Many marketers will make the mistake of viewing their SEO and their broader marketing as being separate. The assumption is that marketing entails things like social media marketing and advertising, whereas SEO involves adding lots of content to your website and using keywords. The two are entirely different and there is no crossover… right?
Some site owners will even go as far as to eschew marketing altogether and instead focus on only SEO as a tool to boost the status of their website.
But marketing and SEO are not separate. In fact, they go hand-in-hand and each supports the other. If you’re going to come up with an effective SEO strategy, then it needs to take into account an effective marketing campaign. And this includes things like social media marketing, web design and branding.
Why Branding Matters
So how does creating a great logo, web design and site name help you with SEO specifically?
Firstly, creating a brand for your site is something that Google highly recommends. Real companies are not called ‘How-To-Get-Big-Biceps.Com’, they are called ‘CrushingMuscle.com’. Brands help to give a business – and a website by extension – a persona and an identity. Think about the sites that are most successful on Google and you’ll likely find that they all use a brand rather than just a keyword as their site name!
Another reason that brands matter to Google is that brands matter to users. If your site has a great logo, a smart web design that matches the logo and a clear ‘mission statement’, then you’ll find that your visitors find it much easier to get behind your message and to become fans of your content.
That in turn means that they’re likely to spend long on your site, reducing your bounce rates. It means they will be more likely to share your links too. These are both things that Google will look at and view as a sign of a high quality website.
Another important reason to build a strong brand and spend time creating a site with high production values, is that it will send the right message to other site owners. You know, the sites that you want to work with when building links? Try and get a guest post from a top blog if your site looks like spam and see how it works out for you…
How to Design a Great Brand
So how do you create a great brand?
A great brand doesn’t start with a logo but rather with a mission. It starts by knowing exactly what it is that you want to deliver to your users and exactly what sets you apart from the rest. Your logo is then an expression of that and a label that will tell people what to expect when they come across your site.
It should also be well designed though and that means that it needs to be an AI (Adobe Illustrator) file and that it needs to be unique, identifiable and not overly complex.
