The Brand Factory's Branding Blog

Is your SEO Brand irrelevant?

Devin Anderson Added 3 months ago

When it comes to deciding which keywords or phrases to optimise your website around, there are five factors you should consider:

1. Potential Traffic - Number of searches conducted for this phrase each month.

2. Competition - How difficult it will be to rank well for this phrase

3. Intent to purchase – How close searchers are to their point of purchase

4. Search Relevance – Likelihood that your website solves the searchers' problem

5. Brand Relevance - What your chosen keywords say about you

Brand Relevance as a keyword ranking factor is not discussed in the SEO community too often. Unlike the other factors, it's not easily quantifiable - there's no SI Unit of Brand Relevance.

So what does it mean? And what's the application of it?

For me, Brand Relevance is “The tendency of the chosen keywords to reinforce existing brand messages”. Simply, what do these keywords say about your business, and do they reflect what your brand is about?

Let's Look at a hypothetical web design agency, which we'll call them DevDesign.

DevDesign is a boutique agency, based in Sydney's CBD, who specialise in designing websites for medium-sized businesses. Their ideal clients are wealthy Australian professionals who are happy to pay premium rates for good quality.

After conducting some brief keyword research they choose “Cheap Web Design” as their primary keyword target.

Cheap Web Design sees over 5000 searches per month. While the competition for the phrase is comparatively low for the industry, the Adwords Cost-Per-Click is very high (close to $8). This suggests that the Cheap Web Design searchers are a highly qualified bunch, and a valuable group of prospects to target.

The problem?

Their keyword target is Brand Irrelevant. They are a premium web design agency advertising themselves as budget designers.

Let’s see what happens if one of their genuine prospects decides to shop around for price comparisons...

The CMO does a search for “Cheap Web Design Sydney” and BAM. There they are. Right up at the top of the list:

“DevDesign | Cheap Web Design | Cheap Websites”.

Now they're stuffed.

With a headline like this, it's going to be very hard to convince this potential client that they do, in fact, provide the premium, high-quality web design service that she is seeking.

The lesson: If you wouldn't put it in the header of a print advertisement, don't optimise your website for it.

Don't forget, being consistent across all brand communications is one of The 7 Golden Rules of Marketing.

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Posted by Devin Anderson at 4:33 pm 0 Comments