Building a brand isn’t easy. First, you need to figure out what your brand is going to be and then you need to market it.

Marketing your brand is just as important as selling your services and products.

While you’re marketing your brand, you should also start leveraging SEO strategies to improve the awareness of it. Believe it or not you can build your brand with SEO.

Search engines are trying to fine tune their algorithms and choose bigger and better brands to rank higher on search engine results pages. It’s important to do everything you can to show search engines you have a brand that people want to know about.

Don’t worry, you can build your brand with SEO in these ways.

Publish High Quality Content

You need to work on publishing only content that delivers what your consumers want to know. If they have questions and problems, you need to answer those questions and  find solutions.

If your consumers search for entertainment, you need to find a way to provide content they will love to engage with and share with their online followers. Researching your audience comes first before you start publishing content.

This really is the best SEO and what it’s all about these days. If you do a great job for your readers/consumers then their increased engagement will be picked up by Google and your site will reap the rewards.

Show Off Your Expertise

Search engines don’t want to show their users information that might be inaccurate. That’s why it’s important to let people know how much you know with your content and social media posts.

The more capable you are at telling people about you, your brand, and the services or products you’re selling, the more people will turn to you for information.

Don’t be afraid to stretch a little. And I mean a little. This is generally because most people are afraid of self-promotion and consider it boasting. If you stretch a little from your comfort zone then you’ll likely be hitting the sweet spot.

Look to see what else your audience is interested in, and if it relates to your industry, don’t be afraid to share your thoughts and experiences. Overcome your personal obstacles and let the world know that you’re in town, and you can help.

When you are able to demonstrate authority in your industry and maybe even a related one, people will inherently want to link to you. They want to show their followers the information you are giving out because they receive recognition too. They do this by linking to your site. The process of getting people to link to your site is called link building. Link building is important to SEO because it shows search engines that you must know what you’re talking about if other people want to use you as a reference.

Just please, don’t pay for your links.

Use Google Keyword Planner to Guide Keyword Use

Google can learn a lot about you from what you publish online. To make sure you are correctly identifying yourself for search engines, you should use Google Keyword Planner. Use the Keyword Ideas section, type in your name or the name of your brand to see what comes up for keywords.

What you should see are keywords that are relevant to your niche. If you don’t see that, you have some work to do to make those connections. From that point, you’ll need to identify some keywords that will describe your brand and then you’ll need to publish content and share it on social media and other outlets in a way that demonstrates your authority on those topics.

Get in the Google Answer Box

Have you recently typed in a question in Google’s search bar and find that the answer comes up in box? Pretty nifty, right? Well, what if you could get your site to provide the answer for the answer box? It would be phenomenal because you would receive a ton of traffic and brand awareness because your site’s name would be clearly visible at the bottom of the box.

You can get featured in the answer box by providing answers to commonly asked questions in the Google search bar. If you structure the information in a streamlined way, you will have a higher chance of getting it featured in the answer box.

Remember, you need to develop yourself as an authority, and getting in the answer box does that.

Here are some tips for getting featured in the answer box:

• If consumers search for a definition, bold the word you will define and then provide a clear definition that provides more information than other sites do.
• If consumer want instructions, clearly have the word “instructions” at the top and then list the steps below it. Make sure that the steps are short and make sense because that’s what people want to see in the answer box.
• Try entering who, what, where, why with something that relates to your industry in the Google search bar and see what pops up in the suggestions drop down menu. That’s a hint for what others are searching for that have to do with your industry.

Write for Humans

Always remember, even though you are trying to optimize your site and brand for search engines, what really matters is your target audience.

Everything you publish online has to be for humans. That means, don’t use keywords that don’t make any sense. Make sure your articles are readable. Don’t stuff keywords, so that people reading your content will wonder why you keep using the same words or phrases repeatedly.

With these ways to optimize your brand for search engines, you’ll be able to improve your exposure online. As you gain visibility on search engine results pages, you’ll start to see increased traffic to your site and engagement in social media. This all leads to an increase in online revenue.

What do you think of these SEO strategies to boost your authority online? Do you have any others to add? Let us know in the comments.