How SEO Traffic Can Increase Your Branding Traffic in Chicago

We can all agree – Chicago is a great city to do business in. But that greatness has a downside for businesses here – there is a lot of competition in nearly every market. If you can make it here, the saying goes, you can make it anywhere. But in order to make it here, you need strong branding to put and keep your business in the forefront of consumer online searches. And this is why it is important to keep in mind that SEO traffic can increase your branding traffic in Chicago.

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What Is SEO Traffic?

SEO traffic is a critical business key performance indicator (KPI). SEO traffic is a measure of the number of visitors to your website as a result of paid or organic search traffic. By collecting information on your SEO traffic and pairing it with other metrics, you can gain a complete understanding of your company’s SEO performance. SEO performance is a critical indicator of your company’s online performance and marketing efforts.

Other key terms to be aware of are:

• Organic search: Organic search results are web page listings that most closely match a user’s search query based on relevance. It means that your website is properly positioned to appear high in search engine ranking when users type in search terms that are associated with your business – both specific trademarked names and more general branding associations. Winning the organic search game is just about as good as it gets.
• Paid search: Paid search comprises advertising campaigns such as sponsored listings that appear on a search engine or partner site. Most commonly, you pay the host each time your ad is clicked on – hence the name pay per click (PPC). Less frequently, you pay simply when your ad is displayed, which is called cost per impression (CPM).
• Traffic rank: Traffic ranking is how much traffic your site gets when compared to all other sites on the internet. It can include traffic from organic search, display, direct, referral, social, email, paid search, and others.

What Is Branding Traffic?

A key concept to understand here is branding traffic. Branding traffic is any website traffic that occurs after web users type certain keywords into a search engine that include any reference to your company’s brand, including its name.

Branding traffic is an important element of SEO traffic as it means that visitors have heard about your business from some source other than a keyword search – in other words, these are visitors who are not looking for an “air fryer” but are looking for a Chefman air fryer or a Turbo fry air fryer. They have heard of the company, but they are searching based on key specific attributes or branding association rather than heading directly to the company’s home page.

In many cases, then, branded traffic is the highest performing and most profitable stream of online traffic to a website. Branded traffic is good for two main reasons. The benefits of branded traffic include:

• High conversion rates: Users who’ve found your website by using branded queries are typically loyal. They are already familiar with your company and are headed to your website with a specific purpose in mind.
• High click-through rate: More visitors navigate their way to your website.

Branded Traffic Will Have a Positive Impact on Your SEO

Because branded traffic has high conversion rates and high click-through rates, it has a powerful and beneficial impact on your SEO. This helps to explain why branding is so critical for businesses.

But companies have to keep in mind that solid branding is not a switch that can be flipped on. Developing an impactful, resilient brand that resonates with customers takes time, and it also takes consistency, day after day and week after week, with that consistently including messaging, tone, design, and delivery, not just on your website but at all customer touchpoints, from customer service, chat to social media posting.

The effort, of course, is worth it. The more people search for and engage with your brand, whether that is online or on social media or on other channels, the better your brand authority will be, and the higher you will rank in search engine results. The brand authority will then impact your domain authority, which is a search engine ranking score that predicts how your website will likely rank on a search engine results page (SERP).

How Your Company's Brand Authority Impacts Search

While brand authority and search engine rankings go hand in hand, one does not automatically impact the other. You could spend months producing top-rate content for your website and optimizing every section of that content for search engine ranking. But without a brand to prop up your marketing efforts, you will be less likely to rank high on search engine results pages. Without that branding, people won’t know how to search for your branded keywords. To use our earlier example, they will still be stuck searching for “air fryer” or – worse – the branded keywords owned by one of your competitors.

This brings us back to the importance of branding. Developing a strong brand is a key function of SEO growth – it gets people talking about your brand online, which signals to search engines like Google that you are relevant to a specific market. And since the search engine will see a link between your rankings and the visibility of your brand, you will rise even higher in search engine rankings, along the way earning more traffic and more customers.

Is Branding and SEO Hard? You Bet!

Do branding and SEO concepts seem difficult? They should. While the ideas, in theory, are not difficult to grasp, actually putting into place a campaign to drive results requires a huge amount of coordination, planning, and work.

This is where a Chicago SEO agency can step in and help out. Digital Authority Partners is your Chicago local SEO agency, with a team of branding and SEO pros ready to help you create memorable branding and impactful SEO content that drives your bottom line and connects to customers both here at home and around the world.

To learn more about what Digital Authority partners can do for you, schedule a free consultation today.