Understanding Branding versus SEO is important when planning your marketing strategy. 

Branding is a traditional broad approach. SEO is targeted and cost effective.
For both branding and SEO the goal is to increase sales and profits. However there are major differences.

Branding is an expensive Marketing Strategy

Gauge your available marketing resources.

Branding is a time honored approach to marketing.  It is generally used by very large companies to familiarize the public with their product line.  A successful branding campaign builds trust, credibility, and the desire of the public to purchase and use your particular brand of product or service.

If you think of some of the major corporate giants in America today, certain products and companies come to mind: Coke, Pepsi, Apple Computers, Dell Computers, Honda, Toyota etc. 

These companies have huge advertising budgets designed to get their name and products in the public eye, massively. Branding campaigns often use television, radio, billboards, newspapers and sponsoring of huge sporting events to repeatedly deliver their message.

The goal is to have the public automatically think of and desire their brand of product.

It requires many repeated exposures before branding begins to be successful. Branding campaigns tend to be very expensive.

It is essential to consider the most efficient use of your marketing dollars. Branding is not usually a useful strategy for smaller companies.

SEO is an affordable Marketing Strategy

For medium and smaller companies SEO may be a much more practical.

When medium and smaller sized companies consider the question of branding versus SEO, a more limited advertising budget is usually available. SEO invests your advertising dollars to utilize the enormous economic potential of the World Wide Web and search engines.

SEO can give greater focus to your advertising dollars. It helps your business reach a more targeted audience. Therefore it can generate a more successful impact and business growth for much less money. Instead of dealing with television, radio, direct mail, and sporting events etc., you focus on a well designed website which has search engine top positioning. 

A well designed website will present your product or service in an attractive and compelling way, and build the trust and confidence of your web visitors.

Once you have a well designed website you can then focus on SEO, or search engine optimization to increase website traffic and conversion rates.

An affordable SEO optimization firm can help you with improved web site structure, web site content and linking strategies to get your web site organically listed on the first page of the three major search engines.

This then brings a stream of targeted interested visitors to your web site on an ongoing basis, 24/7.  These are visitors who typed your SEO keywords into the search engine.  They are interested in and looking for exactly what you offer.  It is truly a cost effective, efficient marketing strategy for many medium and small companies.

Gauge your target customers and market carefully.

Caution, for some types of products and services SEO may not be effective.  If your target market is not oriented to the Internet or lacks Internet access, they will never find you with SEO.  Also, some types of goods and services are not widely purchased on the web. For example, most people go to their local grocery store rather than the Internet to buy fresh vegetables. 

However, more and more people are gaining access to the Internet. Many local businesses and services are finding that SEO can be a powerful marketing strategy.

For example many Realtors are finding that real estate SEO is an effective means of getting good leads with a well designed SEO campaign that features keywords for their local area.

Dentists are finding that SEO for Dentists is an effective means of getting new patients with a well designed SEO campaign that features keywords for their local area.

SEO for Doctors and SEO for lawyers are also growing fields.

Large Businesses need not choose between branding and SEO