the same as branding decisions, your just branding to search engines.

Over optimising can put people and search engines off in the same way big brash brands can put people off. Subtlety in site-wide meaning is key…

Examples of where this thinking maybe helpful include:

1. When we are writing content – we can optimise for search engines or social media, we know search engines are focused on latent meaning, so write content that draws from this – keywords are limited in value now…think meaning over keywords. ‘Books’ has very little meaning, but ‘buy children’s books as a Christmas present this year in the shop’ has much more meaning. It relates to selling, and it is child and seasonally focused.
2. Inbound links – the perfect links come with a wide range of situational and relevancy factors, and all promote meaning and value to the search engine. The same way marketers hope their brands communicate to their consumers via sponsorship deals and advertising.
3. Site structure – if the information is tucked away in the darkest depths of your site, the search engine infers that this is not as important as a page that is linked from the homepage…meaning is found everywhere!

…and there are examples for every ranking factor!

Other benefits of thinking of SEO as a brand

Taking SEO projects on like a re-branding exercise can be very helpful. For instance, if it has been decided that you are looking to target a group of keywords and searchers, then each decision that you make on your site needs to infer meaning – thinking along the lines of the page format, information architecture, site structure, inbound links, etc creates consistency in what you are trying to communicate…in the same way you want to communicate a brand – just think about the importance of influencing/uninfluencing in all aspects of online activity!

So…

In several meetings with clients I have repeated the cliché that SEO is not about doing something 100% better, it’s about doing 100 things 1% better. I have thought this to be quite a helpful phrase…but I think to make it “100 things 1% more meaningful” adds even more value. My perspective is that if we see ourselves as people who focus on SEO in the same way as we as branding then we can go a long way regarding analysis, presenting meaning and even a spot of flare…

In the same way you might want to leverage targeted advertising to promote a particular meaning around your brand, think about how your can leverage the wealth of resources out there to promote meaning to search engines about your website.

And next time…

Next time you are charged with the role of SEO-ing a website or even facilitating SEO training, why not see the website and SEO as a re-branding exercise that needs to clearly communicate the message to both users and search engines. I always try to answer the question “what does this tell the search engine about this content / website / link / etc” whenever I make a decision on a client’s website.

Try it, you might like it!

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• December 17th, 2008
• Posted in SEO