How SEO grows brands: The science behind the service

SEO is an investment in brand growth, not a short-term ROI play. Learn how SEO boosts your brand and acquisition of new buyers.

There is too much misinformation about how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) works.

Let's clear that up. Because you need to know exactly why and how SEO supports brand growth, sales, and leads.

How brands grow

Marketing research has made it clear how brands grow. They grow by acquiring new and light buyers. 

(Light buyers are consumers who make occasional or infrequent purchases, they may not be as committed or loyal to a particular brand or product category.) 

But how do you increase the rate at which you acquire new and light category buyers?

Again, the research is clear. You increase the brand’s: 

• Mental availability: The likelihood of a brand being considered in a buying situation.
• Physical availability: The ease and convenience that a brand can be purchased from.

Marketing leaders widely accept these terms and have been for around ten years now.

But where does SEO fall into this?

Some SEOs don’t understand marketing 

What happens is many technical minds get tunnel vision about technical things.

The end goal for a business is not high rankings on search results, it is sales. And sales require marketing before it.

Some SEOs have said: “When people search Google, they don’t care about logos and brands; they care about finding a relevant page and solving their problems.”

Many on the technical side agree. And yet, the advice is entirely wrong and is an example of the tunnel vision effect.

Brand, logo, and website quality are not only essential for your marketing. SEO is actually about the delivery of these assets. Repeated studies have shown that website quality and perception of the brand are used to formulate trust.

Without trust, we don’t buy.

But that’s not all; your logos and branding are how we remember businesses. In marketing, these are known as “distinctive brand assets”. 

If you were to think of your website as a package. Our job as SEOs is to place your website on the shelf. And if we can’t understand this, how can we advise clients?

How buying online happens

As SEOs, we should understand and be able to explain precisely how buying happens. Let's simplify it to 4 easy steps:

1. Trigger

We all receive triggers to search. These can be internal ones, such as a feeling or thought. Or an external one such as advertising or a life event. At this time, one of two things happens:

We either search for a brand/website directly or we enter a keyword in a search engine or open an app like YouTube or TikTok.

The key to brand growth lies in the need state of the searcher. You want to be found or searched for by people who are in the market to buy. These are people looking into buying or are ready to buy today. 

And our job as an SEO is to bring your brand to prospects with those two need states. Reaching those looking into buying your brand helps the mental availability. Reaching those about to buy increases your physical availability. 

2. Exploration

The next stage of search is known as the exploration stage. It’s here where things get messy, and we start researching the category. And yes, people head to social media apps to research.

It’s at this stage that a fierce battle starts to take place. The battle for memory. 

Buying decisions often take place over prolonged periods.

During this period, prospects are subjected to retargeting with ads on multiple platforms. And it’s here where advertising largely plays a role. Businesses with great advertising that reaches people regularly are more easily remembered at the all-important time we decide to buy.

Limited advertising? Showing up organically where your prospects conduct their research can increase the likelihood that you are searched for, recognized, and remembered when buying.

3. Evaluation 

After we’ve conducted our research, a few things happen. You can be directly chosen as a brand, or you’ll be part of a consideration set. But people often don’t search this way.

A person may search for a specific brand or business name, but in the search results they get many options: links to other businesses, YouTube videos, etc. Many get clicked because the person is in research mode.

But eventually they have to make a decision. And they may well choose an option they didn't click into before, but that showed up repeatedly in search results. If it's a known name they will trust it. This is called “transfer rate,” (SEO JP Garbaccio LinkedIn post. Here's the punch line:

"Google found that giving a shopper an option to choose a second choice brand was enough to entice 30% away from their initial choice."

PPC works like this. You pay to reach today’s buyers, hoping you can nudge them to you at the last minute.

4. Purchase

There is a lot of talk online about “TikTok” as a search engine. However, the real questions are:

• Where do your customers buy?
• What is their shopping environment?
• How can you increase the likelihood of being recognized in these environments?

This is why advertising is so powerful, especially creative video advertising, which helps to link a brand with a category within our memory architecture. For example, if asked who do you first think of when it comes to basketball shoes, chances are you’ll say Nike.

However, for many categories, we are simply unaware of the brands that exist until we start to research. As such, we head to search engines and social media apps.

But where we purchase is massively important. This is your physical availability.

For example, there is a TikTok Shop. But this isn’t suitable for most brands. This means we’ll still return to search engines to buy our goods. 

You need to be on the digital shelf to be chosen. Just showing up increases that chance.

And this leads us to how SEO helps brands to grow.

SEO grows new and light category buyers

When a person heads to search to start the buying process, they are doing so because they are open to buying from different brands than they last purchased. Or they have never purchased in this category before.

And this is where we start to showcase the brilliance of organic search.

Paid search is all about efficiency, often in the form of ROAS or ROI.

Organic search is about marketing effectiveness.

Reach as many possible "in-the-market" buyers as you can. 

Most search results are overwhelmingly organic results. But you see paid results up on top, paid search generates more clicks in some sectors. But you have to look at this beyond just the clicks. When you acquire a customer through a paid search click, you effectively reduce your profits, and very often, they would have purchased from you anyway.

And a huge amount of buyers click on the organic listings.

This is key for growth because brands grow by acquiring new and light category buyers.

Takeaways: Justifying the investment in SEO

Most businesses fail to invest in organic search. They look for the mythical ROI: “If I spend $3,000 per month on SEO, how long before I see results, and what will those returns be?”

You don’t measure SEO performance by ROI; you justify its investment.

If you don’t invest in SEO, you are losing out on reaching vast amounts of potential customers and letting others win them.

At the same time, others are growing their brands; you’re not winning new and light category buyers.

I genuinely hope business owners wake up to this. Organic search is competitive. But all business is.

When you win in organic search, you gain a competitive advantage, leading to more business.

• Do you want to grow?
• Are your buyers using search engines to help them find what you sell?

If the answer is yes to both of those, it’s only a case of how much you can afford to invest in SEO.

This is why we need to invest in SEO.

Or not, and your competitors will.