Expert SEO Technique: Total Brand Presence

Total Brand Presence is a buzzword from the field of offline marketing — a response to the massive fragmentation of the traditional media channels. Originally, the idea behind Total Brand Presence was to get a company away from expensive, failing marketing on TV and radio channels, and into high-RoI, low-entrance advertising like social media and YouTube campaigns. Recent developments in the Google algorithms have shown, however, that the same techniques that can get a multinational corporation cheap brand penetration can also get a website a solid boost to its SEO.

Simply put, Google uses what it called “brand signals” to help determine how to rank a website. That’s why, no matter how hard you try to rank for the keyword “pay less,” there will always be a massive multinational brand of shoe sellers that will kick your scrawny butt up and down the SERPs until you go home. But Google’s algorithms, while they’re still mostly mysterious, do seem to be able to respond to expert SEO manipulators creating ‘brand signals’ for non-corporate websites.

So what does Google look at as a ‘brand signal’?

In short, it’s “almost anything that shows you claiming as much territory as you can on the Internet.” Or, as offliners would put it, “maximizing your Total Brand Presence.” There’ s absolutely nothing keeping your business from claiming pages on:

• Your own website (as a blog)
• Google+
• YouTube
• Blogger
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Tumblr
• Pinterest
• WordPress
• Vimeo
• Slideshare
• LiveJournal
• Quora
• Weebly
• Yelp
• Angie’s List
• And any topical niche sites (i.e. BiggerPockets for investors, Trulia for real estate, etc.)

Taking the time to create these pages, fill out their profiles (with keyword-infused copy), and most importantly, link each one to 3-5 others in a haphazard web with no central pages (and not using keyword-optimized anchor text).

Then, every week, publish a few pieces of content, and link to different pieces on different sites. Say, put up a blog post on your blog, and link to it from Facebook, Pinterest, and Quora. Then put up a review of your services on Yelp, and link to it from Twitter, LiveJournal, and Google+. Finally, put up a sweet picture of your business in action on Instagram and link to it from Tumblr, Slideshare, and Weebly. By consistently creating content and inconsistently arranging which business sites you link to which kinds of content, you will slowly build authority over all of your business’ social properties and slowly build SEO power for all of your content-hosting sites.