Build your brand to stay ahead of Google updates
- Julian Oppelt
- May 21
- 17 min read
Author: Julian Oppelt
Robust branding helps ensure that your campaigns continue to bring in traffic, leads, and conversions—even as you face uncertainties in search, generative AI, or whatever the future throws your way. In this piece, I want to shift away from the usual technicalities of SEO and explain how building a brand can help you navigate (and overcome) some of the hurdles Google has placed in front of us.
I will focus on tips and strategies for small- and medium-sized businesses as well as startups that rely on search traffic from Google to expand their reach and customer base (and to keep ad spend under control).
You’ll discover how Google has changed over the past few years and look at practical examples of how brand building helps you get in front of the right audiences in the current search landscape.
Tables of contents:
Google: Constant changes and new content opportunities
First, let’s explore how Google’s algorithm has changed and what it means for content websites and small- to medium-sized brands. The company periodically updates its algorithm and how it presents the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Algorithm updates are coming more frequently than in previous years, with four major algorithm updates in 2024 (March, August, November, and December).
The SERPs are changing less quickly than the algorithm, but Google often tests new layouts and formats for featured snippets, ads, images, and videos.
Here are some of the changes that I consider the most impactful:
Favoring established brands
Search Generative Experience & AI Overviews
Situational content
Google’s algorithm favors established brands—even if they’re not the most relevant
In February 2024, a website called HouseFresh made waves in the SEO community as its managing editor called out publishers, like BuzzFeed and Forbes, that published content despite a lack of expertise (in this particular case, the expertise was regarding air purifiers).
With genuine, in-depth product reviews, HouseFresh’s content adhered to quality standards and demonstrated E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness). Still, the site saw its rankings drop in favor of more well-known brands. Many website owners shared HouseFresh’s criticism, and industry media around the globe covered the topic.
This led to Google’s Danny Sullivan responding that he had raised concerns within Google and that the algorithm shouldn’t behave this way.
Fast-forward to August 2024, HouseFresh is back at the top for many previously demoted keywords (e.g., [best budget air purifiers]).
However, the HouseFresh case didn’t force Google to reduce its brand bias and change its algorithm in favor of smaller, independent publishers.
Even now, Google’s algorithm prioritizes established, well-known websites—often at the expense of more relevant or better-quality content.
Take another glance at the screenshot of the [best budget air purifiers] rankings above. At the time of writing, Billboard.com ranks 6th, livescience.com 7th, and weather.com 8th—for a keyword related to air purifiers.
As another example of this issue, look at Forbes and the product review keywords its ranks first for that include “best”:
Regarding expertise, I would say that a business magazine known for publishing a ranking of the wealthiest people on our planet scores relatively low for those topics.
And, look at the full ranking of the top 15 pages for [best baby monitor]. You will see that the first website that’s specifically about babies and motherhood is ranked 15th—below Forbes, other established sites, and online communities.
But here’s why Forbes probably pulls in those rankings: It’s a household name known to many people worldwide (434K searches per month, according to Ahrefs).
Users tend to choose familiar options when making decisions, even if the latter options may be more objectively relevant. When consumers recognize a brand name, they often associate it with positive attributes, as familiarity can create a sense of trust and reliability. This psychological phenomenon is called familiarity bias.
This familiarity bias could be one reason why Google ranks websites like Forbes, Billboard, or communities (like Reddit) above lesser-known online properties.
In particular, a part of Google’s algorithm called “NavBoost” could be influenced by this familiarity bias. NavBoost analyses what users clicked on in SERPs over the past 13 months to potentially influence future rankings.
So, the more people are familiar with your brand, the more they will click on your results in the SERP. Navboost and other ranking signals, such as backlinks and brand mentions, could explain Google’s shift towards popular brands at the expense of smaller publishers.
Search Generative Experience in the SERPs
In early 2024, Google started testing a new SERP feature called Search Generative Experience (SGE).
With SGE, Google generates information to answer a query using AI technology, citing sources it drew from. The results are called AI Overviews (AIO).
In May 2024, however, Google’s Gemini AI started to hallucinate on queries and offered potentially harmful advice to users (remember the tip to put glue on your pizza?). There were also allegations about Google copy-pasting the original work of popular journalists.
In response to the mounting criticism, Google reconsidered its approach to SGE and pushed for more accurate and trustworthy AI-driven answers in the search results.
So, the appearance of AIOs declined sharply.
Analyzing around 100,000 searches on Google in July 2024, researchers at SE Ranking found that just 8.7% of SERPs included an AIO, representing a significant drop from February 2024, when 64% of queries returned an AI answer.
Yet (and in line with the thoughts of Wix’s own Mordy Oberstein), a generative AI experience has a place in SERPs, provided that it creates value for searchers, offering a contextual look at the topic and then facilitating further exploration. Therefore, AIOs will probably be included more heavily as Google improves Gemini and makes those AI answers more reliable.
Gartner predicts that 79% of consumers will use AI-enhanced search in 2025, and 70% already somewhat trust AI-powered search results.
So, it is essential to understand how you can be cited in AIOs. I suggest you consider generative engine optimization (GEO) for your content and brand.
While SEO and GEO are different concepts, they share some similarities: the quality of your content, its relevance, and the perceived E-E-A-T of your website are still crucial factors if you want to be featured at the top (or cited as a source).
This is confirmed by more research from SE Ranking, where fewer but more authoritative AIO sources were shown in July 2024 compared to the beginnings of SGE.
As a result, the competition among content providers to appear as a source will likely intensify.
It’s also important to consider that, in around 85% of searches where the SERPs included an AIO, the cited sources included at least one domain from the top 10 organic search results.
Similar to the organic search results trend I shared above, brands with a strong digital footprint also win here.
The algorithm surfaces situational content
“Excessive generative AI can lead to ‘AI Fatigue’—meaning people are becoming increasingly tired of seeing AI-generated text, which could have a negative impact on the way consumers are viewing a brand.” — Caitlin Faulks, Talking Stick Digital
Consumers are requesting a new type of content—so-called ‘situational content’.
In his case study on the March 2024 core update, Mordy Oberstein found that Google rewards user-centric content that caters to a person’s needs in a given situation, rather than the ‘classic’ content written for SEO purposes (which is topic-centric and sterile).
Also, with the release of Gemini 1.5 in February 2024, Google can train its algorithm on enormous datasets, allowing it to perform highly sophisticated understanding and reasoning tasks for different modalities, including video.
So what does this mean for you?
I think that as a smaller business, you can, in the future, avoid Google’s brand bias and win over household brands if you try to engage with people on a personal level.
Especially if you are a proven expert in your niche and have vast experience on a specific topic, you should create content that connects with your readers, taking into account their pain points and predicting their needs.
And I expect Google to surface more of this original, truly helpful, situational content from smaller sites rather than big brands in its search results as Gemini can learn what’s helpful and reliable and demonstrates real-world experience from a much bigger dataset.
The benefits of building a brand: how does it help with Google?
In the previous section, I touched on some factors that help brands better cope with Google’s algorithmic and SERP changes. Let’s look at them in detail.
Showcase E-E-A-T
Attract backlinks
Create a digital footprint
Connect emotionally with your audience
Drive branded search and direct traffic
Explore new traffic sources
Showcase your E-E-A-T
As we’ve seen before, users often favor content from established brands because of familiarity. They trust their content and associate positive attributes to them, including expertise.
To achieve those associations, you, too, should aim to build a brand that clearly conveys your company’s story, experience, expertise, authority, and why people should trust your advice.
As you build and consistently communicate your brand, you will gain traction in the market and your audience will become familiar with what you stand for. It’s fair to assume that the more aware people become of your brand, the more often you will be talked about, whether in blog posts, forums, social media, or any other channel.
Consequently, Google’s algorithm will pick up on your E-E-A-T signals, giving your content more visibility and higher rankings.
Let’s look at how branding helps with E-E-A-T in the health industry, a YMYL (your money, your life) sector whose content significantly impacts people’s health. Google, therefore, places even more value on E-E-A-T when deciding which websites to rank for these health-related keywords.
Take Healthline, for example. Healthline is a health information provider that was founded in 1999.
On its About Us page, the company talks extensively about its expertise, authority, and trustworthiness by highlighting its medical affairs team and editorial guidelines. The company also includes its mission and core values.
Also, the visual design conveys trust and reliability with a very clean and clear layout. Moreover, Healthline is very transparent about article authors, including a medical reviewer and trusted sources as references. Overall, it convinces readers that Healthline is an authoritative, trustworthy source. Its content deserves to be shared with friends and family and to rank at the top of Google’s search results.
Attract backlinks
Circling back to brand familiarity and E-E-A-T, readers will reference and forward links to your content more readily if they are familiar with you and think of you as a credible and authoritative source of information.
For example, take Statista, a German company that publishes statistics on various topics. Over 6.6 million sites, including the creme-de-la-creme of websites, are backlinking to them instead of other sources. Even Wikipedia links to Statista rather than the Home Depot website regarding the Home Depot store count per country!
All other considerations being equal, the more backlinks you have from authoritative sources, the better your pages rank and the greater your site’s visibility in search results.
Leave a digital footprint
Both backlinks and brand mentions serve as brand authority and trust signals for your audience and Google. They leave a ‘digital footprint’.
With Google’s advances as an AI-powered search engine, its system can be trained on enormous amounts of data. So, the more often your brand or website is mentioned in a thematically relevant context (with or without a link), the more likely it is that the algorithm will view your brand as authoritative and rank it higher, or cite it in AIOs.
The beauty brand Glossier is a good example of a brand with a huge digital footprint (over 3.1 million Instagram followers, 950K followers on TikTok, 200K subscribers on Youtube, and 750K organic traffic).
Glossier initially built its brand through Instagram and YouTube, using aesthetic imagery and beauty tutorials to engage with customers. The company prioritizes one-to-one conversations with its customers, directly replying to social media users who create Glossier-related content. As a third tactic, Glossier leveraged influencer partnerships to create organic content, increase brand awareness, and drive sales.
Make an emotional connection with your audience
As mentioned earlier, the rise of AI-generated content is frustrating for many users. People are tired of reading auto-generated, topic-centered, and arbitrarily search-optimized articles that don’t speak to their needs. They are looking for content from humans that engage on a personal level (i.e. situational content).
Branding can help you with creating this type of content.
Within the branding process (which I’ll discuss in greater detail below), you will think about your target audience, their pain points, and their needs. You will, therefore, understand your readers’ situation and be able to create something that speaks to them. Combined with strong brand values and a unique personality, you will consistently distinguish your content from AI-generated or topic-centered content from competitors.
Australian toilet paper Who Gives a Crap is an excellent example of injecting personality into a brand.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t see toilet paper as the most exciting product to market and create a brand around. Yet, by creating a product that stands out (an alien design on my toilet paper?), a fun brand identity, and humorous content, Who Gives a Crap manages to drive around 200K organic website visits per month.
Drive branded searches & direct traffic
Once people are aware of, familiar with, and loyal to your brand, they will either search for it on Google or visit your website directly.
Unlike informational searches, when people search for your brand on Google, you usually don’t have to compete with other brands for the highest rankings. Google will show users the most relevant search results, which naturally shows your brand in the top position (unless the search intent behind your brand name is unclear to Google, which would further underscore the importance of brand building).
Consider Traderoo.de (full disclosure: this is a website I own in the German market). It was started in 2022 as a marketplace to buy and sell websites. Back then, only a few Germans knew about the site. Brand awareness was zero.
We slowly started to build the brand and its digital footprint. Today, the website ranks 4th for one of my target keywords ([buying a website]). Even so, due to PPC ads, Traderoo is still way below the fold, which reduces our chances for organic visitors.
The picture is different, however, for the branded keyword [traderoo]. As you can see in the screenshot below, my marketplace is ranked the highest, followed by a review site, our LinkedIn profile, and an article about the business.
What is particularly interesting is that we created search volume for a keyword that had zero volume two years ago.
Now, those branded searches are nice, but there is an even better benefit of branding: direct visits to your website.
Let me ask you: How often do you actually search for the term [amazon] on Google? Most people usually type amazon.com directly into the address bar and skip Google altogether.
There is no better way to make your business resilient in the face of Google’s algorithm or SERP changes.
Explore new sources of traffic
Another powerful benefit of branding is that you can drive traffic from channels other than Google to your website.
Like direct visits to your website, the goal is to have a flourishing business that is less reliant on Google.
Once you establish a website, build a strong brand, and create a community around it, consider adding podcasts, webinars, or online courses as new traffic sources.
In branding, we call this concept “brand extension.”
Brand extensions like this usually work because your audience trusts your brand’s reputation for quality and reliability, which reduces perceived risk when trying a new product (or just investing time listening to a podcast).
How to build a brand that withstands search volatility
Crafting and implementing a sound brand strategy—one robust enough to carry you through volatility when search isn’t going your way—involves the following:
01. Define the market you are operating in. Ask yourself: what business are you really in?
For example, Netflix is not in the VOD streaming service market. Netflix is in the entertainment industry, where it competes with many more players for the free time of people like you and I, including cinemas, football matches, or even your favorite bar next door.
02. Look at your direct and indirect competitors. Understanding how your competitors position themselves in the market will help you find opportunities to differentiate your brand.
Analyze your strengths, weaknesses, capabilities, and the opportunities and threats at play in the market (SWOT). Don’t forget to look at the environment you’re operating in (PESTEL analysis) as well.
03. Understand market segments and define your target customers. It is vital to deep-dive into each buyer persona. Use customer empathy maps and journey mapping tools to gain insights into their needs, preferences, and pain points. Knowing your audience will help you tailor your brand message.
04. Define your brand essence. Think about your brand’s vision, mission, and values. Ask yourself why your brand exists beyond just making a profit. This essential step helps you connect with your audiences more deeply and create real meaning to better resonate with them.
05. Position your brand in its market. This step will help you avoid mimicking competitors; instead, you will focus on what makes your brand unique. Visualize your brand’s position in the market on a positioning map (either a digital one or on an old-school whiteboard). Define the value you bring to customers and what promises you will make to them. Develop a clear brand positioning statement that communicates what your brand offers and how it differs from competitors. This statement should resonate with your target audience and align with your brand’s capabilities.
06. Refine your brand identity. Write down where it comes from and why it exists (i.e., your brand story), decide on a memorable name, and define your brand’s personality. Ensure your brand name is unique and check for domain availability to secure your online presence.
Based on your work so far, hire a professional designer and give them access to your notes on brand essence and identity. This will help them develop a strong and stunning visual identity for you, including an eyecatching logo, brand colors, typographies, and imagery style. The visual aspects of your brand are as important as the strategy behind it. They will help your brand stand out and be perceived as cohesive and professional.
07. Communicate your brand. As the final step, you must spread the word about your brand. Convey your brand and what it stands for to your employees and partners first, then communicate it to your target customers via all digital channels.
Hire an experienced web designer and writer to create an on-brand website. The interface, UX (user experience), and content should 100% reflect your brand essence and identity. Highlight on your website your experience, expertise, authority, and why customers should trust you—make it easy for Google to pick up on E-E-A-T signals.
Build your digital footprint with branded accounts on all relevant social media networks and engage in meaningful discussions with users. Look as well at online communities, such as Reddit or Quora. Offer to write opinion pieces for other media outlets (guest posting), publish original research on your website, and connect with influencers in your space to get relevant backlinks for your website.
Your overall goal is to increase your digital footprint with brand mentions (with or without backlinks) and be considered a relevant player in your market—both by customers and by Google.
Ensure that every interaction with your brand is consistent and reinforces how you want your brand to be perceived by your customers. This includes marketing materials, customer service, and product or service delivery. Consistency is vital in shaping your brand image in the minds of consumers.
Branding is an ever-evolving process. Use customer feedback and new insights about market trends to refine your approach and ensure your brand remains relevant and competitive.
Case studies: Examples of brands that thrive
To give you a clearer idea of the power behind effective branding, I want to showcase two companies I believe have created strong and impactful digital brands over the past years. Those are not your 100-year-old institutional companies, such as Forbes (1917) or Procter & Gamble (1837), but relatively new contenders that understood market trends better than others.
Casper: Mattress in a box
Do you enjoy shopping for expensive mattresses in a physical store and awkwardly laying on a bed with your partner in front of the salesperson to see if the mattress would fit your sleeping style? You probably like this experience as much as I do—I’m not particularly crazy about it.
That’s precisely why Casper disrupted the industry in 2014 and achieved significant success within five years, building a strong brand with a loyal base of 1.5 million customers.
In 2014, the mattress industry was dominated by traditional mattress companies and their showrooms, with high prices and relatively slow and tedious buying experiences.
From day one, Casper aimed to change perceptions about mattress shopping. Casper’s goal was to create a community around sleep in a playful and creative way, using a genuine voice, according to Lindsay Kaplan, Casper’s former VP of communications and brand engagement. This approach helped Casper differentiate itself in a traditionally boring and uninspiring market.
Like Apple, Casper turned the unboxing of its mattresses into a share-worthy experience. And by working with influencers, the unboxing videos became popular on platforms like YouTube and helped generate buzz and excitement around their products.
Across all channels, Casper adopted a quirky, loveable, authentic, and contrarian brand personality that stood out from traditional mattress companies and resonated well with their target audience. Here’s an ad from 2020 that embodied the communication style:
An essential pillar of Casper’s brand strategy was the creation of search-optimized content for all stages of the buying process. This included top-of-the-funnel, science-backed guides on what to do when you cannot sleep and bottom-of-the-funnel content, such as mattress comparison pages.
However, in addition to SEO to get the word out, Casper also adopted a multi-channel advertising strategy to boost brand awareness, including YouTube, Google Search, and Meta.
To establish trust with website visitors, it offered a 100-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee and showcased all product reviews (the good and bad ones) on its product pages. To further boost E-E-A-T, Casper included press mentions on their website and published original research that positions them as experts in their industry.
To increase the customer engagement, Casper offered a referral program and incentivized people to invite their friends to try Casper.
Casper’s brand strategy translated into 31% aided awareness, 80% net positive brand sentiment, and 60 in Net Promoter Score, according to Vertic. Today, the branded keyword [Casper mattress] generates a search volume of over 100K in the US and 119K worldwide (according to Ahrefs):
Key takeaway: Adopt a unique brand personality and help consumers at all stages of the buying process.
AppSumo: Lifetime software licenses
Did you ever wonder when subscriptions for software became a thing? Me too. Almost every piece of software is now sold on a subscription basis, which created a new business model called software as a service (SaaS). Gone are the days of buying Adobe tools for a one-time fee.
And then, AppSumo launched in 2010. Today, it is the leading marketplace for software from startups for a one-time fee. It paid over $550 million to software developers and helped thousands of entrepreneurs reduce their monthly subscription spending.
A big part of that success is due to AppSumo’s longstanding branding efforts, as well as the personal brand of its founder, Noah Kagan.
Noah Kagan worked for Facebook in its early days (employee 30th) and Mint. He then went on to start his own companies. He is very transparent about his success and failure as an employee as well as his entrepreneurial journey and managed to get a huge following both on YouTube (1.2 million as of Nov 2024), Instagram (270K as of Nov 2024), and LinkedIn (102K as of Nov 2024).
As you can see, his personal story and brand appeal to aspiring entrepreneurs, who are among AppSumo’s most important target audiences. People trust his tips and advice and appreciate AppSumo’s mission to support them on their entrepreneurial journeys by avoiding costly subscriptions. On top of that, startups are happy to launch software on AppSumo, as they can rely on Kagan’s marketing skills to get customers for their businesses.
Over the years, AppSumo has created a vibrant community of entrepreneurs and software enthusiasts who buy, sell, and give feedback on software. Besides Kagan’s personal brand and his involvement in the community, how did they pull it off?
If you look at any of AppSumo’s software listings, you will see two tabs that stand out: questions and reviews.
In the questions sections, you get direct access to startup founders and not a generic chatbot (as is usual with most established companies). In the reviews section, buyers of the software rate their experience extensively as they want to add value to the community and help fellow entrepreneurs find their perfect piece of software. Both sections are a massive source of user-generated content, which is very valuable for SEO, especially considering the aforementioned situational content.
In combination with a heavily promoted affiliate program, AppSumo ensures that it receives tons of brand mentions on other websites and social media, particularly YouTube, where entire channels exist just to review its products.
AppSumo calls their community members “Sumolings” and they give tacos instead of review stars. The brand presents software deals in a fun, engaging way:
This brand personality trickles down to their sales copy and any marketing email you will receive from the company. Here’s an example of their cart abandonment email:
The result of all this effort? The branded keyword [AppSumo] has a monthly search volume of 19K in the US and 47K worldwide, according to Ahrefs.
Key takeaway: Work on employee and founder personal branding, create an active community, and craft an engaging brand personality.
How to measure whether your brand strategy is on track
There are many metrics you can track to analyze your branding success. Here, I will focus on the ones that are most accessible.
Metric | Description/What to do | How to do it |
Branded vs. non-branded search traffic | When you’re working on creating a brand, look out for the ratio and volume of branded versus non-branded search traffic. The further down your journey, the more you should rank organically for branded keywords. As we’ve seen in the Traderoo example, you should strive to create search volume for your brand as the exact keyword. | Use a tool like Semrush, Ahrefs, or SEOCrawl to determine how users arrive on your website. |
Backlinks | As your brand awareness and authority increases, backlinks should also increase. It’s also a good idea to track the anchor text ratio of branded vs. non-branded keywords. | Employ the tools mentioned above to track the number of backlinks and referring domains. |
Direct visitors | This number will be low initially, but the more established your brand becomes, the more this number should increase. | Use Google Analytics or similar software to analyze the number of direct visits to your website. |
Brand mentions | Monitor mentions of your brand across social media, online communities, forums, and traditional media outlets. If your digital footprint increases over time, you’ve laid the foundation for a strong brand. | Use tools such as BrandWatch or BrandMentions. |
Brand sentiment | Take feedback into account and improve your brand strategy over time. | Draw on tools like BrandWatch and analyze review sites to understand what users think about your brand. |
Followers and engagement metrics | Keep tabs on follower growth and the quality of comments and responses. | To measure brand preference and awareness, track the evolution of your social media following across all channels. |
User engagement metrics | CTR can be a good indicator of brand familiarity, while time on site and pages per visit help indicate whether you’re addressing user intent. | Use SEOCrawl (linked to Google Search Console) to analyze CTR from the SERPs. Use Google Analytics to track the time on site and pages per visit. |
Focus groups | This is on the expensive side of tracking options, but you will get unrivaled qualitative insights into essential metrics such as brand recall, preference, and awareness. | You should work with a professional service provider for this. |
Surveys | Explore brand awareness, sentiment, and recall to see if your branding strategy is on track. | Use online survey companies or tools such as Typepad to survey your audience. |
Branding is your guide to navigating marketing’s uncharted waters
A strong brand enhances E-E-A-T, leaves a lasting digital footprint, drives branded searches, and warrants brand extensions in the future. Your brand and its identity also allow you to create an emotional connection with your audience through needs-based and situational content.
All in all, your brand is a powerful engine that allows you to maintain visibility and grow—even in the unchartered waters of today’s marketing landscape.
Julian is responsible for The Branding Journal's marketing strategy and oversees the strategic development of Traderoo.de. He has worked in SEO and branding for over ten years, helping many startups establish a digital presence and gain traction in their respective markets.
