Two quick examples: Nike would never be able to sell sneakers for $120 a pop if they slapped on a Wal-Mart logo. Same shoe, same manufacturer, same quality, but the Nike swoosh makes all the difference. I’ve heard stories of popular authors releasing books under a different name only to find that it was their name that sells their books, not their writing. As long as the quality that got them popular is (mostly) maintained, their image does the rest (*coughJohnGrishamcough*).

I’m sure you could think of a dozen companies that are kept alive mostly due to their image. Change the name, and they have to build an image all over again. But once you got it, you gotta do what you can to hold onto it.

Many approach SEO as an effort to build rankings. But, really, it’s about building an image through the search engines. People may find you by your ranking in the search results and click through your site because they are attracted by the products or services you offer, but unless you build an image of quality and customer service, all the rankings in the world won’t bring them back. Almost as if you’re putting SEO Frosting on a Website Dung Pile.

But, if you use your search engine rankings to drive traffic to a site that is building a great image, each visit and transaction helps enhance that image in your customers mind. Having a professional looking website gives you a good first impression and a positive image in your visitors’ mind. Providing good customer service protects your image, but, if you have a poor record of delivering solutions to your customers’ problems, you’ll soon suffer from a serious image problem.

SEO can play an important role in building your image. Not just by driving traffic, but by helping you build a site that your visitors truly find valuable. Employing on-page keyword targeting, analytics, site architecture, and usability strategies can all work together in creating a website that provides searchers more of what they are looking for in a way that engages with them and compels them to re-engage over time.

This is why SEO is so important NOW. Holding back on your SEO efforts doesn’t just cost you in terms of rankings and revenue, it costs you in terms of image building opportunities.

Too often, business owners look at rankings as the primary means of driving traffic. “Sound the alarms, we’ve fallen from #3 to #5!” Sure, rankings can drive traffic, but better rankings doesn’t coincide with better image. Clicks improve with rankings, but what sacrifices do you have to make in order to get those clicks?

When making sacrifices for SEO, for every visitor you add through better rankings, you probably lose two visitors through poor image. This isn’t universally true. Some sacrifices are well worth it, but others are not. I’m speaking primarily of the sacrifices that are done solely for the purpose of moving up a couple of points in the rankings.

Optimizing the site = good.

Over-optimizing = bad.

While a good image must be built over time, a bad image can be created within a single interaction. For any business, it is important to constantly work on building a positive image to your customers. People are ten times more likely to tell someone of a negative experience that they had with you than a positive experience. That means you need ten positive interactions building your positive image just to break even with one customer’s negative experience.

Good on-page SEO helps you build that positive image that will not only keep your customers returning again and again, but it will also draw in new customers as well.

From my examples in my post Why Branding Matters to Small Businesses, you might conclude that a full-scale SEO or PPC campaign is the only way to brand yourself online. SEO can play a role in branding, but you can engage it strategically so you’re spending less time and less money while still building brand recognition.

In the past, we often felt that some clients just didn’t need to be branded in the search results. Maybe because they were smaller clients or didn’t have a nationally recognized name. But then how do companies become nationally recognized names? You got it. Branding.

Branding isn’t just for big companies any more. With the internet and search, it has become easier and cheaper to for companies to brand their names in front of their target audience. Good branding efforts will always cost you some time, energy and even money, but it’s not out of reach of the small businesses.

Searching a name as uncommon as Stoney deGeyter, you may not be surprised to find him in all of the top ten results, but each and every one of the top one hundred results are either articles Stoney has written himself or are about him. I stopped checking after page 10.

When searching for Pole Position Marketing (no quotes), the top 21 are all directly related to the company, with the results still very heavily relevant but starting to get more scattered after that.

If you don’t have a unique personal or company name, what can you do to promote your company in the search results? Join and become active in a variety of social media. Great examples are LinkedIn , FaceBook, and Twitter.

And when you’re interested in knowing what anyone else is saying about you or your company, you can use Google Alerts. It may be good to know when a YouTube video appears with you as the underdog!

If you’ve ever doubted that buying additional domain names solely to protect your brand then this post is for you.

Years ago we went buy the name Pole Position Web. Then we re-branded as Pole Position Marketing. I wanted to go with “marketing” instead of “SEO” because I needed a name that better represented our focus on website architecture, usability SEO and PPC.

All things considered, I should have bought the SEO domain name anyway.

Recently a new company sprang up working out of the UK that was using the name–you guessed it–Pole Position SEO.

That’s not the worst of it.

We recently found out they were sending spam emails as part of their link building efforts.

That’s STILL not the worst of it.

A few days ago we found ourselves on a span list that was suddenly preventing some of our emails from getting to the recipients.

So now we have to go into damage control to ensure that our name is not being associated with this companies’ spam efforts.

So if you haven’t quite caught on that buying up additional domains to protect your company brand is smart business, maybe this post will get you to rethink that. Domains only cost $10/year at the most. Small price to pay for brand protection.

Today I want to look at several of the search marketers themselves. To see how well they are branded in the search results and see if we can pinpoint any gaps. In Monday’s post I added a disclaimer that you might want to read if you feel you or someone you love is being attacked. They’re not.

First of all, I hope nobody takes these as an attack. I don’t know your personal story, whether your dog died recently or if your business is two days old. This isn’t a look at anybody’s history, but rather a snapshot in time.

Readers should think of this more like a case study. See where others succeed or, in some cases, fail, at branding their name in the search results. The goal here is to help readers understand the importance of branding in the search results while also providing ideas for how they can do so themselves.

Last year I took a look at a handful of speakers from whose sessions I attended. This time I wanted to start with the list of SES’s Featured Speakers.