SEO For Brand Visibility & Recognition

Aledya recommends that small businesses showcase expertise by leveraging testimonials, reviews, and case studies that highlight real success stories. Including mentions from reputable sources also builds credibility. When it comes to content, small businesses need to publish high-quality, authoritative content that reflects their industry knowledge and expertise.

No, transparency is beneficial. In fact, Aleyda believes this is a great way to prune clients. Clearly stating who your product or service is best suited for helps attract the right customers while filtering out those who may not be the best fit.

If a competitor offers something you don’t, highlight what makes your brand unique rather than ignoring the comparison. Honesty prevents churn from customers who may have had unrealistic expectations.

While you should ideally always be posting and active, Aleyda highly recommends that at the very least if a company isn’t posting regularly, maintaining updated social media profiles with accurate branding, descriptions, and links to the website helps reinforce its online presence.

Google still uses these signals to associate the brand with its digital footprint. When possible, engaging with customers on social media strengthens visibility and trust.

How do you balance the concern in providing good customer experience on all platforms?

It’s unrealistic for most companies to be active everywhere, the key is to clearly communicate the best ways for customers to connect with you. Aleyda suggests making sure that social platforms and other touchpoints provide clear guidance on where and how customers can reach your business, which creates a strong foundation for a positive experience.

Where can I find a full list of platforms to increase my company’s presence?

🧰 Aleyda recommends using an audience research tool like SparkToro to identify the websites, blogs, social accounts, and publications your audience engages with.

To improve branded search visibility, companies should implement structured data like Organization Schema and claim their Google Knowledge Panel. Consistent brand mentions and backlinks from authoritative sources also increase recognition. Internal linking can help reinforce key brand-related pages, and addressing common branded search questions directly on your website helps visitors find the right information from the company itself.

If a company isn’t ranking for its own branded queries, it’s important to identify which third-party sites are appearing instead, such as review sites or forums. Businesses can engage on these platforms when appropriate or create better-optimized content to capture those searches. Monitoring branded search trends and making sure landing pages are aligned with what people are looking for can improve rankings.

SEO for Brand Visibility & Recognition_ Why it_s Key & How to Succeed At It
Dana DiTomaso: [00:00:00] Hey everyone! Welcome to the Kickpoint Playbook webinar. I am Dana DiTomaso, founder and lead instructor here at Kickpoint Playbook, and today I am joined by the truly brilliant Aleyda Solis, who honestly every time I talk to her I’m like, I don’t know how you find the time to do this stuff. She is a brilliant international SEO consultant.
She founded Orianti. She publishes the SEO FOMO and marketing FOMO newsletters and the new AI newsletter, which you should subscribe to if you haven’t already. She’s also responsible for the learning SEO dot IO roadmap. I mean, honestly, I’m tired just saying that. And she’s one of my favorite. I’m going to be talking about how to achieve success in SEO when it comes to brand visibility and recognition.
So please do make sure to ask questions in the chat. We’ll cover those as we go. And if you have to drop out early, we’ll be emailing everyone who registered on LinkedIn and recording today’s session. So if you’re watching on YouTube, please hop over to the Kickpoint Playbook LinkedIn page and register or message me and I can help you out.
And [00:01:00] now let’s get this rolling. Hey Leda, how you doing? Hello,
Aleyda Solis: Dana. Thank you very much for having me and so very excited to be able to share with all of you today.
Dana DiTomaso: Yeah, absolutely. I’m excited about this topic. I mean, I, you’re very much at the forefront of where SEO was going. And so I think this is one of our best registered webinars ever.
I think everyone’s very excited about watching this. So all right, let’s let’s get it going.
Aleyda Solis: Thank you. Thank you. And yes, I’m, I’m actually also very excited about this particular topic, SEO for brand visibility and recognition, because I believe that this is the first time ever that I am presenting about this as the topic of the presentation.
I have been mentioning it as something that is critical, but very looking forward to. Go deep, deep down and go through all of it about the implications, the importance, because I believe that especially for a lot of companies that are not enterprise level [00:02:00] established brands tends to be very overlooked and not taken into account as it should.
And actually my times it. Pretty much like the prioritizer as something that you own by default. Like, and we are going to see that that’s definitely not really the case. Even if you have established brands, a brand offline. So today more than ever, SEO is whether at a very high level, a brand and or product problem, allow me to, to explain for smaller companies.
Companies that are starting or are startups or are just local techies companies solving the brand problem, usually popularity and authority not only from a link popularity, but experience in counting wise that challenge is the biggest one is If you think about it when you start, nobody knows you, your brand is not established you don’t have many backlinks, you don’t have a lot of [00:03:00] content, right?
And you need to get going, right? And for bigger companies and sites, the product is actually the challenge. They already have all of the. Authority, all of the popularity, they already have backlinks. They already have a brand strategy going on that they can or might not necessarily leverage or optimize necessarily for online, but there is something already.
Right. So in this particular scenario for bigger website, bigger companies, usually the biggest challenge is the product that means that is more of. Technical challenges, technical implementation called budget. This is like for massive companies. This is where called budget actually makes sense to optimize and execution, buying an alignment between departments.
This is usually the top challenge. So it’s much more of a product problem than a brand problems. And in terms of SEO areas of importance, it translates to this, right? If just in [00:04:00] case you, you, it, it’s not clear enough. So. Brand, content and backlinks, product is technical issues or challenges. It doesn’t mean that it’s one or the other, but as we see as the brand related issues or challenges the top ones at the start, it start to crease a little by little while the technicals are increasing and so on, right?
So, the difference in size, also impact, as you can see the, the type of challenges that is faced. Through the execution of the SEO process. And if you think about it, if you analyze the top rank websites across any industry, right, you can see that ultimately the sites that succeed in search are those that connect their web brand and product and align what they do with both what the user search needs maximizing.
The recognition and visibility, attracting as an outcome, a very high [00:05:00] share of branded searches, direct traffic to and because of all of the work that they have done connecting with the search needs, with the pains of their audience very high, let’s say level. That makes the audience to look for them directly.
They don’t even look for generic non brand products, non branded products, but they look for the products related to that particular brand because they recognize it and they have such a high recognition and, and, and they trust it at the end of the day. And many, many times for many of these top websites that are leaders in their industries we.
Go to any of the SEO tools that we like to use. SEMrush, HREF, Systrix, SimilarWeb, and so on. And we see that the share of branded traffic, organic search [00:06:00] traffic, that they bring, many times is even higher to than the non branded. And realistically. This type of, of traffic eventually when you have the established brand, it will be easier to run for you when, when the query comes directly with your brand.
Of course, we are going to see how in, across many scenarios, there are two parties trying to leverage that, that are your, your competitors, you don’t, you don’t know it, but you don’t own this queries by default, right? But if you have the minimum, let’s say as a presence that is like. The basics are optimized and aligned with the way that you use your search.
You have it, it’s much more straightforward and definitely a lower hanging fruit for you. And yes, I know a clarification. I know that, especially in the last year and a half or so, there have been so much going on about Google having a bias in search results towards bigger [00:07:00] brands, established brands.
And we love to complain about the big brand. Presence in Google SERPs. And we’re going to talk about this much more later on, but not, not something here though, at this point, I would like to clarify something, not because you have a popular offline brand, you necessarily will have all of this top rankings, even for the branded queries by default, if you don’t do the product.
And if you don’t necessarily do the minimum alignment to translate the offline popularity and authority to your online presence, right? And, and we just saw an example of this not a half or a couple of months ago or so when it was with the, was here complaining about for, The Yeezy brand, it was Adidas still ranking top positions rather than his newer website or new website where the brand is [00:08:00] not necessarily that new anymore, but its own website that now exists targeted to the brand, right?
But yes, this is a very basic example of how Although you should ideally own these queries, you might not necessarily be ranking even for your core brand terms many, many times. Can I jump in for a second?
Dana DiTomaso: If you go back for a sec, I actually wanted to, to ask something about that. Okay, so this is a great example.
I think like this is a perfect SEO case study period, but I also think it’s a great example of people who are still obsessed with exact match domains. Like, the only reason why he might be showing up at all is because he has an exact match domain, but it is not enough to overcome the brand presence of Adidas, or I guess Adidas is how they prefer to say it.
But yes, it is not. Yeah. 100%. 100%. That’s the OK study.
Aleyda Solis: 100%. That’s still like that. Right. And I completely agree that the reason why they are able to even rank in the second position is because of that. 100%. But how we are in [00:09:00] SEO going to grow a brand, right? Because this is the first, let’s say, a question and doubt that arises around this particular topic.
And then why I understand not, it’s a topic that we don’t necessarily prioritize. It, it doesn’t goes beyond the scope of what we do. Are we overstepping? Like, and I want to think back that all of what we do in SEO. It’s multidisciplinary. We need to work with the development team. We need to do work with the content team.
We need to go work with the branding team or digital PR team. And those who take care of the brand aspect or branding related aspect of our websites too. We also need to work with the UX team. So it’s about alignment at the end of the day. And if we also analyze all of the insights that we have been getting from Google as the top search engine and with all of the.
Let’s go through them. It’s clear that brand and brand new related signals are core for two rankings and [00:10:00] therefore should be core also to those aspects that we should prioritize and take care of and work on in our SEO process and cannot be overlooked. So if we look back to. 2008, there is a quote, there is an interview that was done to Eric Schmidt, who was at that point, the, the CEO of, of Google in which he pretty much mentioned that.
Brands were the solution to the internet cesspool, quote unquote, referring to the spam, the existing spam that still at the point where that challenge and for, for Google, right? So yes, that on one hand, then on the other, I had the great opportunity to interview Danny Sullivan last year in September.
And. I actually asked him about a lot of topics among them, the bias big brand [00:11:00] bias that a lot of smaller indie website owners in particular, those that were affected by the last. Core updates last year that were initially affected by the helpful content update we’re complaining about, right?
Like the role of having a big brand authority that allow them to rank top positions while smaller. Websites were not able, even if they had the expertise and experience and, and just working as in all of the EAT signals that Google was looking to highlight in, in top search results they, we were seeing that was not necessarily the case.
And Danny highlighted how. They want to highlight brands in general, whether bigger or smaller or whatever size in between they, what they want to do is to highlight real brands. So those websites that represents real [00:12:00] businesses or, or not even businesses, but a real people who provide. A service, a product that might have even a hobby activity, but that were a real entity behind showcasing real expertise and real experience rather than the two party, the middleman, I guess that.
It’s like, yes, of course, good. They don’t necessarily at this point want a middleman in shown in, in search results are very commercially oriented. They are the middlemen at the end of the day, but, and he highlighted how they might not necessarily be there yet, but that is the intent. That is the goal.
So yes, there is clearly a brand bias and that is how they prune the spam that not madness, Holly. Meaningful websites representing real, a real service, a real product that they [00:13:00] want to highlight and the way that they expect to do, and they are doing it already is through brands. If they haven’t been able yet to, let’s say fine tune their algo enough in order to be able to showcase both smaller brands and bigger brands.
It’s a challenge, but they, it’s a challenge that they’re trying to solve and this is where they want to go. So developing a trusted brand with a great product experience that Google can recognize is what the people first guidelines are about. And for realistically, if we. about it. And, and then the reality is that we have this situation that is like the chicken and eggs type of situation in SEO.
The US, this study that Patrick from Ahrefs share a month ago or so, a month and a half pretty much analyzing if Google were actually still taking into consideration backlinks as a ranking signal as much. And well, he went through a lot of data and one of the [00:14:00] sections of the outcomes of this analysis is that he identified that websites that represent brands get more, more backlinks, get more links.
And he highlighted that links correlate better with branded searches than non branded searches. And he doesn’t, he didn’t want people to interpret this as links matter more from brands, but the correct way to interpret this is that due to the popularity of many brands, they tend to get attract more, more backlinks, right?
So yes, of course you will be incentivized to link to those entities and websites that you already recognize that you trust already is far easier. Right. And this. Goes beyond popularity, popularity too. I believe that we, that suck thinking about popularity and authority and having to do with lean building only and [00:15:00] connected with brand also, but it goes beyond that because realistically you represent your brand.
And everything that you do with your website and how you design, have the experience that you provide, the quality of the information. So the overall experience and expertise should be communicated through your website, including your content. And I have, I think that we have all witnessed another very clear example of this, which was the traffic drop from.
HubSpot at, at the end of last year because of a lack of brand and expertise alignment with, with certain topics that where they were covering on, on the website, because yes, they were very trending topic, very trendy topics that got a lot of traffic that had a lot of searches, but they were not on brand, they were out of scoop of the brand expertise and actual.
[00:16:00] level of experience and subject matter authority at the end of the day. So I believe that this question and is something that I ask more and more to clients and, and, and partners in projects to us is like, what topic should we go for? It’s like, these are. And a lot of times, like, what is the relevance, but if we think about relevance, because this is more of like technical term, many times like, Oh, this is still, this still marketing and we are marketing software.
No, we should ask about, is this on brand for us to target, to address? This is, is our business actually anything has anything to do with this. Right. And beyond content is also the overall experience. It. It’s, we should ask ourselves, is this actually on brand? This is how we want to be perceived by our, our visitors, our potential clients.
That should, will they actually [00:17:00] trust us and high have us in high regards is with this type of experience. And I am on purpose covering, covering the logo of this mobile website. And it’s important to always. Simulate to in, in our, even on our desktop browsers to be mobile because at the end of the day goal is mobile first quality raters also use a mobile first approach when evaluating websites.
And we should be asking questions like, is this secure, mobile friendly, it loads fast, is it non intrusive, it provides great UX, it’s easy to browse and it showcases. Clearly real expertise and experience. Does it satisfy my search needs quickly and fast in a very comprehensive way? All of this shit communicate and be aligned with our brand at the end of the day.
So brand encompasses a little bit of everything, right? And growing a brand is about establish, establishing an identity to facilitate recognition [00:18:00] and reputation too. So if a website is difficult to browse or has a lot of fluffy content that doesn’t say much of our brand also at the end of the day.
And these are questions that actually quality raters are asked to evaluate to, if we go to the search quality raters evaluator guidelines, we can definitely. Find this sort of questions. And this has been actually one have been one of the big learnings from the recent Google Doc leaks. They Google tracks signals that have to do with brand and an entity and the analysis, the outcome that Rand Fishkin did last year, this was the number one, right?
Like brand matters more than anything else. Google has numerous way and was found to have numerous ways to identify entities. So RAM filter employ them to assess the website quality. And then in the other [00:19:00] Google leak that happened later in, in the year by Mark Williams Cook. It was something similar, similar, and even more obvious, right?
Like he found some site quality scores. And one of these site quality scores was brand visibility, branded searches or searches that include the brand’s name, right? So it’s clear. And last but not least, there are even Google patents about using queries related to a specific site, to the brand of the site, the name of the site to determine site quality.
So. Yes, it is important. It is within our scope. It is used by Google. It’s evident that is something that we should try to optimize in a way that aligns with the purpose and the, the brand that already exists on with the business that we work with, that we need to help translate online. It doesn’t need to do, because unfortunately [00:20:00] this is what happens a lot in SEO.
Oh, let’s gain this to generate a lot of random searches because like, that’s not the purpose, right? Like we need to think bigger and we need to work for the long run in a way that is consistent in a way that actually makes sense and it’s easy and it will be easier if we do it like that. Right. If.
Finally, one of the positive by products and another reason, yet another reason to take care of this is that in today’s SERPs, they are full of features and potentially this is an extreme example that I’m showing on screen right now, but it’s full of features, establishing a brand that people trust and has affinity for and recognize and likes is what will make the difference on only scrolling or only generating an impression without a click.
Getting an actual click from the user because we can see, we can see that now we don’t compete with, we are the only one in our row in search results. And we don’t [00:21:00] compete with many other players, but only a couple of ones above and below, no, we don’t. Five players per row now in, in this product packs.
And so many of the players in the product knowledge panel that we need to compete to get the click, even if the visibility of all of. Us, or is there, right? Pretty much at the same level. So as you can see, it’s not about placing a brand expert or product expert, but online and optimizing the efforts that we do in search to surface and maximize the visibility of all of the signals that on one hand, Google will take into account, but ultimately.
We’ll generate more sales, which allows us to gain reputation and to increase and improve our reputation and, and the, the, the engagement that we get from our clients and they will likely double down on us and continuously repeat the repeat and repeatedly buy from us because [00:22:00] they are so happy with the experience that on brand experience that we are able to, to, to give them.
Right. So let’s go through a few actions that we can take. Race are taking right now to optimize this brand authority and recognition in SERPs. Here’s a list of a lot of what I am going to go through right now. And hopefully it will give you quite a few ideas. You will see that. I also share some screenshots, different tools and resources.
I always try to include the URLs as you’ve been able to see so far too. In the footer of the slides, and I will be sharing that deck later on. So you can take a look at them too. So the first thing to do is something that I believe we all should be doing, should have been doing so far in our keyword research, that it start by understanding your brand position, the company that we work for, the client brand position, right?
How, how you differentiate Versus your competitors, why you should be chosen over them and in which [00:23:00] scenarios, because it’s true that a product is not good for everything, right? Which is an area. Should it be chosen by which audiences by whom, right? So I believe that this type of questions are.
Fundamental to understand our brand positioning, what our brand is about, what, why it is different, what is unique and how it should be perceived and optimize it accordingly. Right. And another very important question is how do you want to be recognized? And I have a very good example with a client that I had a few years back that was a cruise line.
And I remember doing a keyword research in for cruises related terms and topics, and we could see, as you can see on the screen, that cheap cruises is crazy, but it’s like the, there were even more queries about cheap cruises then. Like even many other very popular cruise brands and cruise related information.
And [00:24:00] they advised me and they warned me and like, they told me, look, when you do the, the QR research, like be warned that cheap cruises is one of the top terms. We, but we are not cheap. We are not cheap. And we don’t want to be perceived to be cheap because we know the connotations about being cheap, the quality of right connotations, not necessarily the best.
And it’s not a. Keywords or a group of queries that we prioritize in our content, because we are not cheap and the type of clients and customers that will come through those topics and queries are not necessarily topics that are not necessarily the clients that they want to prioritize or that they are for, right?
This is. This was all for me. This was amazing and allowed me to focus the, the, your research and allow me to filter what was not necessarily on brand for them to target and out of scoop and not relevant. Right. So it’s fundamental to understand, [00:25:00] monitor and target your branded search demand across.
your different target markets. And, and like so many tools here, like in this case, it’s a fresh, but some brush does the same similar web. So streaks, they allow you to see all of the related queries and provide you pretty much the. Total other sub market for a particular topic segmented or segmenting already, plus arising already by parent topic for each one of them.
So you can easily go through and prune and start prioritizing, eliminating those that don’t actually make sense. Right. And this is another good example, because it’s an example that I showcase to. Href in the run event a few months ago, and I was showing how some of the top queries connected with the href run was about href trial or href free.
They, they do have some free features and sections here that they, that they provide, but they don’t have a trial, right? And so it’s, it’s, [00:26:00] Are there ways for them to target these queries? Absolutely. They can have an article or a landing page explaining why they don’t have a trial, but how it is so cheap.
And they have so many features that the users can test to validate if they’re comfortable with the UI of the tool and the experience with the tool. To give enough confidence to move forward and upgrade, for example. So yes, it’s not about not targeting it at all or overlooking it at all, but doing it in a way that is in line with your unique selling position and with your brand.
Again, and there’s a wealth of disinformation that we can take into account. The people also ask in SERPs, for example, in many circumstances are even Even all the players rather than us. And what are the top questions and concerns in your own internal search results, in your own internal search feature and through your help [00:27:00] center, right?
We should gather that data, that information. If we have already a community, I know that a lot of websites, I work a lot with SAS, a lot of SAS have. Forums and, and they, they work a lot in social and with dev rels and they have a lot of community information and Q and A’s and back and forth, all of that information you should take into account to identify, well, like what are the questions, doubts and concerns, and then in terms of relevance and popularity, how can you take them into account?
And not only on your, and it’s from. Let’s say Google and traditional search engines, but what about the conversations on social platforms? Where are the top topics? Where are their sentiment? And for that, we have now a wealth, thankfully, of social audience analysis tool. So for example, I really like this buzz about because it goes through Reddit.
It goes to TikTok. It goes through a lot of social platforms. [00:28:00] And it actually provides summaries. segmenting each one of the topics and threats that exist about our, our, our brand and provides the sentiment analysis for it. And even beyond traditional platforms, but newer ones like ChatGPT, I created this GPT for free that provides you an easy way to validate if.
Your brand is being recognized by chap GPT when the user search for it. But also if it is recognized, connected to your top services or products versus competitors. And if not, which are the sources where your competitors are getting mentioned or being mentioned and you are not, and for all of this.
Topics and queries and, and, and keywords that are branded. And you could target, like, what is the sentiment of the top questions? And we can use so many tools like numerals. ai to do sentiment analysis for any list of keywords that we have in Google Sheets. And [00:29:00] then for those that are actually. Very popular, meaningful for us.
How are we already targeting these queries? Are we already ranking for them? Because again, not because they are branded, it means that we’re already ranking the positions. Many of them, fortunately, might be overlooked still at this point, you might not necessarily have a strong enough page or content that.
It’s ranking top positions yet, and potentially even third parties review websites, and even competitors might be ranking instead of you. For how many of these are you already ranking top positions? So again keyword tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Ximera web, they have a great ways to create like keyword lists in bulk and validate which are the pages ranking for this group of keywords here.
I actually created a list of them. 500 keywords that were Sapphire related, and we can see how the top ones here for the top ones here is Sapphire pages are ranking for them, but we can see that [00:30:00] also later on that for many others. They are not ranking at all. And also, even if you are ranking, are you ranking with the right page?
Is the experience that you’re providing at that stage of the search journey the best or the ones that is needed by your client? And so all of these are questions that we need to ask. We’re going through the data. And another great source of this data is our own Google Search Console information if we filter it well, right?
So, We should ask about what is the blend of the current branded and unbranded searches that you’re already ranking for. And if the traffic is going to the relevant page and what’s the click through rate and conversion performance of this branded versus the non branded. Many times the, the click through rate and the conversion, if you’re doing a great work with the right page will be better.
Right. And here’s a Looker Studio dashboard to monitor branded versus no branded queries using the Google search console search performance very straightforward for you to start using already with a little bit of a configuration branch. So you can add your, [00:31:00] your, your brands right there. So this information should be there accessible, even if you don’t have access to so many different tools.
And what about those? Queries that you identify when going through all of that analysis that you’re not ranking for. Are they relevant for you to target? Can you run through your own site? Or if you cannot, because many times you have limitations of what you can publish or not, you need to specify them to try to piggyback and, and, and, and try to rank with third party presence.
Oh, like, Oh, so for example, in this screenshot, we can see that for some of this. Zapier related queries. It is a Reddit surprise, surprise thread that is ranking or a few threads. And should they start try to interact with their potential community? Through Reddit in a way that is actually relevant, consistent, friendly, community managed from a community management standpoint, right around spamming.
Let’s try to create presence no matter what, right. This is the wrong approach and I don’t want to [00:32:00] recommend this of course, but yes, all of this should be your input understanding. Where the searches are coming from, what is the sentiment? What are the topics? How is your brand being searched versus your competitors?
And of course you can also include here, even a little bit of like, what if this is happening with your own brand, what is happening with your competitors, is this consistent or not? What are the questions that are being asked for them that are also relevant for you and potentially your users, audiences are not right now asking about you, because.
You’re not yet even that popular, but yes, these are the competitors. So you can take that as an input. That might be like a little let’s say too fast to go or to move forward to. Let’s start with the base. And with all of these insights, you can now align your site content, PR and branding efforts to optimize and grow.
Your authority in a way that is consistent, right? And I want to [00:33:00] highlight something important here. The outcome of all of this won’t be necessarily only that you will start ranking top position for your brand terms. You, for example, in my case, Aleyda Solis, and I’m ranking with my own entity there, there with my own knowledge panel and ranking through what all of my different website and third party social presence in, in.
It serves in cool serbs for my name, but also that when someone searches for non branded terms for something that you provide because of all the features and the level of sophistication that Google has, they recognize you to be highly authoritative and you have many more better chances to run the position for it.
Like in this particular query, best SEO consultants, and I am there. And this. feature along with all the players, because I have so many mentions and Google recognized me to be an SEO consultant, right? Like I’m an entity for them. So we need to start with the fundamentals. [00:34:00] Is your brand recognized as an entity in Google Knowledge Graph?
Are the details correct and all presence included? You SERP API Knowledge Graph, free validator You can actually see all of the information on screen from, from the code and all of the presence that you have included in, in the SERP beyond even the, the one of the, the, the knowledge graph shown in the panel, what is the selling scores, the level of relevance towards your brand?
Query, are there other sites recognized for it too, that you need to align, that you need to take into consideration those? There’s also this excellent tool that is free also from audits. com about that. And you should then specify all of the brand details through the organization schema on your site.
So many very popular websites overlook this. Don’t do it. They have the FAQ structure data. They have probably the structure data, but they don’t have the organization structure data. In their homepage use every [00:35:00] relevant property to specify what you, what you do, what are your scoop of services where you have also presence at, which are just.
Social platforms that you’re using and where you have a profile to claim your knowledge panel and suggest changes to make the details accurate in case that is already showcased. And of course, it’s also critical to optimize your brand information across all of the company web presence, not only your main sites.
And I asked about this like a month ago or so in LinkedIn and 50 percent of people said that they were already. Doing it, 19 percent said that they will start this year, 27 percent said they wish, they wish, but they have challenges. Just earlier today, I had a call with a SEO client that wanted to start collaborating more with the community management activities with that area.
And [00:36:00] I can confirm that it’s not something that happens. Just because naturally, unfortunately at companies, if you don’t move forward, if you don’t push for it, but once you do. When it is clear what is your expectation about alignment, about getting input of what is going on and how you can piggyback and how you can even maximize the impact of whatever they do, very high number of times is something that is actually welcome.
Right. So go ahead and do it because we can definitely see that not everybody is doing it. So optimality of all of your brands, social like server platforms, presence consistently, linking back to the main site too, this should be so very clear and beyond your brand, what other relevant entities are recognized in your site content that you should specify, configure your site knowledge graph to specify all of this relevant entities within your content to facilitate Google relevance assessment and recognition of what you do.
[00:37:00] What, what is your expertise? And we have tools like InLinks, for example, and I believe that they do have a freemium option so you can start trying it out that will pretty much not only generate automatically all of the structure data of the website but they, they will create full knowledge graph for your website automatically.
And even proof internal linking is if you have challenges with that too. So that is right. And also. This will end up also positively impacting the experience of the user. So it’s sort of like win win in this particular case. And you should expand your content strategy to grow your brand while targeting your audience main concerns.
At the same time, this should be aligned, all of those questions that you have identified that your audience is asking about your brand. With the signing, if they should buy your product versus your competitors one, so for your brand versus the one of your competitors, and I know so many. Businesses and website that they hate to the idea of having to mention the [00:38:00] competitors, but they need to do it because otherwise they will end up going to read it instead of position or worse, even worse to your competitors landing page.
And what I highly, highly recommend in this case is you are honest. You are transparent. You highlight. Why you’re not necessarily the best for everybody, but you are best in this particular scenario for this type of customers, for this type of potential clients, for businesses, and. It is obvious, I believe, when you are highlighting the pros in a way that is consistent in a way that is reasonable, that it’s not that you’re selling your product at not matter what cost to whoever is landing on, on, on the page.
Highly no highlighting only your pros without any cons and how you’re the total best option, not necessarily even. Comparing it in a accurate way. What the ones of your competitors [00:39:00] features, right? So it’s something that you should do naturally, but in a very honest and transparent way, transparent way.
Also optimizing your support, documentation, and community presence to run for relevant customer questions, to solve their issues, retain them as clients, and this is super important for two things a lot of. Businesses think only to attract the clients through SEO efforts and that’s it, without realizing that they should also look to support their clients, engage their client, and keep their clients happy to maximize their, their engagement and, and to avoid them from, from going to another.
solution to one of your competitors, just because they are unable to find a feature or a solution for a particular problem that potentially you do provide, but it’s too difficult for them to sort it out. Right. And I work with money clients again, that have forums, they have communities that are amazing to run for this sort of [00:40:00] queries and to get easy support.
Actually they help to minimize the costs of their help desk of, of, of potential users and clients and customers having to reach out actual humans. We know that the, all of this AI bots now that they, 99% of out there of them out there provide a terrible experience. And the first thing that I do whenever I use them is say, I, I get, I want to get in touch with a human.
Send me to a human please. Because yes. This is a way to solve it in a much more straightforward action that is aligned with your brand visibility and, and highlighting, let’s say, how you solve the issues of your actual customers, you know, in a way that is consistent, they will help you to minimize the cost of running your help desk.
And they will. Potentially help you to upsell, cross sell and engage better to avoid your customer to leave you for your [00:41:00] competitors, because you do provide a solution for them. And, and then of course, this is not only when deciding choosing you versus competitors or. Already existing customers to retain them by providing them content that is very aligned to what they are searching about your products or services, but also creating resources and tools to address your audience’s doubts through their customer journeys to establish as a trusted advisor in your industry.
And this will rank initially when they are not necessarily looking for you, but once that you establish your resource as a go to. Destination. This will also generate branded searches. And there’s a fantastic example of this that I think that I showed before. That was the, the Zillow, the Zillow one, right?
One of the first things that I, I remember that I heard about Zillow was that they provided the estimates, right? The cost of, of houses [00:42:00] and, and the information about, yeah, how much property costs and is that. Tool, a validation that they do provide and they provide also analysis every X. Number of, of, of, of months and so on, trends, insights of their industry.
And they became the go-to destination for, for to, to, to look for property because of this. And the same can be said and can be, be applic, can, is applicable and has been applied already to so many different industries. And here are a couple of of amazing examples, right? FreshBooks, for example, they are an accounting.
Software but they do provide a series of resources, free resources that have become massively popular. So take a look at this free info generator here that they provide to anybody and that ranks well, that attracts a lot of backlinks that ends up becoming so popular that people end up like even as searching for Freshbook info generator.
And same with [00:43:00] Wwise Wwise also has so many different resources. There are resources that you see are very, very connected to what they do. In their case, there are, they are online transfer, money transfer an app they do have a lot of different features also for businesses. It’s not necessarily only B2C, but yes, they are a fintech company that provide financial solutions online and.
On, on, in, in, through their app too. Of course, what are some of the most common questions that their customer will tend to have when users, when using their service, Oh, the IBAN number. Like, like they have asked about IBAN numbers and they’re talking about it. Like, how do I check it? How I calculate it?
How is it formed? So this is part of like the typical questions that customers will have. When using their, their product or service, right? So, they have all of these sort of resources. Also they have another one to calculate the, the the exchange price [00:44:00] between currencies, finance suite, big code too.
And all of this also attract a lot of backlinks and popularity. And you might tell me, Oh, Aleyda, but these are, these were not necessarily, necessarily brand in place. These were resources. That were likely let’s say efforts or campaigns. I have no inside information here, by the way, that were incentivized.
They look to be incentivized from an SEO standpoint or an SEO savvy type of, of campaign. But we can totally do this the other way around, right? Especially if we work with companies that have already. Like campaigns that exist beyond SEO have been created beyond a criteria that has to do with SEO, but is important to align SEO best practices there to make sure that they’re correctly findable and those backlinks that are retracted through it actually benefit the main sites and moneymaking pages too.
And ultimately provide even more popularity and authority to the overall [00:45:00] entity, to the overall website. Right. So, great example of this. Is what Notion did a month and a half ago with their Notion faces. So it’s interesting because there were already third party tools that had created this before, and people were using this to create avatars that they could use anywhere with the same type of design.
of Notion’s avatars that were used within the tool. So they actually launched this, allowing anybody to create them and using them. Well, through their official app providing all of this different features. So anybody could go to create them and use them. And we can see here how it is in a subdomain.
And how literally has been mentioned in across dozens of places. And I, when I took a look at. The number of backlinks that it has gotten since the release, we can see at the beginning of, of the year, it has already, this has already got the got 10 207 [00:46:00] backlinks. Do I think that this was a link building type of campaign?
No, this was definitely a branding type of campaign, but it’s well optimized. So for example, I will have. Especially given if it is in a subdomain. I would have added there a footer cross linking well to all of the feature pages, for example, or much more clearly to the, to the homepage, but there’s that, but I can definitely see how this can benefit brand authority, the perception, the popularity generate direct searches looking for.
Notion faces where they rank first rather than these other two party tools that already existed. Right. And the same happens with all the type of campaigns of bigger brands, indeed, bigger companies, because these are the ones that tend to release them. So Spotify ROP again every single year generates traffic it’s growing, mentions, backlinks.
about Spotify. These are actually cover even online and [00:47:00] anywhere. And is it an SEO play? No, but it’s a branding play. And if you do your work, you will have a landing page that is actually well optimized that can pass any backlinks that are generated through this campaign to the main website pages and provide a great experience that is aligned with your brand here, that for sure.
And some of the things that I have started trying to do, even myself with my own, come let’s say products that I have, like SEO formal, for example, they, it has an SEO formal jobs, a free job board for anybody looking to post their SEO related jobs is for example. Whenever I share about any of this campaigns, initiatives promotion over social list, okay, rather than saying, look for the link in the comment, because adding the link will make it to have like, poorer reach in, [00:48:00] in social platforms, like LinkedIn, for example, like search for SEO, for more jobs, it will rank first.
And you incentivize the user to go and look for your brand in Google in a way that it will be even more straightforward than looking for the link and the comments where sometimes it’s not even shown directly because only the relevant comments are shown and it’s not among them. Win win type of a scenario, right?
And, and, Finally, I will highly, highly recommend you to monitor your brand missions across the web to identify for the road opportunity, whether in two party social plan channels in, in YouTube, in LinkedIn, in Reddit, and so on. To be able to align the efforts to understand. What are the concerns, the doubts that you can address directly there while coordinating with the community management departments and efforts and also identify opportunities for you to create and optimize content accordingly to be able to rank and grab it [00:49:00] directly rather than allowing third party websites to run for it.
And rinse and repeat. This is Little by little, growing further, once that you have pretty much suckle the initial group of queries that you have identified that you’re not yet ranking for, not ranking as well, you can move further with even, as I mentioned before, validating the ones of your competitors, selecting the ones that, the ones that are actually.
Meaningful and helpful for you to to integrate and so on and continue the process. This is an iterative and incremental process that shouldn’t be stopped. And it’s the alignment of all of these actions that will establish a brand that’s so popular in its sector that Google cannot overlook. And users will click even if not in the first position, right?
I do expect that if you look for how to learn SEO for free, you click on learningseo. io here rather than one of these. AI overviews information, some of them even including ready, how they will know better about how to learn SEO. This is a really [00:50:00] well curated roadmap from actual experts in the field.
Right. Of course. So there’s definitely that I believe that that should be ultimately the outcome that even if you don’t rank, unfortunately. In the first position, or if there’s a big feature above you, because the user recognize you, they click on you and maximize the click through rate. If you want to learn more about brand optimization ideas and opportunities, watch this scrolling Mondays that I did about it like month, month ago or so.
With Gianluca and Morty I have also created a learning SEO. io section for SEO brand recognitions creating. A lot of resources about it that you can also go to, to even get more ideas and ways to validate and optimize and maximize the visibility of your brand for searches opportunities and recognitions.
And once you’ve started positioning and growing your authoritative brand. That Google cannot overlook, it’s time to solve the product problem too. For that, I have also a presentation is it’s not on the scoop, under the scoop, it’s beyond the [00:51:00] scoop of today’s session but you should definitely do check it out too, because it’s the other major, let’s say, complimentary problem of what we have discussed today.
And at the end of the day is about the results. I’ve been growing a recognized, recognizable authoritative brand with a cost effective, well aligned, online product execution. That we are going to change the narrative and achieve those results. And we are not going to be always on state of. This is fine, but burning, no, we are going to became the fire in the room.
Right. Well, thank you very much. I hope that this has brought a few ideas for you. I’m very excited to hear if you have any questions, any doubts, more than happy to answer them if I hopefully know there.
Dana DiTomaso: Thank you so much. I, I always show this at the end. So I always take notes during people’s presentations. And if I circled them, I’m like, this is something I need to write about. And so here’s my really bad notes. But you can see, like, I definitely had a whole bunch of things that I circled for this particular talk.
And no one can read my handwriting. So I left handed. So it’s [00:52:00] not hang on. I’m all fuzzy now. Shoot. All right. We’ll come back in a second. All right. So, we do have some questions that people ask, and if you haven’t got your question in, please make sure to ask it. I don’t know why my camera’s out of focus.
We’ll figure that out later. All right. So first question is from Amy. What are some ways a small business slash team can prove or show their expertise on their website? They’re a smaller team. I think that very,
Aleyda Solis: yeah, testimonials will be done. Very straightforward way to do it. Think, think beyond pure SEO, right?
Like from a business standpoint, it will be with reviews, testimonials mentions across the web. This is something that I actually, me as a, as a user in general do is like, if I see that is a brand that I don’t recognize and see if actually reliable are, is this brand being mentioned? Is this company being mentioned in all the websites and and if.
They are being mentioned is in a positive light rather than not. So yeah, I will say that I [00:53:00] will, I will definitely start there.
Dana DiTomaso: Okay. And just FYI, Angeline just asked are you going to have a replay for this? Yes, absolutely. So if you’re registered on LinkedIn, we will email you the replay. If you don’t get the email, you don’t see it come in.
It’ll come in probably tomorrow morning. Then just message me on LinkedIn. I’m happy to send you the link. All right. Let’s see. Kim asks, don’t you worry about sending clients to your competitors? It’s a way to also filter and lower end clients, but you don’t want, but is it worth the risk? And I think from an agency perspective, for sure, when we talk about this, like clients get really nervous about this.
So how do you, how do you deal with that concern? So
Aleyda Solis: this is the thing, right? I tell my clients something. I believe this is actually a good way to prune.
You’re not for everybody and this is something that should be clear, right? Oh, but you know, my, my, my competitor gives all of these features that I don’t provide yet. They will come. Highlight that they will [00:54:00] come and say when and say also. That instead of that, you’re doing this, right? So it should be clear for the client, but something that you don’t want also, let’s imagine that you’re not doing it because you don’t have certain features.
If that client comes and end up converting and registering to your tool or service and they realize that you don’t have them anyway after they have registered or subscribed for the first month, they will cancel anyway because you don’t provide it. So it will be a lost client anyway. So I actually believe that this is an amazing way to prune good feeding clients, though, those that actually are looking for.
But you actually are able to provide in the best possible way and in a better way than your competitors. So I believe that honesty here is important and you should, you should do it in an honest way. And if at some point the clients that prefer [00:55:00] my competitors, even if I provide a better, better features, more features, better service, and I do a good work showcasing them just because I am a little bit also more expensive.
Perfect. I don’t want, I don’t, those are, those will be also painful clients, very likely, even if they end up converting, you see what I mean? You as a business owner know this too. So I believe that if at some point we’ll miss clients, we’ll lose clients because of this. These will be clients that won’t be necessarily bad to lose.
Dana DiTomaso: Yep. Realistically. 100 percent agreed. And actually when you were talking about cheap cruises, I was thinking about one of our clients. We have a case study in the Kickpoint website about them, Einstein Moving, they’re in Texas. And they’re not the cheapest moving company in Texas, because the cheapest moving company in Texas is some guy with a pickup truck.
And so they, you know, don’t. advertise on things like cheap moving and things like that. But one of the things that they do is they have an all in price. They don’t charge for extras. And so when we’re building their [00:56:00] flow for people getting a quote online, because you can actually go through the quoting process to actually book your move online, which is another thing that makes them stand out from their competitors, they go through like, here’s everything your quote includes.
This is not going to be, you’re not going to be charged extra. And this is why, because there can be some sticker shock there. So really like looking at when people see that price, are they going to freak out? Then you have to, you know, deal with those concerns right then. And really it’s, it’s, you know, changing the language, monitoring that continuation rate of people moving through the funnel, you know, part of it is looking at the metrics as well and, and seeing, you know, we added this thing on here.
Is that helping or hurting us? You know, is our churn rate gone down? Right? Like, what are the different questions you can ask yourself when you do add those concerns on your website? Okay. So Nerissa has a several point question. And we are at the hour. Are you good to keep going through the questions?
We just got a couple more after this. So do you need to run? A couple of more is okay. Okay, perfect. All right. So, how has SEO impacted when ensuring [00:57:00] your company has a presence on social and external websites, but there is no or very limited activity. So they exist on social, but they never post pretty common.
Aleyda Solis: Yeah, I think that, of course, ideally you should write post, but oh, there’s usual, right? Resources constraints. There’s only so much time, so many hours in the day and so on. Independently of that, I will highly, highly recommend that at the very least. The profile is updated and logo description, linking back to the website, explaining that.
Hello there. This is our official profile here. We don’t pass that much. So go and take a look at this other profile where, where we are. So you give also a good experience to your customers and they don’t think badly of you or that something is weird with you just because they don’t see much activity there.
And then you provide those signals also for Google to understand how you are [00:58:00] connected and with other websites too. So yes, there’s. There’s definitely that I see that there’s another question regarding balancing the concerns in number one we provide a customer experience on all platforms.
And yes, and that is, that is a problem, right? You cannot be everywhere and anywhere. That is, and I believe that by doing that. You can good, you can provide a good, like the minimum good base to refer your customers where you are able to, to do it.
Dana DiTomaso: Yeah, for sure. And then for tools and platforms. So actually there was a discussion in the comments.
I think Kim maybe said checking out SparkToro to look for a place where your customers hang out. SparkToro, if people are unfamiliar with it, is a fantastic audience research product started by Rand, formerly of Moz. And yeah, just go check out SparkToro. Great resource and I probably
Aleyda Solis: should, should add it to the presentation for future opportunities for sure.
Yeah. Absolutely.
Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. SparkToro is something, one of the tools we definitely pay for and it’s worth every penny for [00:59:00] sure. Okay. I think I went through the questions. I think we have covered absolutely everything. So, thank you so much for your presentation today. Like it. The team I’m watching on Slack and they’re just like, this is such a good point.
This is such a good point. So yeah, I’m really happy with the presentation today and thank you again. All right. Now, before we end things off here, please make sure to mark your calendars for our next webinar, which is going to be on March 18th with Celeste Gonzalez, who Alayda, I think you might know. She works at Rickety Roo.
Yes. She’s. Also going to be continuing our delightful AI theme of 2025. I feel like every talk in 2025 is going to talk about AI in some way because this is the year. SEOs love AI and analytics folks love AI too. And she’s going to be talking about practical AI applications for SEO testing. It looks so good, but I am not going to be hosting it because I’m going to be at SMX Munich.
So Liz Linder on our team will be hosting that. You can sign up for that on the LinkedIn page right now. And watch your email for a special discount on Kickpoint Playbook courses, along with the replay and the deck from this [01:00:00] webinar. There were so many links, so make sure to look out for that email. And again, if you don’t see the email or you forgot to register, message me on LinkedIn and I can definitely help you out and see you next time.
Thank you very much. Bye bye.