My Exact 7-Step Framework for Brand SEO (With Templates)

Branding wasn’t something SEOs traditionally thought much about. The real wins were in non-branded keywords, where the traffic and conversions lived. 

However, that changed when Google and OpenAI turned most of these queries into zero-click searches.

For the remaining queries, search platforms directly reward authoritative and popular brands, so branding can no longer be ignored for SEO.

Here’s your brand SEO playbook for getting seen, trusted, and chosen in the future of AI-powered search.

Ahrefs’ media kit, where we make it easy for others to reference our brand the same way we do.

But you are not in control of the impression your brand makes in consumers’ minds (and how AI summarizes those impressions).

Mark Williams-Cook discovered that Google uses a site quality score to classify websites, and those that fall under a certain benchmark (0.4 on a 0-1 scale) do not qualify for visibility in rich snippets.

This score is calculated based on:

• Brand strength, measured by how many searches are made that include the brand’s name
• User interactions (like clicks), especially when a brand does not rank in the top position
• Branded anchor text, determining topic-to-brand connections from around the web

Not to mention that branded signals correlate with visibility in Google’s AI Overviews:

Brands are also being vectorized as entities in LLMs and semantic search engines’ embedding models.

This means that machines treat your brand as a distinct organization. Then, they map other topics related to your brand to understand what you’re all about so they can summarize this information directly in search results.

When visualized, it looks like this:

Notice how the brand Lucasfilm is connected to its sub-brand Star Wars, which is connected to characters, actors, genres, and more?

The same network of connections is built around your brand, too.

This is the foundation of how AI systems understand your brand and how to summarize it best. So brand SEO is crucial for ensuring your brand:

• Shows up as a distinct entity, separate from other similar-sounding entities, like Apple the company vs apple the fruit.
• Is connected to appropriate and accurate topics for your products and services, like how Dyson is connected to vacuum cleaners and seen as an authority for that topic.
• Has no gaps that can lead to misinformation or hallucinations in AI summaries. If your brand entity isn’t connected to topics and other entities that matter, those are gaps you need to close.

Brand SEO is not just about rankings (which only care about if you show up). It’s about how you show up to ensure favorable and accurate mentions in AI-generated responses.

Here’s the exact 7-step brand SEO framework I use.

location landing pages if appropriate.

The “why” element

Are the reasons why you started the brand or why you do things in a particular way important to your audience? Connect these to your unique selling proposition as part of your key messaging.

For example, purpose-driven brands can inspire loyalty among their audiences, take Who Gives a Crap as an example:

Their branding is very loud when it comes to why they do what they do. On the surface, they just sell toilet paper. However, they’ve had huge success on the sales and promotion side because of their “why”, earning thousands of links and mentions in premium publications:

The “how” element

For most brands, who they serve, what they do, or why they do it is often enough to unify their brand vision. But there are rare occurrences where it all comes down to how they do things.

For example, a facilities management company I worked with struggled to define its brand. Its services spanned multiple categories (security, cleaning, labor hire, and investigations), and its audience ranged from small pubs to international government bodies.

This made both the “what” and “who” too broad to unify, a rare situation.

Surprisingly, the answer came from the “how.” By articulating its unique process, it was able to clearly define what tied together its diverse services.

For the first time, the brand’s messaging was in alignment with how they operated offline.

The “5Ws and How” is a simple yet powerful method for defining your brand’s identity and planning how to represent it online, especially if you want people and LLMs to talk about it correctly.

You’re welcome to make a copy of my “Brand Identity for SEO” template to get started.

Brand Radar to assess your earned visibility.

Look for:

• Inconsistencies in brand messaging or core details like, incorrect name, address or phone number details could be a problem. As can mentions of old company slogans and taglines.
• Brand sentiment (especially negative sentiment): If mentions of your brand are predominantly negative, this could dissuade search engines and LLMs from including your brand in responses.
• Weaknesses in brand authority affecting online visibility: If you do not have many brand mentions and links from authoritative sources, your brand’s online authority may be weak.
• Brand popularity and traffic from branded keyword searches: If your competitors have more brand searches and demand than you do, this could lead to them also being more visible in search.

To find these potential brand-related visibility issues, start in the “Search demand” tab to get a benchmark of your branded searches:

In the “Web visibility” tab, you can find mentions of your brand around the web. I like to filter out mentions on the brand’s own website here:

It’s also worth checking the other tabs to see the brand’s mentions on different platforms and in AI responses.

You can also look at your analytics or Google Search Console dashboards and filter for branded traffic or impressions. These are great indicators of your current level of brand awareness.

If your brand is fairly new and you want to confirm if it’s seen as a distinct entity by Google, try searching Carl Hendy’s Knowledge Graph API Search Tool. You’ll also be able to see if your brand is getting confused with other things, or if it’s been misclassified:

The idea is to get a robust picture of how machines have classified and interpreted your brand. And if you notice any gaps here or incorrect information, add them to your project management tool.

You’ll need to correct those to ensure accurate information in search responses, especially in AI features. How you go about correcting them depends on the source of the inaccurate information:

• If it’s an owned channel (like your social profiles or business citations), you can log in and change it directly.
• If it’s on a forum or discussion thread, you can respond and become a part of the conversation, clarifying things for your audience exactly where they’re talking about your brand.
• If it’s on a third-party website or news, you could reach out to the author or editor and ask them to correct any misinformation they’ve published.

Your mileage may vary, but it never hurts to try. Here’s an example of Common Room, a brand that undertook such a task recently and what worked for them:

Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. For example, the topic of “ergonomic chairs” has over 1,400 queries being searched in the US per month, 25,000 times.

This gives me a great overview of what topics I can align the brand to, especially when filtering for commercial or transactional intent. Queries with these intents lead to higher click-through rates from AI-powered search engines compared to informational queries.

However, for brand SEO, I take it a step further by looking at keyword modifiers, features, and attributes mentioned in keywords that can be used in USPs and brand messaging.

For example, for a local aged care home, there were many keywords relating to quality and price:

So, we adapted the brand’s messaging around the USP of “value for money”, making them a top recommended choice in AI responses as a result:

I also go further and assess what platforms are a part of the audience’s search journey to ensure holistic brand visibility everywhere searchers are likely to look.

SparkToro is a great tool for seeing the most popular platforms for a topic. For example, for “ergonomic chair”, Twitch, Github, and Discord are used above average, indicating a strong audience demographic among coders and gamers:

Discussions are happening on these platforms that relevant brands can contribute to. For instance, here’s a thread discussing recommendations for ergonomic chairs on GitHub:

To find the conversations you can join, try using the Web Visibility report in Brand Radar. Filter the data to the platform you care about (like Reddit, in the image below) and then search for mentions of the topic on that platform:

Try out different things here:

• Search for your brand mentions on each platform and assess sentiment among your audience
• Search for competing products and get your product featured in similar conversations to them
• Consider paying for ad real estate on pages or conversations about related topics

The idea is to protect your existing visibility and amplify it everywhere your audience searches for your brand, products, or services.

Remember to keep adding interesting insights and action items as tasks in your project management tool as you go.

EEAT elements

Create individual staff profile pages for leadership and key team members

Add or update organization schema to codify the technical elements of the brand

Optimize branded image files, like logos and favicons, to appear in search results

Create a topical map that aligns specific topics, features, and attributes to the brand

Contribute to relevant conversations on forums and discussion threads

The overall aim is to create a consistent brand footprint online so you’re seen as the go-to brand for your main product or service category.

Clean up as many inconsistencies as are within your control. Then amplify the brand’s messaging and topic alignment through its owned and paid media channels.

Good SEO plus lazy marketing doesn’t cut it anymore.

It comes down to embracing “search everywhere optimization” and getting your brand visible on all the platforms you found in Step 3. These will generally consist of:

• Traditional search engines
• Social media platforms
• Marketplaces and aggregators
• Forums and discussion threads
• Generative AI, LLMs, and chatbots

For example, here are all the platforms I visited when looking for the best laser cutter to buy:

You need to understand what the typical search journeys your audience goes through look like so you can show up with the right message on the right platforms.

It’s important to optimize the entire search experience, not just individual searches on Google.

Every question you answer on Reddit, every review you reply to on TrustPilot, and every post you make on social media become potential touchpoints, exposing your brand to a high-intent audience that’s actively looking for a solution you can offer.

Brand-focused link building will also help here. Think of it like doing PR. The goal isn’t to sculpt link juice.

It’s about getting your brand mentioned on authoritative and relevant publications your audience read. It focuses on:

• Getting linked (or even linked) brand mentions
• Aligning your brand mentions with specific topics
• Improving the sentiment around your brand
• Being seen by the right audiences

These days, even without the link, brand mentions are powerful because they are still recognised by AI systems and contribute to your online brand footprint.

The stronger your footprint across all relevant platforms, the easier it is to attract profitable, repeat customers, too.

Without active promotion and amplification of your brand across these platforms, potential customers are more likely to choose a competitor they have become more familiar with over you instead.

measure brand awareness so you can stay on top of your brand SEO efforts and make future brand SEO audits easier.

The easiest way to go about it is to use my colleague, Louise’s, Brand Awareness Dashboard template in Looker Studio:

It’s already hooked up to all our main tools via the API and makes it easy to create a live, auto-updating dashboard of the key organic brand metrics you care about, like:

• Branded traffic over time
• Share of Voice for branded keywords
• Top pages and how they’re contributing to branded traffic
• Branded keyword performance (volume, CPC, ranking)
• The location and quality of branded backlinks
• New/lost branded backlinks
• Branded SERP feature ownership

If you want to be updated on new links and brand mentions more frequently, you can also set up mention alerts that go straight to your inbox:

Final thoughts

As AI reshapes how people find and trust information, brand SEO is no longer optional; it’s foundational.

The sooner you invest in building a clear, consistent, and credible brand across all search surfaces, the more defensible your visibility becomes. It’s not just about showing up anymore. It’s about showing up with authority, accuracy, and credibility.

Start now, and future-proof your brand for the future of AI-powered search.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn anytime, or check out our growing portfolio of posts about improving your brand’s visibility in search and LLM responses.

Further reading