It’s every startup company’s dream: their very own brand—fully established and turned global.
Of course, it doesn’t happen overnight. Even the most established global brands today had to start small before achieving their success. At the very least, businesses have to first ensure they are delivering the very best products/services to their customers. That’s how people equate a particular brand with quality. Word of mouth gets out, and soon more and more people will seek your brand, confident that they are making the best choice. As long as you know you’re delivering a great product and stellar service, customers will find you.
But with so many companies and markets, both established locally and globally, vying for everyone’s attention, it can be hard to reach out to your target market online. That’s the job of the SEO community.
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Keywords and the (Not Provided) Data
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) used to be a simple affair, mostly based on the Content is King motto, which is why SEO back then relied on keyword-rich articles. People are always seeking info and answers to their questions, and when sites fulfill that basic need, those people will keep coming back for more. Consequently, your content-richness signals to search engines that your site is reliable and worthy of being displayed in its search results.
These days, it’s not about keywords anymore, especially since Google launched secure search in 2011 and strengthened such policy couple of months ago with its latest algorithm update Hummingbird. Technically, secure search brought users from the traditional http to https. If before, SEO companies could analyze a website’s keyword data based on what users typed in, Google now encrypts those data, making it hard for SEO folks to track user behavior.
In many ways, this is a good thing for everyone concerned, as it prevents that much-dreaded surveillance component of our digital lives. For the SEO community however, secure search only resulted in lots of (not provided) data on keyword web traffic programs.
Rather than being crippled by Google’s restrictive secure search, SEO specialists should see this as a new challenge.
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Content is Still King, Distribution is Queen
No doubt, content is still king—whether that’s in the form of
- Articles
- Images
- Gifs
- Videos
- Infographics
- Reviews
- Forums
- Ebooks and whitepapers
Even if your brand has quality content, if that content does not get distributed to as many people as possible, then everything fails. As Jonathan Perelman of BuzzFeed beautifully puts it, Content is King, Distribution is Queen (and She Wears the Pants). When we talk about great content, it should be useful, interesting, and most importantly share-worthy. When you reach out to the right community, your story has a chance to prosper and even go viral.
A Successful SEO Campaign for a Global Brand
Google will always keep refining its search engine algorithm for a more optimized search experience. Despite these periodic changes, there are a few things that remain constant: the basic pillars of a successful SEO campaign of any brand wishing to become global.
- Authority. Become an expert and show authority of your choice of topic(s). Produce quality, well-researched and always updated content.
Search engines will know your site is the right place that answers a visitor’s query. And you will gain your customers’ confidence and trust. From mere visitors to your site, they will become followers.
- Relevancy. Your brand’s content should be relevant to your users’ needs. When it comes to information, people need the helpful specifics, not the confusing vague details. When your site is fully optimized, every visitor’s query will bring them to the right landing page exact page they need.
- Sharing. These days, almost everyone is hooked on social media, whether that’s Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, etc. And on those platforms, the favorite verb is share. When your content is share-worthy, your brand will enjoy more online visibility.
In the past, link building was a a more straightforward process that depended mainly on focusing on high PageRank websites together with an aggressive link building & anchor texts strategy. Today, it is more about quality content with a natural links acquisition strategy, social media being a catalyst to improve awareness and branding of your site.
- Usability. At the end of the day, if users can’t navigate your site without finding the information they are looking for within 3 to 4 clicks, they will click elsewhere. Optimizing your website (architecture, mobile friendly), ensures that the best possible user experience (UX). Your visitors will naturally look forward to coming back to your site and promote it within their community.
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