Friday, April 15, 2011

SEO vs Branding

SEO vs Branding both are marketing strategies. Both are opted to increase sales. Generating high ROI. We will describe a comparison between both business strategies in details.

Branding is traditional approach to attract customers and win loyalty. SEO is all about targeting actual customers. Branding requires huge budget but SEO is cost effective. Usually big giant companies have budgets to invest in branding and running marketing campaigns using all media means but for a medium and small sized company budget comes first as a major constraint and SEO helps to invest the capital in nurturing those efforts which can bring potential and targeted customers. Ultimately it increases sales and profit.

For an SEO expert there is always challenge what to promote a brand or the well optimized site. For the CEOs brand is more important because what actually they earned is the loyalty of customer and impact in his mind. Customer will refer the other for the same brand. As I told you earlier it is a traditional marketing strategy so owners have different focus and people are having different aspect for what they are looking for.

To Understand this scenario lets have an example: It starts from the keywords, in a company who was selling GRP Pipes (Glass Re-enforced Plastic). The debate was centered around what the manufacturers call it and what the customers call it. Manufacturers were more focused on their brand and its relevant keywords to be promoted and used in SEM campaign. But question was how people are searching for the grp pipe. Arab searchers may not use "grp pipe installers" keywords in their searches rather they would be using "grp pipe structured buildings" or somewhat like this. And may be another Asian is using "grp installation company"
Now whats the nightmare? People are looking for buildings with grp pipe installation won't be able to find the example over searches or the completed projects page of the same company who is providing service for grp pipe installation.

For a big company the branding keyword requirement wins because they have built the trust through their name. But for the smaller company where the customer relationship is building, the SEO organic strategy wins.


An SEO expert builds the strategies with improved web site structure, web site content and linking strategies to get your web site organically listed on the first page of major search engines.

SEO can also be used as a branding tool. If the SEO expert think wisely he can settle down the clash between SEO and branding. Because no doubt the brand is supreme important as well. It is earned in years by huge investments. The SEO must be included in the marketing strategy because it is cost effective way to bring targeted customer.

Brand may be well known in a particular region but SEO brings it to horizons. So either the product line is promoted or the brand, it converts in to profit. CEOs and other manufacturers should always consider an optimized SEO solution to promote their business over multi-billion rupees Internet.

Important point to be noted is bringing brand through SEO can be toughest marketing strategy but yet not to be ignored. So either facing a clash between SEO or organic searching and branding, one must build a unique strategy to blend the brand within SEO. Secondly if the product's target market is not associated with Internet, SEO can do nothing about it. Like a construction consultancy and management company wins the project through links or advertisements because they are already known in the industry and people looking for them do not use Internet as a tool to find best among them. But still people are considering SEO as a better marketing tool over Internet. This way or that way to make the brand drilled in customers mind or to bring targeted customer SEO is must effective and supportive.

Lets take an example of DELL. In Pakistan and rest of the world for laptop brand DELL is considered as most reliable. Why? They just show up in google's top ranking in the SERPs of organic searchers. When a person is looking for latest laptop and reliable laptop and he finds DELL at top. Instantly a concept is built that among all it is better because search engine is showing it on the top. Now brand is well known but SEO strategy helped the customer to decide. Search Engine is used to play the trick.

SEO is the cornerstone of Internet Marketing on the road of business prosperity.


Also see:

SEO 3.0 in 2011
Pagerank in 2011
What is Search Engine Marketing


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