A powerful brand is more than just a recognizable name; it’s a barometer for trust and a gateway to increased visibility. In the era of Generative AI and large language models (LLMs), building your brand is more important than ever. For search engine optimization (SEO), how a brand is either perceived or not perceived at all can affect efforts to rank and appear in results, especially for answers or information found on AI platforms.
Brand, as a concept, has always been a factor in the organic search landscape. Don’t believe me? For years, marketers have accused Google of favoring big brands. Despite smaller brands putting in their best efforts to create strong, well-written content that matched search intent, was helpful and user-focused, and included engaging visual elements like bulleted lists, images, or related videos, sometimes big brands sat at the top of the search results with seemingly minimal effort.
Why? It’s less a conspiracy and more about what brand identity means. As recently as this year’s Google Search Central Live in NYC, Danny Sullivan, Google’s former Search Liaison, said, “Our systems do not sit out there and say, ‘big brand, rank it well.’ It is about recognition. If you are recognized as a brand in your field — big or small — that matters because people then know what your site is about.”
Google isn’t the only platform that sees it this way, either. New AI tools and LLMs like ChatGPT extend beyond the contents of a website and look to branding as an influencing factor in who they refer users to. Worded another way, the stronger your brand is, the more likely your brand’s reputation is to influence organic rankings and how likely LLMs are to reference your site.
“LLM perception match” is a concept that offers insight about the complicated landscape many marketers and agencies find themselves in today. Simply put, AI-powered platforms and LLMs crawl websites, as well as sift through customer reviews, incoming links, brand mentions on topically related sites, user-generated content on forums, reports, and any other data points they discover.
LLMs build a perception of who and what your brand is and weigh that information on the strength of the brand before deciding to mention your site as a reference or not.
It means that optimizing a business’s website, regardless of how much E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) it provides, is an activity that can no longer exist in a silo. Optimization is part of a bigger goal, one wherein different marketing channels work together to build and/or influence branding.
Why Does Your Brand Matter?
The idea of branding is as old as the concept of marketing, but many of its attributes are as relevant, if not more so, than ever.
Here are a number of ways branding is important, both for SEO and otherwise:
- Awareness: The more touch points or encounters a customer has with your brand, the greater and more relevant their awareness of it is. This is true of general branding, but for SEO, more awareness can translate to greater search volume. For small brands, this is difficult to measure, but larger brands can gauge their awareness by using tools like Google Keyword Planner to calculate brand search volume or Google Trends to determine relative popularity over time.
- Trust: How customers and LLMs perceive your brand is indicative of trust. Reviews, familiarity with a brand, association with products and values, and more all play into building trust with customers. The more trusted a brand is, the more likely a customer will choose the brand they know over the one they’re unfamiliar with. And the more likely they are to talk about and recommend your brand online, the better your chances of influencing your brand’s perception in organic search and LLM results. This is why asking customers for feedback and reviews is important. For SEO, it’s equally important to feature these reviews, as they can be read by Googlebot and other LLM bots crawling your site.
- Traffic: With more brand searches, businesses are likely to see more brand traffic come directly to their sites. Google Search Console’s performance report for search results is a great way to gauge how many clicks to a site are from branded terms. As searchers become more aware and familiar with a brand, and as the number of branded SERP clicks grows, it’s important to remember how Google and LLMs see brands. It’s about visibility, recognition, and trust. As indicators like branded search volume and branded clicks grow, these factors should help influence Google and LLM platforms to see your brand as authentic and trusted.
- Differentiator: The most effective brands are the ones that are able to associate themselves with a business differentiator. This extends beyond listing business differentiators on a web page. In the landscape of AI search, it means convincing others to include your talking points along with a brand mention on a related site. It could be in the form of a product review on a niche review site. It could also be in the form of a press release or story about a product. To approach this effectively for SEO, you have to think about what you want others to say about your brand. Then ask yourself, how can you message that succinctly and effectively?
- User Engagement: During Google’s antitrust trial, it was revealed that Google has something called Navboost, which is believed to influence how the search engine ranks sites. Navboost can measure user behavior, including clicks. This means that user experience matters, as Google can observe and measure how a user engages with your site. As a result, this can indirectly influence how helpful a site is, which can be associated with how a brand is perceived. If enough users have a bad experience on a website, this can damage brand reputation, which means Google and other LLMs are less likely to show results for the brand.
How Do I Identify the Strength of My Brand?
Analyzing the strength of a brand is no easy feat, and there’s no surefire metric that can clearly identify it. Many organic search marketers turn to tools like Moz or Semrush for brand metrics and backlink tracking tools. Others watch impressions and clicks for branded terms in Google Search Console. A steady, consistent increase in either could indicate an increased awareness or familiarity with the brand.
Another way is to see what LLMs and Google’s AI Mode say about your brand compared to competitors. What’s included (or not included) in the summary speaks volumes as to what kind of perception your brand has.
Questions to ask yourself:
- What are LLMs and/or Google saying about my competitors, and how does that compare to what they are saying about my brand?
- Are there industries served, products listed, or highlights included for my competitors that I could add to my website?
- Are there any listed references that I should consider getting a brand mention in?
- Are there any partners or affiliations that could help build trust?
What Can I Do About It?
Building brand authority is a complex goal that requires many moving parts. For the SEO side of the equation, it means creating helpful content that’s in line with the overall brand mission, as well as developing data-driven initiatives that can partner with and be repackaged for other marketing channels. It’s about being keenly aware of how the Internet perceives a business and troubleshooting how to influence that perception, both on-page and through outreach.
The fact of the matter is, many of the SEO tasks that have helped improve results for businesses remain important in the current digital marketing ecosystem. The question, “Is SEO dead?” seems to come up every year, and the answer, as always, is a resounding no. SEO is part of a greater collaboration in reaching those brand goals, and it has evolved outside of the Google Search box and into the broader “discovery” landscape.
For many businesses, this means empowering their SEO teams and specialists to collaborate with other marketing channels, like press relations, email marketing, social media, paid search, and Amazon and other online marketplaces. It means multi-channel marketing teams working together, sometimes across departmental lines, to create streamlined messaging that reaches potential customers across every platform.
Translating or adapting content created for SEO into a series of YouTube videos, a social media post, an email drip campaign, or a landing page for paid search can (and should) be a key tenet of marketing strategy. It’s a way to facilitate collaboration, extend a brand’s footprint on the web, and reuse SEO-driven content to the benefit of other channels. Plus, YouTube is heavily used in AI Overviews. Since Google’s deal with Instagram, their posts, as well, are growing in prominence in the new search landscape.
Taking advantage of proprietary data or exclusive information will also help SEO teams build brand authority and trust through information gain. This tactic involves creating unique content that no competitor has, which can then be used to influence AI-learning machines in seeing your site as a trusted source for original and exclusive information.
Adding customer reviews to product pages where the product is mentioned can help amplify trust. This is also true if a product won any awards, was featured in any publications, or passed any specific safety certifications. All of these are trust factors that let customers, Google, and LLMs know that your product, and the brand associated with it, are trusted by real people who have engaged with the brand.
When it comes to strengthening authority, guest-posting and outreach are great ways to build brand mentions that LLMs and AI Search will understand and associate with your business — as long as it’s done thoughtfully with high-quality, helpful, topically relevant content.
Lastly, having a multi-channel approach to marketing is also a crucial component in building brand authority. Pairing SEO with campaigns on paid search or paid social gets your message out there faster and across more platforms that searchers are actively using.
Building a brand is no easy task. It’s a heavy lift, but when done effectively, it can impact organic traffic by creating and delivering a built-in audience through branded search terms. It also influences how LLMs and Google’s AI Mode perceive and speak about a business, which greatly impacts the next customers who are looking for a product or site like yours.
In this way, incorporating brand-building into your SEO strategy not only grows your traffic, it sets your efforts up for continued success in the future. When paired with thoughtful collaboration across marketing channels, it’s an opportunity to identify strategies and tackle initiatives that make the most of your marketing budget.
