Brand recognition and brand awareness are the two key terms you'll keep hearing about when you're looking for ways to increase traffic for your business.  

When your business has good brand recognition, it means that passers-by can quickly identify your brand from visual cues, such as the colors, symbols, and logo associated with your brand.  

For example, anyone seeing the famous golden arch would know that it's a McDonald's outlet without additional cues. 

As you can guess, an eye-catching logo is essential for brand recognition. Thankfully, you can easily create a unique and professional logo with tools such as Designhill's AI-powered logo maker. 

Meanwhile, brand awareness can be defined as your customers' first touchpoint with you. Even if your brand is a perfect match for your customers' needs, they will first need to know that you exist.   

One critical method to build brand awareness is to build backlinks to your website. Below, we'll explore backlink-building and other essential strategies to increase brand awareness so that you can pave your way to good brand recognition in the future.

Do Keyword Research

As the business owner, there's no doubt that you know your products and services like the back of your hand. However, your customers could be using a different approach to search for you. 

Think about your product or service category, the region you service, and start from there.  

Tools like Keyword Planner on Google Ads will allow you to key in several generic keywords and get a list of actual search terms your prospects are using.  

You'll need to generate a list of keywords you want to build on in many steps below. Ideally, it would help if you had a handful of search terms for each product or service that you are providing. 

Make Use of Content Marketing

A long list of keywords will be of no use if you're not using it anywhere. Build content surrounding the list of keywords that you have in formats such as blog posts, social media content, and web pages.  

A blog section would be a great place to start. Your keyword research might have provided you with some insights into customers' questions about your products and services. 

Let's say you're providing digital marketing services. Your customers may be entering queries such as 'How to start with Google Ads,' 'Which one is better, display ads or responsive display ads,' and many others. 

You can start a blog post with titles similar to these questions and answer them in-depth in your blog posts.  

The same can be done with any products or services that you provide. Your ideas for blog posts will never run dry. 

Apply and Update SEO

You'll need to add-on to your blog posts by paying attention to search engine optimization (SEO). 

There is a lot to explain about SEO. It's basically about optimizing your digital content so that your web pages show up higher in search results pages when people search for what your brand offers. 

SEO optimization includes many elements, such as your meta title, meta description, and social images.  

The keywords that you've inserted throughout your website, along with alternate image tags will also play an important role. 

Generally speaking, the more tied-together your keywords, alt tags, and meta descriptions are with each other, the more SEO-friendly your site will be.  

You'll need to update your website content frequently as the keyword traffic changes, so SEO is always an ongoing project for your website.

Use Long-tailed Keywords

Let's reuse our instance of a digital marketing company. Statements such as 'We are a digital marketing company' could be too broad for search engines to pick up on.  

The search term 'digital marketing company' is used by plenty of websites at the same time, so you'll have a hard time trying to compete with the first-page rankers if you're new to the game. 

However, if you're using keywords such as 'analytical marketing consultants in Texas' as an example, you're more likely to be able to rank your website a little better.  

Focus on Niche Audience

Every company wants to target as many people as they can. The more people you reach, the better, right?  

Sure, if you have an unlimited budget for your marketing and don't care if your targeting is a hit or miss. 

Try to focus on a smaller audience group - those who need your products and are the most likely to search for them.  

This would translate to the example of the niche audience searching for 'Back-link building services in New York' rather than 'What is a backlink in SEO.' 

The first instance has a more explicit intent. You'll want to target these clients who are looking to buy services. 

Whereas, the second phrase might reach people who are only searching to understand SEO concepts better. 

Engage with Influencers

All the concepts above are the essential steps before you can start building backlinks. Having built the content with the relevant keywords, you can now reach out to influencers and other parties who can create content linking to yours. 

Search for a handful of influencers whose target markets are in a similar category to your target audience. 

Provide them with some hashtags relevant to your business, sample products (if any), and let them know about the goal for your collaboration with them. 

When these influencers post their content, interested individuals can click on the link leading to your website to understand more and, hopefully, get in touch with you. 

Share from Trustworthy Sources

You can share the content from the influencers you engaged with to your page. While building your content, you can also share information from other trustworthy sources. 

One simple way to do this is by linking the information source on your blog posts to the top-ranking search results. 

If you're sharing any data, you'll want to provide relevant studies, surveys, or other data sources.  

Other websites will happily link back to your source if they know that the information you provide is accurate, so you'll have to find and use other trustable sources for your posts first.

Build Internal Links

Internal link-building is a crucial component for good SEO. The effort to build internal links will pay off later on for improving your brand awareness and having interested parties build backlinks for you. 

One simple way to build internal links is by recommending similar products under a product page. You can also link several other related blog posts in your latest article. 

When your visitors click from one blog post to another within your website, you're increasing your website traffic, which is a positive signal in terms of SEO.  

So, go ahead and link recommended articles related to a blog post that your site visitors are reading. 

Run Signal Boosting Programs

Encourage your customers to share your posts and articles. For example, you can run contests on social media platforms by requiring participants to share your post. 

You can also invite your existing customers to participate by asking them to leave a review on social media pages or websites to be eligible for your lucky draw program.  

All in all, you'll want to encourage site visitors to share your content continuously. These shared posts and website links will quickly boost your SEO ranking and the potential for more backlinks from parties with whom you have never even collaborated.