Why Brand Building with Ballsy Content is Key to SEO

In the not-too-distant past, SEO experts paid little attention to online brand building. Why bother? The way SEO worked, brand wasn’t that important, it was all about keywords. But that has changed in recent years. Brand is now extremely important. Why? Google’s algorithm has become so much more sophisticated. It understands content, content quality, and the authority and credibility of the content source so well that you no longer have to waste time with things like keyword density.

The old way of thinking was to do keyword research — i.e. find out what people are searching for — and then repeat those keywords over and over within a block of text, make sure they appeared in the title and description tags, and generally sprinkle them all over the content. People still ask me, “Is the keyword density okay?” and worry about percentages. But Google has become so acute in understanding authority that it no longer needs those very basic signals. Signals can be much more indirect, for example through links, and Google will understand.

Brand = Authority

Here’s an example: The German company Haribo make candy. They are the name for gummy bears. If you search for “gummy bear company”, you will find Haribo mentioned at the very top, but the content that gets highlighted on their website doesn’t necessarily say “gummy bear company” anywhere in the text (in fact, the title tag spells “gummy” as “gummi,” sticking to the German spelling.) Even if your company name is “Gummy Bear Recruitment Company” which contains the exact words of our search phrase, you won’t place at the top of the results page, because Google knows more people look for candy than for a small recruitment company in Bangkok.

That’s Google extrapolating the importance of Haribo in a gummy-bear-as-candy context.

This approach is a departure from past SEO thinking. Before, you might have established a site called bestgummybearsite.com, expecting to come up at the top of search results when people search for “best gummy bear site.” These days, the opposite is taking place. If you focus too much on your solution, Google recognizes a questionable authority.

In fact, studies show that the shorter your domain name is, the more authority and the more credibility Google perceives and will give you.

At one end of the authority spectrum, we have the likes of IBM, Nike, and Apple commanding the highest level of authority. On the other, we now find sites like inexpensivecarinsurance.net. And that’s new. Even five years ago, if you could score a really smart domain, you’d probably rank well because Google took the name of the domain so seriously. But Google has come full circle and now looks for and recognizes true authority. Which means your domain could be snickers.com, and if what you do is Florida real estate, then snickers.com will come to the very top of the results for searches on that topic.

The Content Implications

What does that mean in terms of content? You need quality, quality, quality. To fully understand the importance of quality content in today’s SEO world, consider the inbound link. Pioneered by Google in the late 90s, inbound links are a circle — if you have good inbound links of high authority, you’re perceived as a higher authority. But what makes those guys a higher authority? Other inbound links. And it’s difficult to fake that.

Again, the thinking here used to be that ‘we need to rank well, so we need to have inbound links. Let’s buy into this huge inbound link program and get tens of thousands of links from our friends in India who’ll set that up.’

Now, Google will see right through that. You need inbound links because the authority of a link is important, but so is the topic or the subject matter of that link. So if you have tens of thousands of great links that come back to your site, but they fall outside of your market focus, those links don’t mean a thing. You have link authority, but not relevance, so it won’t help you rank better for the keywords you’re interested in.

That’s why quality content is so important.

If you can produce content that absolutely stands out, content that is pushy, that is ballsy, that is funny, that makes people think, that criticizes the norms or the typical approach — that’s gold. That is the heart and soul of effective social media and online word of mouth, and that will get you inbound links.

The right way to do SEO is to focus on your brand and focus on the quality of your content. If you do that, understanding that there are all these important signals that come with this approach, then you’ll end up with amazing rankings.

Andreas Mueller is Chief Strategist at Bloofusion, an online marketing and search engine strategy firm with offices in the U.S. and Germany — we RebelMinds partner with Bloofusion on client projects whenever we get the chance. Find Andreas at www.bloofusion.com.