The new SEO imperative: Building your brand

In 2025, all signs point to SEO moving beyond a fixation on the Google search box and toward multi-modal search. 

As search behavior becomes increasingly fragmented across platforms – LLM search, TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, and more – relying solely on Google will limit your organic growth.

What’s more important than ever is building your brand organically across platforms, technologies, and interactions. 

Your brand is the connective tissue that ties everything together, whether users are searching for products, services, or simply information. 

While optimizing for non-brand keywords remains valuable, it shouldn’t be at the expense of a broader brand-building strategy.

This article covers:

• How to shift your priorities to expand brand visibility and awareness.
• Key brand-focused KPIs to track your progress.
• How to collaborate with paid teams to strengthen your brand presence.

How to shift your priorities to address organic brand building

Get busy with PR

If you’ve been investing in PR consistently for your business, excellent. 

PR has always been valuable for brand building and brand integrity, but it’s more valuable than it has been in a long time. 

A couple of years ago, we valued PR for its ability to get backlinks and high-quality placements that we could distribute on other channels. 

Today, PR helps establish your brand as an authority. 

Whether you’re running a DIY digital PR effort or working with an agency, securing mentions in credible publications sends strong signals to both Google and LLMs.

If you haven’t been investing in PR, it’s time to lean into it. 

Make sure your expectations for PR are clear and reasonable.

It’s a great play for influence and awareness, but it’s unlikely to be a major source of direct leads unless you score a big win on the right topic.

Empower your brand’s voice(s)

Getting your CEO out and speaking or writing about big topics is good. 

Deploying several key members of your team? Even better. 

A matrix of sources that covers both strategic and tactical levels of discussion on key topics is a great starting point. 

From there, identify forums and outlets where those discussions are (or should be) happening, and start contributing – or begin the digital PR approach that will open doors for you to contribute.

Build a repository of proprietary content

Whether it’s LLMs or trade journalists, everyone loves proprietary data and research. 

Brainstorm topics you can own with a differentiated point of view, and set aside resources to collect information unique to your brand.

Let’s say you’re in telehealth. Researching average waiting room stays by state or the intervals between referrals and actual specialist appointments can generate valuable insights. 

These topics would be catnip for your key platforms

Keep a close eye on your structured data

Structured data is a key factor in Google search efforts, but it’s also valuable in connecting your brand to the larger set of industry data. 

The more cleanly structured your data, the easier it is for Google and LLMs to ingest, and the more frequently your brand will be surfaced when that data is relevant to a query.

Beef up your owned and partner media

The more ways you can use your website (and leverage your partners) to associate your brand name with your key topics, the more material you’ll provide to discovery platforms.

Here are some recommendations I frequently deliver to clients:

• Create detailed case studies that name the brand in the context of industry success stories.
• Use consistent phrasing (“{brand} {adjective} {keyword}”) to solidify LLM associations.
• Have external sites and partner companies mention the brand in content that also discusses competitors.
• Use FAQ pages that answer “Which {brands} use {technique} to provide {solutions}?” with direct brand mentions.

Dig deeper: Branded search and SEO: What you need to know

KPIs to help you track your brand-building progress

Along with standard SEO KPIs (i.e., rankings, impressions, clicks, and CTR), below are a few brand-centric metrics to focus on:

• Visibility in LLM search models: I calculate this simply: the number of mentions divided by the number of questions you feed into the models. Because AI content can be more volatile than traditional search rankings, it’s important to analyze this regularly and track progress over time.
• Brand search volume over time.
• Brand search traffic over time.
• Brand mentions on sites your audience frequents, whether that’s Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, etc.

Dig deeper: How to segment traffic from LLMs in GA4

How to work with your paid search colleagues to build the brand

While direct-response campaigns aren’t likely to do much for SEO brand-building, top-of-funnel campaigns – such as YouTube ads or LinkedIn thought leader ads – can have key organic benefits. 

Are those PPC activities, for instance, correlating with an increase in brand search volume? 

Suppose you’re advertising on more educational or informative non-brand keywords on Google. 

Are you inserting your brand’s name into the conversation around that topic so that people reference your brand more on other channels?

Paid search’s power to influence people – not just to purchase, but to associate your brand with key topics – makes it a great partner in organic brand-building. 

Any communication you can foster to establish ties between paid search influence and organic brand strength will benefit both efforts.

Dig deeper: How to maximize PPC and SEO data with co-optimization audits

Wrapping up

As you’ve probably already worked out, following these recommendations will also strengthen your Google performance. 

In particular, they will boost your chances of citations in AI Overviews and create more opportunities for your brand to rank high in search results. For example, by having top Reddit content pulled onto the SERP for relevant queries.

The key is to take a more expansive view of SEO and intentionally position your brand as the authority on your preferred topics. 

It might not sound dramatic, but this approach will pull you out of keyword rabbit holes and put you in a stronger position to develop your brand across the greater organic landscape.

Dig deeper: SEO beyond Google: Building your brand on Reddit, Quora, TikTok and more