Leveraging Organic Search To Build Greater Brand Authority

As consumers are bombarded with an overwhelming amount of information and content, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for marketers to determine the most effective channel mix as consumer preferences and trends change at a breakneck speed and frequency.

To stay ahead of the competition and build strong brand authority, companies must find ways to amplify their content to improve brand visibility in this ever-changing world. 

Organic search does that exactly. Over the past year, more people searched for things across web pages, social media, third-party apps, and even maps – acting on what they found (often by purchasing something) more frequently than ever before, and that’s not a trend that’s going anywhere, anytime soon as “influence” culture grips the world. 

However, the sheer magnitude of the web and continuous updates to search algorithms makes it impossible for search engines to crawl every URL on every website. The reality is that it is simply beyond human capacity to analyze, digest, and react to the amount of information involved in organic search.

In a time where advertising budgets are being reduced and paid search costs are rising, understanding and keeping pace with shifts in search behavior is critical to harnessing the potential of organic search and fundamental to establishing stronger brand authority through greater findability.

Benchmarking Organic Search 

Organic search plays a key role in increasing customer engagement by supporting the discoverability of a company’s most relevant (and highest converting) content. Relevancy is why a brand shows up in search results in the first place. The greater the relevance of the content, the stronger it ranks — and in a world where capturing consumer attention is harder than it’s  ever been, that matters more than ever before. 

Also Read: Mobile Marketing Predictions for 2023

This is where understanding the journey of each URL becomes crucial. Organizations can use such benchmarks and data-driven strategies to activate optimizations to ensure that their most valuable content is no longer ignored by search engines. The secret is to make sure that you maximize the number of URLs that are found by search engines at the very start of the search journey. This increases the scale and efficiency of the crawl budget that search engines allocate to discovering content across your entire website, and unlocks untapped organic search potential by helping consumers discover the most relevant content, contributing to increased brand authority over time. 

Further, it’s more essential than ever for brands to have a clear understanding of how different consumer groups search and navigate those results, as more than 33 percent of people will change their search terms if they aren’t satisfied with the initial results.

The Tactics for Building Brand Authority 

While our collective dependency on search engines might not have evolved greatly, what has evolved is the importance of not only understanding why a brand is not showing up when their products and services are needed most, but how to rectify the issue at scale. This exemplifies the need for integrating AI to recognize patterns and adapt strategies as part of a holistic organic search strategy for building brand authority.

From an organic search perspective, AI is the most disruptive and innovative differentiator to hit the search industry in years, and the impact on brands is truly significant. When paired with Machine Learning, this dynamic combination can accelerate speed to actionable insight, and ultimately implementations.

In 2023, the most effective marketers will leverage a blend of organic search, and automation to reach consumers as quickly as their search behavior changes. By using AI, marketers will be able to adapt their content in real-time to consumers’ changing preferences. AI can help organizations capture nascent demand and serve prioritized product recommendations at scale, thus allowing marketers to make informed data-driven decisions to optimize the discoverability of their content.

One of the key tactics to improve content visibility is to focus on technical organic search. This includes optimizing website structure, crawl budget, and crawlability to ensure that search engines can easily understand and index the entirety of your websites. Through the use of AI, marketers are able to analyze data from various sources to identify patterns and deliver recommendations for content that will resonate best with targeted audience segments. 

Moreover, AI can also help streamline the content creation process by automating tasks such as keyword research and content optimization. This can help to save time while also improving overall efficiency of bandwidth constrained resources across the team. By using machine learning algorithms, organic search professionals can track performance in real-time, enabling them to adjust to their strategies faster than ever before. Ultimately contributing to a more sustainably profitable performance marketing channel with a higher return on organic search spend.

Conclusion

The point of brand authority is to get discovered, or more realistically, discoverable not through one site or even one technology but across a vast world of channels, devices, and mediums where users are continuously looking for something to satisfy a need, want or desire. As a brand, having the right high-quality, informative, and engaging content that provides value increases relevancy and contributes to overall brand authority. 

Consumers trust what they know, and search engines have long dominated (and influenced) how we search. Because of this, and the growing rate and diversity of consumer search behaviors, brands should no longer consider a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to search.

To build that trust, search strategies must meet customers where they are, with what they need, when they need it.

Organizations that want to achieve the utmost value from their data will leverage the power of  automation and AI to serve content with greater relevancy via search engines. By incorporating tactics such as technical keyword accuracy, quality content, link building, and website performance optimization, companies can improve their organic search visibility and activate sustainable profitability for their business. 

This creates a seamless connection between search behavior and business results, allowing for consistent data-driven decisions, relevant content and improved targeting – optimizing operational processes to better track performance in real-time and ultimately drive sustainable business growth.