Comment on Brand Marketing Strategy by Mike.

Brand Marketing Strategy Hi David, I think you completely misunderstood what I was saying. Brand has little to do with SEO, which should be focused on growing non-brand traffic.

If you reread my comment the key part is “…the challenge is how to position yourself as the go to authority for people needing advice on that software so they add your brand to their search query.”

This is not an SEO focused task but an ongoing commitment throughout both online and offline channels. I don’t think it’s a chicken/egg scenario but rather more like planting an acorn, it’ll take time and attention but once it gets going it’ll grow into a really strong asset.

SEO has its part to play in getting people introduced to a brand via an initial non-brand search and this is where a smart content strategy could be of benefit but the context of my advice is that anyone, including the OP of the post in question, whom relies solely on non-brand traffic is at the mercy of an algorithm and those SERP results fluctuate dramatically over time. I see this a lot in year on year comparisons of share of voice. Technical issues or penalties that harm organic visibility are felt the hardest by those smaller businesses who rely on 99%+ non-brand search traffic.

Growing brand traffic helps mitigate this impact and also benefits direct traffic, email open rates and the good old fashioned phone ringing rate too. But this is not a quick in and certainly can’t be achieved in an SEO silo.

So many focus on pouring all their resources into quick results, whether that’s through social, paid or organic, but in my opinion it’s worth taking a longer view and dedicating some marketing resources to growing the brand.

So as a relevant example to you I’ll look at Yoast as he is one of your direct competitors and I know that you believe that your plugin is superior. So looking at Google trends http://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=yoast we can see that consistent searches for Yoast took off in the second half of 2005.

For 5 years branded searches remained fairly flat but in 2010 they started to rise, this trend has been continuing ever since and the 2014 partial data shows a steep trajectory that suggests that this is going to be is biggest year.

Yoast has become a brand and he invests time and resources into growing this. In a market that faces a lot of competition he has remained consistently successful and has overtaken All in One SEO as the ‘go to’ plugin for wordpress users as we can see here http://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=yoast%2C%20all%20in%20one%20seo&cmpt=q

So Yoast is now enjoying about 10K branded searches worldwide a month plus the domination of the top 4 results for the non-branded search of SEO plugin which yields a further 14k+ searches per month. The top result is the wordpress hosted plugin and the next 3 are for his domain. His brand has allowed him to do this, he is seen as an authority for wordpress SEO and gets rewarded as such by Google.

If we then consider his longtail multiplier and traffic from other search engines, social, email and direct then I would say that even if Google dropped him from the top 4 he’d still be enjoying a great deal of success.

I haven’t taken the time to compare your plugin and theme to Yoast or All in One to see which is best but lets assume yours beats them both hands down. This alone is not enough to break through the competition, the only way you can do that is to market your brand and take share of voice away from the top players.

I don’t know what your conversion rates are but I’m sure you’d be very happy with the levels of traffic that Yoast enjoys.

So I hope this makes sense and that I have explained my reasoning behind my initial advice on Linkedin.

All the best,

Mike