Optimize Internal Brand Pages for Search
Writing by Brick Marketing in SEO
There’s no doubt that SEO is a complex, time consuming process. SEO best practice is that every page of a website should be optimized. This is something that many website owners don’t get right. They concentrate their SEO efforts on the “most important” pages that are most likely to convert. While it’s understandable that those pages should receive more attention and be the focus of link building efforts, it’s important to remember that EVERY page of your site is important. Any single page of your site has the potential to be a visitor entry point from the search engines. For this reason, every page should be optimized.
The primary goal of SEO is to attract a new audience from the search engines that are searching for the products or services that you offer. However, you don’t want to forget about the people that have already heard of your brand and are looking for more information. An SEO campaign works best as part of a well rounded integrated marketing strategy, which means that if you are doing it correctly- target audience members will be familiar with your company. In order to attract this type of target audience member, it’s important to optimize for branded search.
Pages that should target branded search terms include the about us page, the contact page, a careers page, events, and press releases. Keeping all of this information on one page is a mistake, since they each serve a different purpose and attract a different kind of searcher. A person that is looking for a physical address of your business to stop by is different than someone that is interested in working for you. Optimize these pages for keywords like “Company X location” and “Company X careers”. If these pages are properly optimized a searcher can be directed right to the page that they need from the search engine, without having to navigate your site looking for what they need.
In addition to improving user experience and establishing trust with target audience members and the search engines, pages that are optimized for branded search can help online brand management efforts. When someone types your company name into a search engine, you want to own as much of the content as possible that shows up for your brand. That way, you have control of the message and the way that your brand is perceived. Due to the nature of the Internet, anyone can say pretty much anything about you and it can be found in the search engines. The more pages of content that you control for branded search terms, the better.
Of course, in order to optimize the about us, contact, careers, events, and press release pages they need to be “optimizable” and contain a reasonable amount of content. It shouldn’t just be one sentence per page. Provide visitors with all of the most important information that they would need and optimize the content and meta tags for branded terms that will bring searchers to the page that is most relevant to their needs.
