Branding wasn’t something SEOs traditionally thought much about. The real wins were in non-branded keywords, where the traffic and conversions lived.
However, that changed when Google and OpenAI turned most of these queries into zero-click searches.
For the remaining queries, search platforms directly reward authoritative and popular brands, so branding can no longer be ignored for SEO.
Here’s your brand SEO playbook for getting seen, trusted, and chosen in the future of AI-powered search.
Brand SEO is about clarifying and amplifying your brand’s voice everywhere people search. It starts with a solid brand foundation. Without that, you’ll struggle to improve visibility in AI-powered search systems.
If branding is new to you, think of it as the process of creating a distinct identity in the minds of consumers. It differentiates your business from competitors and builds a lasting impression through your name, messaging, visuals, and reputation.
So when you do brand SEO, it’s about creating consistency and ensuring accuracy in how your brand presents itself everywhere people search (Google, ChatGPT, Reddit, and beyond).
You’ll be able to define and control some aspects of your brand. For example, here’s Ahrefs’ media kit, where we make it easy for others to reference our brand the same way we do.
But you are not in control of the impression your brand makes in consumers’ minds (and how AI summarizes those impressions).
As AI is integrated into search, brand signals are becoming a part of Google’s ranking algorithm.
For instance, Mark Williams-Cook discovered that Google uses a site quality score to classify websites, and those that fall under a certain benchmark (0.4 on a 0-1 scale) do not qualify for visibility in rich snippets.
This score is calculated based on:
- Brand strength, measured by how many searches are made that include the brand’s name
- User interactions (like clicks), especially when a brand does not rank in the top position
- Branded anchor text, determining topic-to-brand connections from around the web
Not to mention that branded signals correlate with visibility in Google’s AI Overviews:
Brands are also being vectorized as entities in LLMs and semantic search engines’ embedding models.
This means that machines treat your brand as a distinct organization. Then, they map other topics related to your brand to understand what you’re all about so they can summarize this information directly in search results.
When visualized, it looks like this:
Notice how the brand Lucasfilm is connected to its sub-brand Star Wars, which is connected to characters, actors, genres, and more?
The same network of connections is built around your brand, too.
This is the foundation of how AI systems understand your brand and how to summarize it best. So brand SEO is crucial for ensuring your brand:
- Shows up as a distinct entity, separate from other similar-sounding entities, like Apple the company vs apple the fruit.
- Is connected to appropriate and accurate topics for your products and services, like how Dyson is connected to vacuum cleaners and seen as an authority for that topic.
- Has no gaps that can lead to misinformation or hallucinations in AI summaries. If your brand entity isn’t connected to topics and other entities that matter, those are gaps you need to close.
Brand SEO is not just about rankings (which only care about if you show up). It’s about how you show up to ensure favorable and accurate mentions in AI-generated responses.
Here’s the exact 7-step brand SEO framework I use.
Start by defining your brand and any key topics or things you want to connect it to. I use the “5 W’s and How” framework to get the ball rolling:
The “who” element
There are two aspects here: who you help and who you hire.
For your audience (who you help), tailor your branding to speak their language and give them the “what’s in it for me” factor upfront. For example, Obsidian is a knowledge management app. But its tagline is 100% focused on the benefit it delivers to users, and it shows up where people search:
Also, show the team behind the brand (i.e., who you hire) and create profile pages for each of them, showcasing their industry experience and expertise.
The “what” element
What does the business do? What topics or product categories does it want to be known for? Create dedicated landing pages for the brand’s flagship products or services.
For example, instead of having a single page with all your services, split these up into separate landing pages and add the main ones in your navigation.
You could also have separate pages for unique features and attributes that matter to your audience, showcasing the things that make your brand, products or services different. For example, here’s a turf company promoting the unique qualities of its grass varieties:
It helps with SEO and search ads since you can direct visitors to the exact service or feature they’re interested in.
The “when” element
Is time a potential factor influencing your brand? If so, include this in your brand messaging, such as “24/7 support” or “up-to-the-minute” updates.
Depending on your product or service, you could also create dedicated landing pages about this USP with details like:
- Locations open 24/7, and their contact details
- Mobile services you offer for emergencies and the areas you cover
- How you collect up-to-the-minute updates to report on
- Express shipping you offer for “last-minute” purchases
The “where” element
Think of physical locations (like cities and suburbs), virtual (like the metaverse), or conceptual (like fictional worlds) that are relevant to your brand.
Create location landing pages if appropriate.
The “why” element
Are the reasons why you started the brand or why you do things in a particular way important to your audience? Connect these to your unique selling proposition as part of your key messaging.
For example, purpose-driven brands can inspire loyalty among their audiences, take Who Gives a Crap as an example:
Their branding is very loud when it comes to why they do what they do. On the surface, they just sell toilet paper. However, they’ve had huge success on the sales and promotion side because of their “why”, earning thousands of links and mentions in premium publications:
The “how” element
For most brands, who they serve, what they do, or why they do it is often enough to unify their brand vision. But there are rare occurrences where it all comes down to how they do things.
For example, a facilities management company I worked with struggled to define its brand. Its services spanned multiple categories (security, cleaning, labor hire, and investigations), and its audience ranged from small pubs to international government bodies.
This made both the “what” and “who” too broad to unify, a rare situation.
Surprisingly, the answer came from the “how.” By articulating its unique process, it was able to clearly define what tied together its diverse services.
For the first time, the brand’s messaging was in alignment with how they operated offline.
The “5Ws and How” is a simple yet powerful method for defining your brand’s identity and planning how to represent it online, especially if you want people and LLMs to talk about it correctly.
You’re welcome to make a copy of my “Brand Identity for SEO” template to get started.
Next, audit the current website, business profiles, social profiles, and the brand’s other owned media.
Look for inconsistencies in brand messaging or core details (like the brand’s name, address, or phone number) that do not align with its current information or style guide.
Start making a list in your project management tool, as you’ll need to clean these inconsistencies up, pronto. Otherwise, they’ll become a significant source of misinformation distributed through LLM responses.
Next, check out Ahrefs’ Brand Radar to assess your earned visibility.
Look for:
- Inconsistencies in brand messaging or core details like, incorrect name, address or phone number details could be a problem. As can mentions of old company slogans and taglines.
- Brand sentiment (especially negative sentiment): If mentions of your brand are predominantly negative, this could dissuade search engines and LLMs from including your brand in responses.
- Weaknesses in brand authority affecting online visibility: If you do not have many brand mentions and links from authoritative sources, your brand’s online authority may be weak.
- Brand popularity and traffic from branded keyword searches: If your competitors have more brand searches and demand than you do, this could lead to them also being more visible in search.
To find these potential brand-related visibility issues, start in the “Search demand” tab to get a benchmark of your branded searches:
In the “Web visibility” tab, you can find mentions of your brand around the web. I like to filter out mentions on the brand’s own website here:
It’s also worth checking the other tabs to see the brand’s mentions on different platforms and in AI responses.
You can also look at your analytics or Google Search Console dashboards and filter for branded traffic or impressions. These are great indicators of your current level of brand awareness.
If your brand is fairly new and you want to confirm if it’s seen as a distinct entity by Google, try searching Carl Hendy’s Knowledge Graph API Search Tool. You’ll also be able to see if your brand is getting confused with other things, or if it’s been misclassified:
The idea is to get a robust picture of how machines have classified and interpreted your brand. And if you notice any gaps here or incorrect information, add them to your project management tool.
You’ll need to correct those to ensure accurate information in search responses, especially in AI features. How you go about correcting them depends on the source of the inaccurate information:
- If it’s an owned channel (like your social profiles or business citations), you can log in and change it directly.
- If it’s on a forum or discussion thread, you can respond and become a part of the conversation, clarifying things for your audience exactly where they’re talking about your brand.
- If it’s on a third-party website or news, you could reach out to the author or editor and ask them to correct any misinformation they’ve published.
Your mileage may vary, but it never hurts to try. Here’s an example of Common Room, a brand that undertook such a task recently and what worked for them:
Next, look into untapped opportunities to gain relevant visibility from your audience. With organic traffic going down across the board, clever brands are taking a more holistic view of SEO as “search everywhere optimization”.
I start with Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. For example, the topic of “ergonomic chairs” has over 1,400 queries being searched in the US per month, 25,000 times.
This gives me a great overview of what topics I can align the brand to, especially when filtering for commercial or transactional intent. Queries with these intents lead to higher click-through rates from AI-powered search engines compared to informational queries.
However, for brand SEO, I take it a step further by looking at keyword modifiers, features, and attributes mentioned in keywords that can be used in USPs and brand messaging.
For example, for a local aged care home, there were many keywords relating to quality and price:
So, we adapted the brand’s messaging around the USP of “value for money”, making them a top recommended choice in AI responses as a result:
I also go further and assess what platforms are a part of the audience’s search journey to ensure holistic brand visibility everywhere searchers are likely to look.
SparkToro is a great tool for seeing the most popular platforms for a topic. For example, for “ergonomic chair”, Twitch, Github, and Discord are used above average, indicating a strong audience demographic among coders and gamers:
Discussions are happening on these platforms that relevant brands can contribute to. For instance, here’s a thread discussing recommendations for ergonomic chairs on GitHub:
To find the conversations you can join, try using the Web Visibility report in Brand Radar. Filter the data to the platform you care about (like Reddit, in the image below) and then search for mentions of the topic on that platform:
Try out different things here:
- Search for your brand mentions on each platform and assess sentiment among your audience
- Search for competing products and get your product featured in similar conversations to them
- Consider paying for ad real estate on pages or conversations about related topics
The idea is to protect your existing visibility and amplify it everywhere your audience searches for your brand, products, or services.
Remember to keep adding interesting insights and action items as tasks in your project management tool as you go.