In this competitive environment, it’s crucial for any business to develop a solid marketing plan. Branding helps promote your company and bring awareness to its identity, but you can also use other methods to enhance your strategy such as SEO and SEM.
But, how do branding and SEO/SEM relate to each other? You can use both to position your brand and defend it from competitors.
In SEO, keywords and content development are vital parts of the strategy, while SEM focuses on generating leads and sales of specific products and services.
However, this alone is not enough to boost your branding strategy. Creating visibility beyond search campaigns is vital. You can use other channels such as display or social media ads and create quality content for your users. This will increase your brand value and help you scale positions in organic search.
Benefits of using cross analysis SEO/SEM
Organic results always appear right after search ads, so having both gives you great exposure at a minimum cost. If your paid search results appear after the ads, the bidding needs improvement so they are shown at the top of the page.
You can leverage the keywords that get you good search engine positioning and include them in your paid campaigns, too. Since you can control the message and the format of your ad in a more effective way in SEM, using SEO keywords can help you analyze the impact that your paid campaigns are generating in your organic search results.
However, if you’ve already implemented this strategy and the results were not as good as expected, maybe there are some aspects you should double-check. We see daily how most of the brands that come to us looking to improve their SEO results have found themselves in similar situations.
Some mistakes that advertisers usually make:
- Not using the right keywords, or not being aware of using the wrong words. It’s important to constantly analyze the searches you’re receiving through your keywords to see if you’re using the right ones.
- Not having a good structure at campaign level. An example of this is promoting all product categories without first separating them correctly.
- Not protecting your brand in SEM and focusing only on branded content.
Going through your strategy and reviewing all its aspects, can help you identify these mistakes and solve them in a timely manner, improving your SEO results.
What’s the best way to distribute your budget?
When marketers place a large part of the budget on their own keywords, it’s probably because competitors are already bidding on their terms and advertisers need to outbid them while also increasing their spending.
If your brand is well known, bidding on your own branded terms from the start can be a good option to secure your website as the first result in search engines, strengthening your brand along the way.
How should you distribute the budget?
While bidding on one’s own keywords is recommended, it should not be the main investment. We suggest investing around 25% of the budget in branded keywords, while leaving the remaining amount for generic terms.
However, it can also depend on other factors, such as the available budget, the channels you want to invest in and the type of conversions you want. Therefore, you should:
- Determine the available budget.
- Distribute it between the channels you decide your target audience is using.
- Allocate the budget where you consider you’re going to get the best results.
What happens when you invest too much in your branded keywords?
One of our US clients working in the traveling sector used to assign most of their SEM budget in branding campaigns.
By using a cross analysis SEO/SEM, doing tests and lowering the amount of budget allocated to SEM branding, we were able to see that excessive investment in branded keywords was burying the results of organic search and that organic users were losing ground.
With this information, we were able to save the remaining budget and use it for other campaigns.
Always measure the results
Finally, you need to measure the results by checking if they’ve reached the previously established KPIs. Strategies are flexible and can be adjusted throughout the campaign in order to meet the objectives.
If you’re focusing on performance, you should measure per cost per conversion, conversion volume and ROAS. On the other hand, If you’re measuring awareness, you should use impression share and CTR.
What is brand awareness?
Brand awareness is an indicator used in marketing with the goal of measuring how much a brand is recognized and remembered by the audience.
Should I bid on my own branded keywords?
Yes! In fact, it’s an effective way to secure your position in search engines and defend your brand from competitors. But be sure to allocate your budget correctly to avoid overspending!
