Dani says: “My insight is to focus on building a strong, recognisable brand around a specific topic, so people automatically think of you – ensuring that, regardless of changes in algorithms, your brand remains a go-to source.”

Shall we start off with brand, to begin with? How do you build a strong, recognisable brand around a specific topic?

“There are actually two things in there, I would say. The first thing with building a strong and recognisable brand is that we need to think a little bit bigger and, especially with our SEO tasks, we need to think more strategically.

It's not just about getting this keyword that has a lot of search volume. We always have to think, does what we are doing really help us build a brand? Or is it just about chasing the next keyword with high search volume?”

How do you measure that? Is it about being strategic with your content planning process and then ensuring that what you're intending to write fits in nicely within your intended communication structure in relation to your brand?

“Yeah, exactly. You need to always question what you're doing with SEO, and not look at SEO as a siloed thing that you're doing.

Sometimes it's hard for us because we're just looking at the SEO topic for a client, but we should also have in mind, what are they doing in social media? What are they doing in PR?

Have a little bit of a bigger picture and see how this can actually help us with SEO, and help the brand. If we make blog posts, we also should communicate, can you post them on social media? Can you get it out there? Don’t just think, ‘Now we're here with the rankings’, but think a little bit bigger with every strategy we're doing.”

Got you. Okay. In terms of your content planning process, perhaps you'd come up with the ideation of possibilities and then you take that to other marketing teams, including social media and brand people, and then make a final selection of what to write about based upon the overall consensus.

“Exactly. And also, not just looking at keywords but also having in mind – okay, we have the keywords, we have the newsletter, we have the social media. Where can this shine in addition to rankings on Google?

A lot of effort should also go into the service pages and the product pages. Are they understandable? Is our customer understanding them? Could we post that on social media and reach an audience as well?

Think a little bit bigger, and try to also educate our clients because you're not just there for SEO. We can use this content and everything we do for a lot more things.”

What happens if SEOs identify a lovely keyword phrase that hasn't got much competition, with the potential of bringing in a thousand organic visits a month, but social teams or brand teams aren't on board with it? Should they still fight for it?

“Depends on if the keyword helps the brand.”

But the brand people will argue that it's not going to help the brand as much as this keyword phrase, which only brings in 10 visits a month.

“It depends a little bit on the topic. If it's a keyword that's broadly related to the business of the client, or the business of the brand, then maybe we should focus more on something that's closer to the topic because that also brings us a little bit to the specific topic.

If it might not be interesting for social media and the brand people have some strange idea of what the brand is about, but it's actually the topic the website is about, then we should definitely go for it and frame it to say that this is what we're doing now for SEO.”

Are there any trends in terms of the style of content that you prefer to publish nowadays?

“That's a hard question. I still like to have text on the website. I know there are a lot of UX designers out there who say that nobody's reading anymore and you shouldn't have too much text, but I still think that, if you write something that's written interestingly and actually resonates with the audience, and they come to your website, they are still in the mindset of reading.

Because you don't go on the website to see a YouTube video; you go on YouTube to see a YouTube video. You go on Instagram to see pictures but, on a website, we still have the mindset that we want to read something. It's different from writing a book, but you still need text on a website – for Google and the algorithm, but also because what people are looking for on a website is mostly text.”

If you've produced a related video, are you not a fan of embedding a YouTube video on a webpage?

“No, I would definitely embed it to have more different things and different ways to interact, but I wouldn't just have the YouTube video on a webpage without any text.

If I read through a blog post and there is a video, and I'm reading it on public transport, I might not watch the video because I'm not there to listen to something. I don't have my headphones on. I don't want everyone to see what I'm listening to. So, I would still be reading.

You need a little bit of mix, not just focussing on text because somebody might love to see the video, but not just on video either. Have a mix of it. If it's a blog post or a product page, you should also have text. I think it should be a little bit of a mix and not just one thing – but it should still include text.”

Something else you say is that it's important to ensure that people remember your brand after reading your content.

Is there anything that you do to try to ensure that, once people land on your site – land on a blog post or some other page on your website – they'll be more likely to remember your brand in the future?

“A good thing is, if you have enough content and enough stuff on your website, people stay a little bit longer and don’t just go back – so they actually see the logo, and they see the brand.

You should also have your own voice. If you are just writing with Chat GPT, and everyone is doing it with ChatGPT and everyone sounds the same, they won't remember you. Have your style, and try to have a different style.

Maybe you're really direct with your writing. In German, it's a big thing to write with the formal ‘Sie’ or the ‘du’, which is less formal. We might write in a more formal way, so we're more distant. Be consistent with that, in your style and everything.

Also, to build a brand, of course, it's not normally one impact you get from a user and then they will remember you. Normally it's more impact, and that's also where you have to think a little bit bigger for the brand – so they see you in social media, they see you for more search-relevant keywords, and they come across your brand.

There is a strategy that it takes around seven touchpoints for a client to decide and remember you – so you need to create more touchpoints.”

You started off by talking about the importance of keeping people on your website, so they keep on reading other pieces.

Does that mean that, within an article or at the bottom of an article, you're a fan of having another call to action to get people to read another piece of content? For example, ‘That completes this piece of content on this particular topic. However, a related piece of content is this one here, so you should check out this one now.’

Is that the kind of call to action that you have within articles?

“Yeah, you really should do that. For internal link building, it helps a lot, so that Google sees that there's something else, and something interesting.

But, of course, for the user as well. I see a lot of small business sites doing this after a blog post, where suddenly the page ends. You might have the footer, but maybe you don't have much in the footer. Even if I read through it as a normal user, I feel lost afterwards. What am I doing next?

It always helps to have, ‘Oh, that might interest you as well’, for the user as well as for search engines.”

Is your website always the best place to publish your content or are there sometimes better opportunities?

You see people, for instance, writing long-form posts on LinkedIn and other places. Can that be a more effective content publishing strategy?

“Definitely. That's why the tip I gave about building the brand is so general, and not just about SEO, because I think there is content that resonates better on LinkedIn or resonates better in a video.

Sometimes you need to let go of a topic because maybe the website is not the best place to publish it.”

How do you know which is the best place for it?

“I will give you a very good example because I had that recently with a relaunch.

We were going through a lot of blog posts. As you have a lot with companies, you post things on your blog like, ‘We won this award in 2014’ and stuff like that – which is great brand-building content because you actually won an award, or you went to a conference or to an event. But it's not the right content for your website to write a blog post about it. If you won an award in 2021, in 2024, nobody is interested in the fact that you won an award in 2021.

But it's perfect for social media because that's what you are expecting in social media. You want to see these things. What is going on at this moment from the brand? It gets a lot of push in the moment because social media is something where you need to publish, and then it gets a lot of attraction in the moment but, in one year, it might be forgotten.

That's the perfect topic for social media, but not for your business blog.”

Going on a bit of a tangent, are you a fan of recycling content on social media and publishing the same thing year after year?

“With the award from 2021, it might not make sense. But, if you have something that's working, I actually think it helps a lot to republish it. There are some things you can even republish every 2 months or every 3 months.

Not everybody saw what you published because the algorithm is really selective, and people forget really fast on social media because everything is going so fast and you're reading through it.

LinkedIn goes a little bit longer because there it can be that, in 4 days, somebody still sees a post you made 4 days ago. But on Instagram, it's dead after 4 days, so you can actually repost stuff.”

When you talk about building a strong, memorable brand as a result of the content you publish, how do you measure the SEO value of this?

“That's a good question. I started measuring brand keywords. I know with SEO, a lot of the time we say that we are not measuring the brand keywords because we're not actively working on them – and it's not just organic search because people are obviously looking for you, so it's not so important what position you have.

But still, if you track the brand keywords and see – hey, there is more search volume coming from the brand keywords and they are searched more, especially if you see a trend with a brand keyword.

Last week, I was looking for something in the health sector in Spanish, for example, and there is a really good blog about health and training and everything. I saw the results and that blog was not there. So, I added the blog name to my keyword because I wanted to read from this blog.

If you start getting keywords like this, you see that people are actually looking for your site, so your brand is growing. We should really have a look at the brand keywords to see if the brand gets more recognised and more searched for.”

But how do you know that it was your content marketing activities that resulted in the brand's uplift?

“You can never 100% know but I think, if you're doing a lot of SEO, and your brand is growing, and you know a little bit of what's going on in the rest of the social media and everything, you can say if it's helping. If you do a lot of SEO, it's helping.

That's what happens because you get recognised, and you get found. You can't really say it was just the content that helped grow the brand, of course. What I really like to do is show both: These are your brand searches and the clicks and the impressions you get from brand, and this is what you get from just organic – from people that might not have known you before.

Show both of them and, if there is a relation that both are growing, it might be a relationship between them.”

What's your view on AI-generated content?

“I think people get it wrong sometimes because they think you go to ChatGPT and say, ‘Write me an article about SEO tips’ and, what you get there, you put on your website – but that's not how it works.

You can use ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. to help get things done faster and to get some ideas. What I really like to do, I do a lot of research for my articles. I write down everything I find on the internet and then, after about 10 hours of research, I give it to ChatGPT and say, ‘Tell me what you think about the content?’

Ask him questions. What can I get out of it? And maybe you can use it to write some parts of an article – or help with correcting. If I write something in English, I give it to him again to say, ‘Could you make it a little bit more fluent?’ because it's not my main language, so it's a little bit harder for me to write. I can actually make it sound better.

But the input I give him is the most important thing. If I give him a lot of good input, the outcome will be completely different from asking him, ‘Write me an article about that.’”

You've shared what SEO should be doing in 2024, so now let's talk about what SEO shouldn't be doing. What's something that's seductive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“We talked a lot about thinking about the big picture and the brand keywords, but I think what we still need to stop doing is link building. Because if we think of link building as link building, we just do it completely wrong.

It should be called digital PR – to build a brand, to build authority. We want to use it to appear in relevant content and in front of relevant communities and audiences. If we get, from this effort, a dofollow link from a high-quality authority site, we won't say no, but that shouldn't be the focus.

I think the problem here is, we SEOs can't do digital PR alone. If I think of my brand, my digital PR is writing an article for different really important sites for the SEO niche, but the article needs to come from me.

What we are doing here is what I would call digital PR. We make a podcast and we talk, but I need to do it. I can't do that for my clients because they need to show up. That's something we can't do in a silo.

We can get you 10 links, but we will need to put a lot of different perspectives in there. We should do something to get your brand out there, but it needs your work as well.”

Would it be fair to say that digital PR-type links should be the majority of your link-building efforts, but there are probably a few link types that you can still seek to obtain?

“Yeah, I think digital PR should mainly be about that. Then, of course, there are other links you could get, like when you're already mentioned somewhere, so that would be a really nice thing.

That's something we SEOs can do: ‘Hey, I saw your brand got mentioned there, should I ask for a link?’ It's actually something where we already got mentioned, but we can get an additional thing out of it. That's a really nice thing.

Something very typical is the tools we use and doing some testimonials for them. That's also a link where it's not so much getting in front of the brand, but maybe just more showing, that's a tool that's relevant for my niche, and I can get a link there.

Things like that, but not doing guest articles just for the link and for getting a guest article – sometimes on sites that are not the main focus of the brand and are not so necessary, but we promised the link, so we need to give it to the client.”

Dani Leitner is an Independent SEO Consultant, and you can find her over at DaniLeitner.ch.