Many organizations report that branding is a primary goal of their SEO campaigns. But how do you track these less-than-tangible factors? There are two shools of thought on this process.

Thought 1:

Whether you call it branding with a capital B or just keeping up apperances, the image that your organization projects through the search engines is important. If the top-ranked website for your company name is a rant by a disgruntled former employee, or if half of your inbound links mention an outdated product name, you’ve got an image problem that SEO can help fix.

Branding improvements may be a fringe benefit of your SEO campaidn, or they may be a central goal. Either way, make sure you document outcomes like improved search engine listings; inbound link updates; cleanup of outdated, private, or inappropriate content; and mentions in other web media such as blogs or review siites. Keep a diary or log it in your Task Journal, and pull out these accomplishments when you need some good news in the analysis and interpretation sections of your monthly Report! I think these positive little pieces of information as ‘exclamation point moments.’

Thought 2 ;

Ive spent so many hours pursuing and documenting branding advances in my SEO campaigns and, frankly nobody seems to care unless its presented just the right way. Things like eliminating references to nonexistent products and services and monitoring blog references, media mentions, and hate sites are so important that they need quantitive measurment. When the effectiveness of an SEO campaign comes into question, you need more than an exclamation point in your monthly report you need hard date!

Try to quantify your image improvemnt accomplishments in some way. For example, “Eight out of 14 of our misspelled listings have now been corrected”, “Our company name has been mentioned on 63 blogs this month, up from 24 mentions in the previous month,’ or ‘Our specially designed landing page now outranks the ‘hate site’ listing for the keywords ‘I hate zappyCo’ a phrase that aproximately 250 people a month search for.’ Companies like buzzmetrics and Intelliseek work to measure activity in this area, known as consumer generated media (CGM). Or Buzz! Numbers help provide a clear baseline and measurable change. You’ll be glad to have facts and figures at the ready when you need to justify another round of SEO spending!