I asked Liisa Salonen, a generalist marketer, content creation wizard and a true brand message lover, to write me a guest blog. That turned into a guest glow, partially due to my ever so frequent typos, but mostly due to the glowingly amazing text.
I know we all have to work with SEO and the new AI age search optimizations but as for someone to whom brand still matters and a lot, it was pure joy to get Liisa’s perspective on not sacrificing the brand essence for SEO.
SEO is in the way of your business. There, I said it. Every company needs to be found. SEO has its place in every business’s strategy. But when SEO becomes your #1 priority, everything’s done for the machine and customers miss out on the experience and forget you ever existed. You become searchable but forgettable. With a carefully crafted brand and your tone of voice, you become memorable. It’s more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to retain existing ones. So build, don’t just create traffic. So why not create a brand while you’re at it?
First of all, SEO has multiple levels, and the basics need to be in place, even I can say that much. But when we begin crafting content for search engines, we forget about the people using them. Search engines have their secret algorithms. In the end, they’ve never handed out their secret sauce. And they keep changing. We’ll never really know what changed and when. We just have general best practices. Those best practices kill your tone of voice. Everything will taste the same. It will be bland. Even so boring that you might not even remember from whom you made your latest purchase. Winning in the on-page SEO game once might be good at that moment, but when you need more than just luck, you want people to come back.
Your branded language and SEO are on different ends of the same spectrum. They serve different purposes. Therefore, their goals are somewhat contradictory. You can’t win at both, at least initially. Be very careful when creating your SEO and brand strategies, you might do more harm in the long run.
Whenever you’re creating content for your business and start applying the SEO best practices, you kill creativity. If your H1 is SEO-ready, it’s probably the same as any other company would use for that keyword. When you have to start your text with the desired keyword, it will anchor your viewpoint. With just the functional on-page SEO, your texts will become emotionless, and we live by emotions, even when we try to rationalize our decisions. A strong brand fosters trust and loyalty over time. We know people prefer to buy from someone they trust and make their buying decisions based on familiarity. Your tone of voice is one of the most visible brand assets and if you’ve got it, it shouldn’t be neglected – If you’re the wizard who can do both of these without compromises, congrats! I’m still waiting to see your texts.
SEO serves a purpose; brand tone of voice serves a different one. You can’t win at both without compromises. And those compromises may be the reason why you’re not getting returning customers. SEO is killing your brand. Change my mind.
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