You have likely read many articles and guides about how you can use SEO to establish your brand. But do you know you can use your brand voice in conjunction with your SEO efforts?
Your brand voice defines your business as a way to communicate its views and ethics to your audience. In turn, this voice becomes the way customers associate with your brand and tell others about you.
For instance:
- When thinking of a bold and adventurous brand, does Jeep come to your mind?
- Do tough and resilient traits sound like Nike to you?
- Does a quirky, witty, and entertaining personality mean Skittles for you?
What’s happening here is that you‘re associating brands with their signature attributes, which they imprinted on their consumers’ minds through branding. When you take some time to develop a brand voice that distinguishes you from your competitors, it becomes your identity.
While your SEO efforts consistently expand your reach, your brand voice makes sure you attract the right crowd who will want to buy from you in the future.
Infusing your brand voice into your SEO efforts can dramatically increase the results of content marketing efforts. Before discussing how you can use your brand voice to advance your SEO, let’s have a quick look at some familiar brand voices.
Do You Know Your Brand Voice?
The majority of smaller businesses neglect the importance of brand voice. Their message typically has a slight advertising tone that doesn’t speak to their target audience.
According to Mary Beech, the CMO of Kate Spade New York, “The voice starts with the promise made by your brand to the customers. Your content delivers the story of your organization, conveying the spiritual and intellectual aspects of the brand’s promise.”
It’s the brand voice that gets you noticed in the sea of digital media, where all content looks and feels the same.
Therefore, you must adopt a voice that distinguishes you from others and makes you relatable to your target audience. Figure out the following to get an idea about the voice and tone that matches your business.
- Who are you as a brand?
- What are your values?
- Who are your ideal customers?
- What is the language they speak?
Here are some of the interesting brand voice examples used by leading brands.
Playful, Witty, and Upbeat
People love fun and humor, so if it suits your business values and mission, why not add a touch of comicality to your brand’s voice.
For instance, Purple is a leading mattress brand that saw unprecedented growth thanks to its unforgettable quirky and upbeat brand voice. Their snarky humor is in stark contrast to the typically tedious and stiff mattress industry, helping Purple stand out from the crowd and make mattress shopping fun.
Fresh and Energetic Voice
Some brands choose a fresh, upbeat voice to energize their audience and fire up their imagination. Their brand voice tugs at their target audience and takes them into a magical land of possibilities.
Disney fits perfectly in this category as its first and foremost purpose is to capture its audience’s attention through imagination. Their content is captivating and creative, using energetic words to pump up the visitors and entertain them.
Aggressive and Confident
Sometimes brands choose an aggressive strategy and use an assertive tone for their brand. They spear-tackle the customers to come off as bold and courageous, with no boundaries to bind.
Harley-Davidson is a perfect example of a bold and to-the-point brand voice. Their products are about power and agility, and their audience is attracted to their ruggedness. The content on their site is pertinent and confidently delivers their brand’s motto.
Calm and Friendly
Most green lifestyle and wellness brands opt for a calm voice. The soothing tone attracts their target audience, looking for ways to enrich their lives through simplicity.
Birchwood Home is a mattress and bedding company with a focus on natural luxury mattresses. Their brand voice has a touch of class and quality, which speaks to their core audience, i.e., detail-oriented and quality conscious clientele. Their voice is fresh, without any aggression or quirkiness, making them seem like a friendly and trustworthy brand.
Infusing your brand voice into your SEO efforts isn’t that hard. Let’s discuss 10 easy ways to incorporate your brand voice to optimize your content for search and humans.
1. Choose Topics of Interest to Your Unique Customer
Typically, marketers end up wasting 50% of their budget on unqualified leads and uninterested traffic. That’s because they fail to focus on what their ideal customers care about. No matter how exceptionally you optimize your content, if it’s not attracting the right crowd, then all your efforts can go to waste.
SEO can do wonders for you if your content speaks to your ideal customers. Choose topics that respond to their problems and present your products and services as a possible solution. That way, when your audience searches for something that matters to them, you will have optimized content ready for Google to show to them.
SEO isn’t a game of keyword placement anymore. Google has updated its algorithms, giving much more importance to what people mean when searching for a word or a phrase. Therefore, your content must fulfill the search intent if you hope to rank in the SERP for a keyphrase.
When you write on topics that interest your ideal customers, they visit you often and share your content with others. The popularity of your content will signal Google that your content is valuable, and it will show more of your content in SERP.
That’s how choosing the right topics can improve your SEO and enhance your search engine visibility. Especially if your customer base is more niche, you may be able to find less competitive keywords that speak directly to them!
Going Zero Waste is a sustainable and eco-friendly blog that highlights products without endocrine disruptors in them. Its readers are people interested in a no-waste lifestyle. That’s why they write on topics such as beginners’ guide to sustainability, reviews of eco-friendly products, repurposing things, and the challenges of living an eco-friendly life.
2. Show Your Personality In Your Content
Just like humans, your brand should have a personality that should show in the content you create. When you infuse your personality into your website content, it becomes a magnet for your ideal customers.
Generic content is bland and won’t speak to your tribe, the people you want to attract to your brand. You are unique and can become an inspiration for others if you let your personality shine in your content, irrespective of the tone, and voice you choose for your brand.
To add a unique personality to your web copy, ensure the following points:
- Write content after identifying your target audience.
- Choose to tell the world about yourself through storytelling.
- Add personal statements here and there, allowing readers to feel connected.
- Bend some rules to make your copy attractive and appealing.
Infusing your personality into your copy will allow your readers to connect with you. This connection can foster trust between you and your audience. With this credibility in place, your customers will accept the solutions you provide to their problems. Next time they need help, they will seek you out whether you appear in SERP or not. As more people search for your brand, it will pull up the ranking for your entire website.
Check out Lucy & Yak as they narrate their story in a unique and refreshing way. They have chosen a comic style with bubble messages, interesting punctuations, funky typography, and mild humor. Their brand voice gives an easy-going, fun personality to their brand!
3. Adopt a Unique Writing Style
When you adopt a unique writing style, it becomes your brand’s identity. Your writing style defines your choice of words and sentence structure, and complexity.
No matter what kind of voice or tone you choose for your brand, your writing style should be convincing, intriguing, and easy-to-read. Add a personal touch to your writing style to make it recognizable for your followers and attractive to your target audience.
There are four types of writing styles you can opt for your brand.
- Expository Writing: Expository writing is a formal writing style that discusses every topic in a reserved tone. Business Insider chose expository writing to build authority and connect with their ideal readers looking for reliable business news.
- Descriptive Writing: Usage of figurative language backed with sensory detailing makes descriptive writing interesting. It allows the readers to form an image in their minds when reading. For example, at Amazon, you will find the content written in a descriptive style so that their customers can feel confident in their purchase.
- Narrative Writing: Inscribing in storytelling style while setting an ambiance is what narrative writing is all about. Check out Warby Parker Eyewear and see how they’ve woven a compelling story around their brand.
- Persuasive Writing: Persuasive writing is communicating your opinion to influence the decision-making process of others. It’s all about convincing others that your idea is better. Coca-Cola uses a confident tone and makes compelling arguments throughout its content to persuade their customers why they’re the best and deserve their customers’ support for a better future.
4. Make Title Tags Attractive With Brand Voice
Title tags are a crucial on-page SEO factor that has the power to pull up your ranking in SERP. They are the first thing searchers see as they scroll through the search results. Creative title tags grab the readers’ attention leaving them intrigued to know more.
So, infuse your brand voice in them to catch the eye of your ideal customer. At the same time, follow all the SEO best practices for optimizing your title tags for search.
- Incorporate the primary keyword in the title tag.
- Enter the keyword towards the start of the title.
- The title length should be 50 to 60 characters.
- Use enticing information or numbers to attract viewers.
By adding your main keyword to the title, you tell the search engine and the readers that your content is on-point.
A well-optimized title tag infused with your brand voice ensures increased organic traffic. Ross Hudgens from Siege Media claims that tweaking titles can boost the CTR anywhere from 20 to 100%. You can check whether your title tag is fully optimized or not by using some leading tools in the market, such as Yoast or Screaming Frog.
5. Write Interesting Meta Descriptions
After the title, the meta description is the most important text block that can compel the searchers to click on your SERP result. It should summarize or mention the key point readers should expect to find on the page. Within 155 to 160 characters, you need to convince the searcher that they will find the answer to their query if they click on your result.
There are many different ways to make your meta description enjoyable and SEO ready. Following are some of the tips to optimize your meta descriptions:
- Define the purpose of your content clearly.
- Mention exciting and relevant stats or facts.
- Use power words that address the readers’ pain points.
- Give a sneak peek of the content.
Observe the meta description in the example above. It clearly describes what the readers will find if they click on the result. It speaks specifically to its target audience. Notice the keyword placement, which is at the beginning of both the title and the meta.
If your meta descriptions are highly optimized, they will drive traffic, attract new clicks, and increase your chances of successful conversions. Well-written meta descriptions enhance your website’s curb appeal. When you get more traffic to your site, Google will also rank you better and move you up the SERP.
These first five suggestions are a good place to get started, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. Check back next week as we dive into five more suggestions and another case study example.
The original version of this article was first published on V3Broadsuite.
- 10 Ways to Infuse Your Brand Voice into Your SEO Efforts, Part 2 - February 4, 2021
- 10 Ways to Infuse Your Brand Voice into Your SEO Efforts, Part 1 - January 28, 2021
