3 Tips To Make The Most Of The Close Relationship Between eLearning Branding And SEO
When it comes to branding, you have to distinguish internal and external components. Internal branding is the company's perception of its own brand – mission, vision, and values. External branding is closer to the real world as it mirrors everything people think about your brand. Admit it – your brand is what other people say about it when you're not in the room. It might not sound obvious but a comprehensive SEO strategy is what you need to create a positive eLearning brand image in the eyes of others.
Search Engine Optimization helps your website to get more organic traffic and convert it into sales, right? But, simultaneously, SEO may help you with improving your brand image. Сomprehensive keywords, backlinks, snippets, and images research will help you to get a coherent view of your brand, evaluate its main message, and build a better brand experience. Keep reading and you'll find out how to use both SEO tactics and consistency in the marketing workflow for your brand's benefit.
1. Research
If you ask your SEO experts about the keywords research you might hear a lot about the semantic core, search volume, and keywords grouping. Well, sounds good, but what's in it for branding? Researching all the queries with your brand keyword will show you whether people associate your brand with the service you offer. We may call the keywords research a modern-day marketing as it helps define the target audiences' needs, thinking, and desires.
What to do:
- Comprehensive keywords research. There are tools to help you with that. For example, a tool from SE Ranking provides combinations derived from multimillion internal databases (including long-tail keywords) and search suggestions:
Screenshot taken by Diana Ford
- Get the keywords from Google Keyword Planner.
- Review the queries from Google Search Console (the ones that lead users to your website from the search results).
- Check Google Trends;
Screenshot taken by Diana Ford
- Μonitor the Q&A platforms like Quora and relevant threads (e.g. Reddit) to find out what people think about your brand. You may monitor your brand mentions online via Mention to save your time and resources – just customize the settings to get live updates from the web and social media.
Note: make a research for all the options of your brand name as it's important to take into account all its spelling including typos.
Once you've got a brand semantic core, review it to figure out whether your potential customers receive your brand's message the way you want it. Here's one company's story: a jewelry brand launched many promo campaigns with similar slogans about beauty and elegance that addressed only women and didn't get a sales boost afterwards. But after the company made a brand keyword research, they found out that women don't actually buy their products themselves as they perceive them as gifts. Need we say a word that their next campaign appealed to men and hit the mark.
2. Analyze
It's a common knowledge that all the SEO specialists use dozens of tools to cope with their daily routine. If you ask them about the most helpful ones, you might hear about both separate tools and all-in-one platforms they use to analyze and evaluate different SEO parameters. Let's see what's in there for branding.
- Check your backlinks that influence the brand reputation, popularity, and domain authority of your website. You may perform the task with one click using such tools as SE Ranking's Backlinks checker or Majestic and get a complete list analyzed against many SEO parameters. It means that people are able to recognize your brand.
Screenshot taken by Diana Ford
- Analyze your website snippets for main brand queries – check if the snippet gives the user the correct information right from the search results and represents your brand just like you intended.
Screenshot taken by Diana Ford
- Search for images by your eLearning brand keywords. If you don't see your logo images there, well, you have to combine all the marketing and SEO efforts together to change it. The rule of thumb here is: your logo images Alt and Title tags should include the brand component.
Screenshot taken by Diana Ford
Note: when filling the tags stay away from the keyword stuffing while asking yourself whether you provide a useful information. The tag has to explain to the user what the image is about(remember, if people choose to disable images from their browser, they will see their Alt tags).
3. Be Consistent
While some brands gain the world popularity and recognition, others never go further a certain region or a certain niche. How is it?
There are 3 main types of brand awareness:
- Top of mind awareness – more than 50% of users associate a certain product category with a certain brand.
- Spontaneous awareness – users associate a certain product category with a few brands, and yours is among them.
- Brand awareness – users recognize the brand only in case of a direct interaction (eg, people see or hear the brand name, logo, packaging or the product itself).
Is your brand ready to grow up and reach a top of mind awareness level? Well, firstly it depends on its level of marketing competence as it includes a constant work on content marketing. The brands that keep their marketing consistent enjoy 3-4x the visibility.
A well-thought and consistent marketing work may save your time and give the results you dream of only in two cases – you take into account your target audience's needs and work hand in hand with your SEO team.
Instead Of A Conclusion
It’s a familiar story and it usually goes like this: an SEO specialist strives to get the top rankings for high-volume keywords in your niche. The marketing specialist responsible for the brand development is more focused on PR and key messaging and much less on the keywords. But the truth is – both activities are important for your brand awareness thus the efforts should be aligned. Only when branding and SEO are complementing each other and act synchronically to double their impact you’ll reach your goal of developing a recognizable brand.