Will Branding Be The Rebirth Of SEO?

Writing by Brick Marketing on Saturday, 10 of May , 2008 at 10:05 am

Greg Howlett stepped on some toes with his post about SEO being a dying industry. Of course, he was just repeating what Shoemoney said a day earlier. Nevertheless, I like what Howlett said in this paragraph:

I think, however, that you would be better served by largely forgetting about SEO and focusing instead on building your brand.

That’s essentially what Shoemoney said too. Here’s a sentence buried within the meat of his post:

I don’t think anyone can argue that core SEO has gotten less valuable over the years and I see that trend continuing.

The overarching question is, are they right? And if so, what will this do for local search engine optimization?

Well, I do think that Shoemoney’s observation on SEO declining in value over the years is partially correct. It isn’t that it has declined in value per se, but that it has gotten more difficult to achieve for the average business. It is now more important to hire a professional SEO to help you rank better, but both Shoemoney and Howlett may have a point in that the current trend of hiring an SEO who strictly does technical SEO is going to fall by the wayside. If your SEO is not proficient in branding and marketing strategies then you might as well ditch him for someone who is because that is the future of SEO in general and local SEO in particular.

Branding has always been a core aspect of business marketing, whether we are talking local business or global business. Online, it’s even more important because people do not want to do business with someone they don’t know. You can have the best SEO in the world, but if you can’t built trust with your target market then your business will die. That’s where branding comes in. This principle is no less true if you operate a local business, but with local branding you have the added advantage of being able to draw your customers to your physical location to meet you face to face. Still, you’ll need to rely on branding to make that happen.

The future of local advertising online lies in your ability to create a brand that people will trust. SEO will just be a part of that branding process, though I don’t think that SEO will necessarily die out. It will simply be incorporated into the branding process. I think that’s what Greg Howlett meant with his follow-up post, and I can see the same the trending as well.

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Category: Local Online Advertising, Local Search Engine Optimization

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