Branding and SEO, they are two different sections of your overall marketing strategy, right? Well, not so fast. In this week’s video, we take a look at how your brand can impact your rankings in Google.

Particularly, if you are a small or local business, how are you going to compete with the big national brands? And, why do they always seem to get the higher rankings? Does Google have a way of determining which brands are more powerful and they give higher rankings accordingly? Well … yes … and no.

Watch the video to learn more and see our case studies with some different assisted living facilities. If this video is helpful for you, be sure to thumbs up, comment and subscribe. Thanks!

This video is Part 1 of a Marketing Your Assisted Living series. Click here to see more. 

We are continuing our video series to help residential assisted living owners with their online marketing. In our first video, we did an overview of how to market your residential assisted living home. We covered the Top 10 Marketing Tools you should be considering if you are trying to keep your costs down for placing residents in your assisted living home. While we are focusing on assisted living in this series, many of the marketing tools will apply to any local small business who is implementing a Local SEO strategy.

Spend Time On Crafting Your Core Beliefs and Brand

So, let’s talk about branding and SEO.

Branding is obviously an enormous topic, and we spend time in the video talking a little about where to begin with your brand. It needs to flow out of core beliefs from the owners – what you care about, what you are passionate about. If you are already in the assisted living business or plan on getting into residential assisted living and haven’t spent time working on your brand, then STOP!!! Take the time to sit down and develop who you are, and what you are all about.

When I first went to work for Cladwell, a Cincinnati fashion-tech startup, the first project I got into was the brand. At the time I came on, the brand was not true to what the founders believed about men, clothing, and life. So, we did a deep dive into beliefs and out of that work, we came up with a mission that I was extremely proud to create.

At Cladwell, I helped grow their user base from 10 dudes to over 200,000, but I think the single project I was most proud of was creating this About Page that shared Cladwell’s story and core beliefs.

To boil it down, we determined that all men matter. Whereas most clothing/fashion companies like to say, “we’re cool. You’re not. Buy our stuff to be cool for a while.” We drove a stake in the ground and said that every man has worth and inherent value. Therefore, they should dress well to express that value and dignity bestowed upon all men who are created in the image of God.

That work in branding helped guide a lot of decisions for the company. It helped us earn trust with our users. And, it’s guided the path for a lot of other marketing efforts.

So, did it help our rankings?

Branding and SEO Correlations

So, does a strong brand really impact your rankings? Yes and no.

As Rand Fishkin points out in this Whiteboard Friday, there is not a specific piece in Google’s algorithm that says, “I will rank one stronger brand over a weaker brand.” However, stronger brands tend to create a cycle of great SEO ranking factors.

If a brand is known and trusted, people might be more willing to link to a piece of content from that site. Or, maybe they will share on social media platforms more often.

Strong brands often spend resources on quality website design and user experiences. This tends to create higher data points for site usage. If Google looks at two sites and one has an average of 2 minutes of site usage time and the other has five seconds, then, they naturally Google says, “people like this site better. Maybe, I should give it a bump in rankings.”

You can go down the list of other ranking factors for SEO and see how a strong brand which invests regularly in branding can develop stronger rankings over time.

Putting It Together

So, how does this impact you and your small business? How should you build your brand at your residential assisted living home?

Clearly, your brand is much more than just your rankings in Google. Your brand includes your reputation, people’s perception of your business, the quality of your service, how you treat your residents and their families, how you treat your employees, etc. You can build a great business simply by providing excellent and quality value to your community.

At the same time, you can leverage that brand into higher SEO rankings by getting a bit creative and thinking about how to translate that brand authority into the online world.

Spend time on design. Create consistent and quality content. Reach out to the community. Give great service and ask for online reviews. Reach out to other brands and websites and create partnerships.

So, as you are thinking through building your brand, realize that typically, the stronger your brand, the better impact you will have on your SEO and rankings.