When it comes to growing a brand, there are two main levers that marketers try to pull:
- Brand awareness
- Distribution
Why?
Brand awareness is important because people more frequently buy what they know. I say cola, you think Coke. Coca-Cola has such strong mental availability that most people don’t even order a cola, they order a Coke (sorry Pepsi and Dr Pepper aficionados).
Distribution, in the traditional sense, is about how easily someone can find and buy your product. It’s about availability. Most people won’t go out of their way to get something, so the more available you are, the more likely you are to be chosen.
That’s one of the reasons why brands like McDonald’s win. Even if you don’t love the food, you’re statistically quite likely to eat there because their stores are, well, everywhere. That’s a strong distribution strategy.
SEOs can forget that they are first and foremost marketers, and that the main objective of SEO is to pull the levers of brand awareness and distribution.
When you’re evaluating the potential that SEO has for your organisation, or your client’s, you need to ask whether search is a viable channel for you to establish awareness or distribute your product.
The power of brand awareness is why I’m a strong believer in the value of top-of-funnel content, especially for large organisations, B2B, SaaS, etc.
It’s notoriously hard to attribute brand awareness’s impact, but that doesn’t make it any less valuable. A rich content ecosystem builds recognition and recall, increasing your chances of being chosen when someone is ready to buy.
The value of top-of-funnel content is rightly being questioned with the rise of AI overviews and tools like ChatGPT. As search changes, I still believe informational content matters for brand building. But the payoff may shift: not from users landing on your site, but from helping train LLMs to associate your brand with the topics that matter.
The utility of distribution across search is more obvious: strong SEO distribution means you are at the top of the search results when somebody types a bottom-of-funnel keyword, such as ‘buy jean shorts’ or ‘best SEO software.’
Framing SEO as brand awareness and distribution helps you cut through the noise and evaluate whether search is a viable channel for your product.
A good practice is to ask:
- Where are my would-be customers generally?
- Where do they go when they are ready to buy?
If the answer is ‘on search’, then SEO is a strong candidate to drive both brand awareness and distribution. If not, your efforts may be better spent elsewhere.
— Sam Penny
This newsletter was guest-written by Sam Penny, Growth & SEO Consultant based in Melbourne. You can reach Sam via his website or LinkedIn.
