The Importance Of Impactful Brand Signals For SEO

Summary

Voices of Search Podcast: The Importance of Impactful Brand Signals for SEO

Episode Title: The Importance Of Impactful Brand Signals For SEO
Host: Jordan Cooney
Guest: Ruth Burr Reedy, Senior SEO Manager at Houzz
Release Date: March 11, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of Voices of Search, host Jordan Cooney engages in an insightful conversation with Ruth Burr Reedy, the Senior SEO Manager at Houzz. The discussion centers around the critical role of brand signals in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how these signals influence online visibility and brand perception in an evolving digital landscape dominated by artificial intelligence (AI).

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Understanding Brand Signals in SEO

Ruth Burr Reedy begins by addressing a long-standing question in the SEO community: "Is brand a ranking factor?" (03:53). She clarifies that brand itself isn't a single ranking signal but rather a collection of numerous machine-readable signals that collectively influence a brand's online impact. Ruth elaborates:

"Brand impact online and your business impact online is made up of countless different signals, all of which are machine readable, all of which can be weighed against each other." (03:53)

She emphasizes that clarity in what a business does and its unique value propositions are crucial. For businesses with diversified offerings, presenting a unified topical picture to search engines like Google becomes more challenging compared to smaller or more focused businesses.

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The Changing Landscape: AI and User Trust

As AI technologies reshape content creation and information discovery, Ruth highlights a decline in user trust regarding online information quality (08:46). She notes a shift in user behavior towards forums, private groups, and more trusted sources for information gathering. This change underscores the need for SEOs to take a more active role in managing and driving branded search, moving beyond traditional SEO responsibilities.

"SEOs should take responsibility for driving not just branded search traffic, but the precursor to branded search traffic, which is branded search volume." (08:46)

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Influencing Brand Demand in Search

Addressing the challenge of increasing brand search demand, Ruth advocates for a multi-channel marketing strategy (11:18). She suggests that SEOs collaborate across various marketing channels—such as social media, email, and in-person engagements—to enhance brand visibility and association.

"It's a multi-channel strategy. And I think that more than ever, SEOs really do need to be multichannel marketers or be partnering with other marketers in order to build multichannel strategies." (11:18)

Ruth recommends analyzing branded search data to identify commonly searched terms alongside the brand. This analysis can guide product strategy and SEO efforts to align with user interests and enhance brand positioning.

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Reputation Management and Addressing Negative Brand Signals

When faced with negative brand signals, Ruth emphasizes the importance of proactive reputation management. Instead of merely suppressing negative content, she advocates for owning mistakes and demonstrating tangible improvements.

"Owning your mistakes as a brand and demonstrating improvement around them... can be a great way to change people's minds." (16:33)

She also highlights the value of building trust through partnerships with reputable brands, which can help reshape public perception and mitigate negative associations.

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Brand Discovery in the Age of AI Platforms

Discussing the impact of AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity on brand discovery, Ruth believes that current SEO strategies largely remain applicable. She points out that AI models are trained on data sets similar to those used by search engines, meaning optimization for AI overviews parallels optimizing for rich snippets.

"If you are optimizing for appearance in AI overviews, it's not that different... Many of the tactics are really similar to what you might have been doing before to appear in rich results in rich snippets." (18:41)

Ruth advises continuing to focus on consistent on-page and off-page SEO practices, ensuring that brand associations are well-established and widely recognized across the web.

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Integrating Brand Conversations into Business Strategies

Ruth provides actionable advice for SEOs and content marketers looking to incorporate brand management into their strategies. She suggests starting by reporting on branded search metrics using tools like Google Search Console and Semrush.

"What gets measured gets improved. Starting out, I think a good thing is to start reporting on it, just start talking about it..." (21:23)

By correlating branded search volume with traffic and rankings, SEOs can demonstrate the tangible impact of brand management on overall business performance. This approach not only underscores the importance of brand signals but also aligns SEO efforts with broader business objectives.

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Conclusion

In wrapping up the discussion, Jordan Cooney and Ruth Burr Reedy underscore the evolving significance of brand signals in SEO. As AI continues to influence how consumers discover and interact with content, maintaining a strong, consistent brand presence across multiple channels remains indispensable for achieving sustained organic growth.

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Notable Quotes

• Ruth Burr Reedy (03:53):
  "Brand impact online and your business impact online is made up of countless different signals, all of which are machine readable, all of which can be weighed against each other."

• Ruth Burr Reedy (08:46):
  "SEOs should take responsibility for driving not just branded search traffic, but the precursor to branded search traffic, which is branded search volume."

• Ruth Burr Reedy (11:18):
  "It's a multi-channel strategy. And I think that more than ever, SEOs really do need to be multichannel marketers or be partnering with other marketers in order to build multichannel strategies."

• Ruth Burr Reedy (16:33):
  "Owning your mistakes as a brand and demonstrating improvement around them... can be a great way to change people's minds."

• Ruth Burr Reedy (18:41):
  "If you are optimizing for appearance in AI overviews, it's not that different... Many of the tactics are really similar to what you might have been doing before to appear in rich results in rich snippets."

• Ruth Burr Reedy (21:23):
  "What gets measured gets improved. Starting out, I think a good thing is to start reporting on it, just start talking about it..."

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For further insights and detailed episode summaries, visit voicesofsearch.com. Subscribe to the podcast for daily SEO and content marketing wisdom delivered straight to your feed.

Transcript

[Podcast Announcer]

The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of.

[Jordan Cooney]

Search Podcast, Jordan Cooney hello SEOs and marketers. My name is Jordan Cooney from Pre Visible. Joining me today is Ruth Burr Reedy, who is the Senior SEO Manager at Houzz. Ruth is working on Houzz Pro, an all in one business management platform for interior design and residential construction businesses.

[Podcast Announcer]

This podcast is also sponsored by Ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO health backlinks and organic rankings at no costs? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not, because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over a hundred technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus, AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most linked to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO health, backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster [e-mail] AWT that's a h r e f s.com.

[Jordan Cooney]

AWT yesterday, Ruth and I talked about building expertise driven content in a world of AI created slop. Today we're going to continue the conversation by discussing the importance of impactful brand signals for SEO. Okay, here's my conversation with Ruth, the Senior SEO Manager at Houzz. Ruth, welcome back to the Voice of Search podcast.

[Ruth Burr Reedy]

So happy to be here.

[Jordan Cooney]

So yesterday's episode we covered really, this, this. This spectrum of why expertise is so important and why in a world where content is just accelerated at an extreme pace. With AI, we really dove into what it really means to be an expert, why AI has cluttered the experiences and expectations of users on the web. If you missed that episode yesterday, please go back and listen. Ruth has some great insights for our more junior SEOs who are growing their careers and trying to become experts in the field, as well as some direction on why and how AI is impacting the content world the way it is today. Today we're going to go into really, I think what is absolute critical component to the changing landscape of discovery, which is why brand and brand signals are so important for SEO. As we get this topic started, Ruth, when we talk about brand signals, tell us what your frame of reference is as it pertains to SEO and the ultimate efforts that are related to SEO.

[Ruth Burr Reedy]

Yeah, so the one of the $64,000 questions that has been coming up for as long as I've been doing SEO is is brand a ranking factor? And I would typically say no, because brand isn't one signal. Your brand impact online and your business impact online is made up of countless different signals, all of which are machine readable, all of which can be weighed against each other. That doesn't mean that Google doesn't have some kind of overall brand understanding element to some of its algorithms, but it means that brand isn't one thing. So when I think about brand, I think about, and this is purely for SEO, thinking about is it clear what your business does and for whom, what it does that is better, different, unique from other people who do the same things for the same audiences, and boiling it all the way down, both of those can be conveyed through a bunch of different machine readable signals. If we zoom out a little bit and think about brand more as a traditional marketing idea, your brand is every touch point. If your customers are fishing, your brand is the water. It's every part of what they do, part of what? That, when it, when it relates to their company, it's anytime. If they have conversations with their friends, that's part of your brand. If they are talking about you in forums, that's your brand. If they see an ad, if they have a good experience, if they have a bad experience, if they read a blog post, all of those things are brand touch points. All of those impact your audience's overall perception and understanding of who you are and what you do and what that means. And not all of that is under your control as a marketer. And I think that that's that we as marketers have to constantly be on a journey of releasing ourselves from is part of your brand happens when you're not there.

[Podcast Announcer]

Yeah.

[Jordan Cooney]

And you brought up this control piece and I want to dive into that which is as marketers or as SEOs or just as business owners or agencies that support businesses. When we think of the concept of brand, what are the important factors that we should be taking into account? What are we really thinking about when it comes to to brand?

[Ruth Burr Reedy]

So one of the signals that really stood out to me from the Google leak from a couple years ago was the idea of the distance of a given topic, a given pages topic from the main topic of the homepage of a website and the main topic of the website. I think that that is a useful lens through which to view machine readable proxies of your brand experience is goog and other search tools. But in this, probably most, I mean Google, do they understand what your company does? Do they understand what your website is about? And when you talk about things outside of that very, very core understanding, how closely can they understand that these things are related? Do they trust you to know what you're talking about on a given topic and do they understand what you as a business do? I think for a small business or a young business or a startup, for example, that's often very easy because you do one thing, you do one thing and that's what you do. And so it's very easy to go all in on that. Topically. I think the larger a business is, the older a business is, the more diversified it's gotten. Especially if you serve multiple audiences or have multiple product sets, that becomes a lot more challenging in presenting a unified and complete topical picture to Google to help them understand where your expertise lives, where your trust lies, what you do and how well you do it compared to other people who do the same thing.

[Jordan Cooney]

And a big, big question for you is, is it changing? Is this landscape changing for us, especially as we think about AI discovery and how consumers are going there to find content and information is, you know, historically I think we always thought about our brand as, as a thing that we, we, we used a foghorn to message out, right? We're going to throw up a billboard, we're going to throw up some to commercial ads where it's much more than that. Right. And you even brought up the areas that you can't control, maybe what people are saying in forums or YouTube videos that are describing how you use a product. I'm curious, what should we be thinking about as SEOs and content marketers, when it comes to the brand channels that exist today and how we are able to communicate what's happening there to help our organizations be more aware of our brand's current health.

[Ruth Burr Reedy]

Yeah, 100%. I do think it's changing, and I think that it has changed. One of the things that you and I talked about yesterday is that user trust in the quality of the information that they can find online is low. It's lower than it has been in a long time. And you see that in changing user behaviors when it comes to people going to things like forums, going to private groups and slack channels, and a lot of things that we as marketers are kind of a black box of how people get there. I think referral and word of mouth and trusted sources have become way more important in people's overall information gathering and search journey. And what that often means is that by the time somebody gets to your website at all, they have already narrowed down a larger field to you and a few other options and are now researching those. And that is based on third party content, it's based on conversations. It may or may not be happening online. All of which is to say, historically, brand search has been something that in many places that I've worked or clients that I've worked with, the overall business's point of view was that brand search was not something SEO did. If we got a lot of new traffic, but it was all branded search, then that was because of our new product launch or our new press release or some other thing that we did that was not SEO. And I think that it is time and past time for SEOs to take responsibility for driving not just branded search traffic, but the precursor to branded search traffic, which is branded search volume. So if more people are searching for your brand, that I think is something that SEOs should be looking at.

[Jordan Cooney]

Let's talk more about that real quick, Ruth, because this is, this is the interesting piece. This is the, the. I think this is the crux in the road, right? This is the challenge that many SEOs have, which is how do you as an SEO or content marketer influence the demand of a brand in search?

[Ruth Burr Reedy]

Yeah, right.

[Jordan Cooney]

Like how do you convince more people to search who you are? And it's a really interesting challenge that we all have in the sense that it is in many cases codependent. But I want to hear from you as to how we should be thinking about that, what we should be unpacking as it comes to this belief you have, that is, we can influence the volume or the demand in brand search.

[Ruth Burr Reedy]

Yeah. I might suggest instead of thinking of it as codependent, that we think of it as multi channel.

[Jordan Cooney]

There we go.

[Ruth Burr Reedy]

It's a multi channel strategy. And I think that more than ever, SEOs really do need to be multichannel marketers or be partnering with other marketers in order to build multichannel strategies. With the knowledge that a lot of that stuff is happening on social media or in email or in private groups or even in person. You know, some people talk to each other in person. I know it sounds crazy, but they do.

[Jordan Cooney]

It happens.

[Ruth Burr Reedy]

But where are you getting the word out about what you do? You know, when you have stuff to say about what you do, when you have strong brand positioning, when you have brand associations that you want to build, how are you sharing that information out? One of the things that you can do is look at what is already co occurring with your brand. So if you look at branded search in Google Search console, what are the words that people are searching alongside your brand? Do they match what you do or not? If they do, that's a great signal that you can boost that farther. You can promote those products more. Maybe you give them their own section on your website, maybe you flesh out. I mean I think that can even going like true, true multichannel. You can take that back to your client and say, everybody really loves your blue teapots. I think that you should launch a cerulean teapot and a teal teapot and a robin's egg teapot and people would love it. And so now you're coming back, you're driving product strategy, that's driving SEO, it's synergy. So I do think the multi channel aspect is one that increasingly we can't ignore. I think the other thing to think about for a long time, I think we have really conflated brand building and link building online, which is very SEO perspective. We like to take large concepts and then boil them down into the things that we are interested in and good at. Link building is part of the equation. But I think when we're talking about brand building, I think especially now, especially with the advent of large language models and AI overview and ChatGPT search and all of that co occurrence is an even more important signal than it has ever been. And so when you're thinking about link building, it's not just about link building, it's about building mentions of your brand in conjunction with the things that you want your brand to be known for. It is about building mentions of your brand in conjunction with the brands that you want your brand to be associated with. So there's I think a strong play to be made right now for strategic partnership for things like content creation, for co branded campaigns with other businesses. Especially if it's a little bit aspirational for your business to be associated with that brand, build that partnership, ride those coattails and gain that association. But at this point, of course I want the link. I'm still an SEO, I want the link. But if you want to mention me and you've got a huge audience and you don't link, I still want that if it's a link. But if it's a no followed link, I don't care. I want that. I want my brand in front of your audience and association with the things that I do.

[Podcast Announcer]

Time for a one minute break to hear from our sponsor, Pre Visible. So you're looking for SEO help and you got a couple of options. You could start replying to spam from agencies that claim they can get you to rank number one on Google. You can pay an hourly rate for a consultant who will inevitably nickel and dime you with hourly charges. Or you can work with a cookie cutter agency to quickly launch a strategy less project with low success rate. None of those sound very good now do they? Well, that's where Pre Visible's integrated consulting model comes in. Pre Visible draws From a collective 40 years of SEO and digital marketing experience to unlock your organic growth opportunities. They build custom solutions that combine strategy, technical expertise, content and reporting to effectively operationalize SEO for your business. Pre Physical's four stage approach ensures that your SEO programs thrive by starting off with a strategy first approach. Then they support you in your efforts to create quality content, help you identify technical issues and most importantly, they'll work with your cross functional teams to integrate your SEO strategies to make sure that your SEO budget actually drives results, not just your agency's bottom line. So join brands like Yelp, eBay, Canva, Atlassian Square, all who rely on the SEO consultants at Pre Visible. For more information go to Pre Visible IO. That's Pre Visible P R E V I S I b l e.IO.

[Jordan Cooney]

Yeah. And I'm curious what happens when it that brand signal or those brand signals that we're interpreting as a business are negative. Right? And I think this is where it gets really challenging and I'm curious to get your perspective, what happens when those sentiments or those, you know, you were mentioning some examples, right, of you know, seeing how people are searching your brand. But if you put your brand in and the next keyword isn't exactly what you want. What do you do then?

[Ruth Burr Reedy]

That's. I mean, that's. Yeah, that's a great question. I keep saying that, but you ask really good questions. I'll stop.

[Jordan Cooney]

I'll stop, I promise.

[Ruth Burr Reedy]

No, no, no. Never. Never. Yeah. Reputation management is a huge problem and it's definitely a core part of brand marketing and brand marketing online. You know, I just read an interview with Lexi Mills that I really liked, and one of the things that she was talking about was that historically reputation management is often about kind of pushing a bad result down. And I think that is less the case now. I think that there is a play to be made for owning your mistakes as a brand and demonstrating improvement around them, giving people an opportunity to say, yeah, we used to be bad at this, but now we are good. Our teapots don't burn the tea anymore. And here's a whole piece about why. I think that brand partnership, that kind of building trust via association with other trustworthy brands is a great thing to do. If you are seeing some negative brand associations, gaining that kind of second chance, gaining that social proof, often in a way, but on a business rather than a personal level of another brand, being willing to associate with you, being willing to partner with you, getting their good mojo all over your name can be a great way to change people's minds.

[Jordan Cooney]

Right?

[Ruth Burr Reedy]

And then I do think there is still room to not even push things down, but change the conversation again. Going back to what are your positive brand associations now? Building those and attempting to shift the conversation more toward the things that you do well, I think is still a.

[Jordan Cooney]

Valid play with respect to the future of where brand, brand and SEO is going. There's been a lot of news about the fact that Google's dominance is declining. Right. Consumers are shifting their discovery to other places, whether it be perplexity, ChatGPT, Cloud, what have you, and the increase of the prevalence of AI across a variety of different places. What's your perspective on brand and brand signals as consumers go to do discovery and other platforms?

[Ruth Burr Reedy]

I think a lot of that is going to depend on how those platforms evolve in the next couple of years. Right now, I would say the strategies are pretty similar because those platforms are largely training their models on the same data set that Google is. So if you are optimizing for appearance in AI overviews, it's not that different. Many of the tactics are really similar to what you might have been doing before to appear in rich results in rich snippets. I think a lot of the tactics just don't necessarily change right now if these tools are going to new and different data sets. I think even it's not necessarily the tactics themselves that will change, it's just making sure you're present in that. But I think a lot of those things that we do today, again, co, occurrence, co citations, building awareness. You and I talked yesterday about appearing in AI overviews and appearing in Best of lists. A lot of Best of Lists is just an affiliate site, not actually necessarily that worthwhile of content, but it's what ranks and a lot of people don't know that. A lot of people are still looking at listicles and roundups and appearing there. It's a really easy way, a really easy, scrapable, machine readable way for a machine to get a big group of brands together that they know all do this thing and then sort through other signals. So I think in a lot of ways the signals aren't that different. It's just a matter of continuing to pay attention to where and how these new models are being trained. And that's evolving all the time and making sure that you're continuing whether on page or off page. I think that that's the other thing SEOs love on page SEO because it's easy, we can control it, we can do it all day long. No one can stop us.

[Jordan Cooney]

That's right.

[Ruth Burr Reedy]

But those off page signals and making sure that they are consistent throughout the web, not only of your brand, but also your brand associations, whether that's your product, whether that's your brand values, whatever other thing you want people know about who you are and what you do, making sure that those are present and consistent across the web, which has been the deal with brand marketing and the SEO space for many a year now. I think that's still a huge part of what we need to be doing.

[Jordan Cooney]

Yeah, I absolutely agree with all that. So Ruth, as we think about this brand concept, right. We've unpacked some of the signals that you should be thinking about. We've talked about what you do if the sentiment is negative, how you influence a brand, where it's possibly going with AI. How should we as SEOs and content marketers start thinking about the brand conversation in our businesses? How do we start thinking about this? As an agency member who's talking to a client about this, what's the approach to talking about brand?

[Ruth Burr Reedy]

Yeah, I think a lot of it is going back to the idea of reclaiming branded search is something that we do and that impacts us. So what gets measured gets improved. Starting out, I think a good thing is to start reporting on it, just start talking about it and your clients are probably going to say, oh, that's not you, that's us. And then you can say we want to impact things in the following ways. And so we're going to start doing this, I think too, using your own data, using Google Search Console, but also using things like Google Trends, using tools like Semrush to kind of show show what your brand search is doing, what are the commonly searched terms alongside your brand, and also what your competitors are doing, especially at an agency. Agency clients love to hear about what their competitors are doing. You can say the search volume for competitor plus product is three times what your brand plus product is. We want to grow that search volume for your brand plus product product. And here's how we're going to do that. That's an easy to understand and reportable metric that you can then track success back to. You can also then help build that association further for them by tracking that increase in search volume to the overall increase in rankings and traffic for the page that that product is about, or the page that's about that product, or any of the topical areas of your site that that branded search touches on. Because you're often going to see a correlation between non branded search volume and non branded search traffic and rankings and branded search volume around a given subtopic. So pointing that out, I think further solidifies the case that brand search is absolutely something you should be doing that impacts the whole business.

[Jordan Cooney]

And that's a great place for us to wrap up this episode of the Voices of Search podcast. Thank you to Ruth Burt Reedy from Houzz for joining us. If you'd like to get in touch with Ruth, you can find a link to our LinkedIn profile in our show notes or visit our company website, houzz.com.

[Podcast Announcer]

Okay, thanks to Jordan Cooney, the founder of Pre Visible. If you'd like to get in touch with Jordan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show Notes. You can contact him on Twitter. His handle is J.T. cooney. That's J T K O E N E. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O. And a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore. Thanks to Ahrefs because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster [e-mail] that's Ahrefs a h r e f s.comAWT just one more link in our show Notes I'd like to tell you about if you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Benjayshab B E N J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember the answers are always in the data.