SEOs want the brand budget. But should they get it?
16th May, 2025
SEOs are realising that visibility in search isn’t just earned through keywords and links, but through recognition and reputation – through brand.
And that realisation creates a new kind of tension.
If brand drives SEO, should SEO teams take a seat at the branding table? Should budgets shift? Should we stop talking about brand and SEO as separate things, and start treating them as part of the same machine?
Or do we risk breaking something valuable in the process?
The cold, hard truth is that you can’t optimise your way to fame. You need fans. And that starts with brand.
The best-performing SEO strategies today aren’t just about technical audits or content strategies. They’re backed by brand. The kind that people recognise, prefer, and seek out.
Brand drives SEO
Google rewards signals it can measure. And brand shows up everywhere. People search for your name. They click more when they know you. They link to your stuff when they trust you. They stay longer, bounce less, and convert better. All of which are signals that push you up the rankings.
This is entity-based SEO in action. Google is no longer just matching keywords to pages; it’s mapping relationships between concepts, businesses, people, and the world around them. And brand is the connective tissue.
Brand recognition shapes search behaviour – from predictive autocomplete to navigational queries. It influences how people interact with the SERP, and how likely they are to choose you over the competition.
Google doesn’t just index your pages - it indexes your reputation.
The smarter SEOs get, the more they see this pattern. And the more they see the real influence on performance isn’t just on-page tweaks or backlink counts – it’s salience, trust, and preference.
TV ads don’t just sell soap – they make people Google you. And those signals stick.
So what happens when SEOs realise that brand is the secret weapon?
They start looking at the brand team’s budget.
A bigger slice of the pie
Brand teams traditionally control the big spend: media buys, sponsorships, TV, radio, influencer campaigns. And it’s tempting for SEO teams – often underfunded and expected to deliver magic with duct tape – to want a piece of that action.
The logic goes: if brand campaigns drive awareness, and awareness drives search, and search drives revenue, then SEO should have more say in how that brand money gets spent.
But here’s the twist: what if SEOs actually got the brand budget?
Would we spend it on schema markup, sitemaps, and scalable content workflows? Possibly. But more worryingly, would we try to do brand work – without the creative instincts, consumer insight, or emotional intelligence it demands?
This isn’t just a misallocation problem. It’s an opportunity cost. Every pound we pull away from meaningful, awareness-driving brand activity and put into the SEO pot risks weakening the very salience and preference that good SEO performance increasingly relies on.
Would we end up killing the magic that made the brand powerful in the first place?
Brand is messy. That’s the point.
Branding works because it’s not optimised for algorithms. It’s emotional. It’s creative. It’s vague and hard to measure.
That celebrity endorsement? It might not convert directly. But it sparks a feeling. That feeling drives a search. That search leads to a click. That click turns into a signal. And that is what SEO needs.
We risk trading Superbowl spots for sitemaps – and nobody Googles a brand they’ve never heard of.
What SEO Can Learn from Brand
There’s a rich opportunity here for SEOs to level up – not by taking over brand, but by learning from it.
Brand marketers think in stories, not just statements. They design for memorability, not just metadata. They craft emotion, experience, and identity.
Good SEO answers questions. Great SEO tells stories people remember.
If SEO wants to truly influence performance at scale, it needs to step beyond mechanics and into meaning.
So what do we do instead?
Rather than trying to take the brand budget, SEOs should be looking to align.
What if brand and SEO teams shared goals? Shared briefs? Shared narratives?
- Let brand campaigns inform SEO strategies
- Let SEO insights shape brand messaging
- Bake organic amplification into the campaign plan from day one
- Build shared editorial calendars
- Sync regularly to align on consumer trends and behaviours
- Use brand tracking data to optimise SEO tone and positioning
Imagine a world where brand campaigns were built to be searched for.
This is the maturity moment for SEO. Not to grab power. But to collaborate.
The goal isn’t to out-brand the brand team – it’s to make sure our stories show up everywhere, including search.
Maybe it’s not about getting a bigger slice of the pie. Maybe it’s about baking a better one, together.
If you’re a CMO…
This is your cue to stop funding silos. To stop pitting brand against performance. To look for where the real magic happens: in the overlap.
The next generation of marketing leaders won’t just optimise – they’ll orchestrate.
They’ll build teams who speak both brand and search. Who understand emotional resonance and technical nuance. Who can sit across departments, connect objectives, and ensure that everything – every ad, every article, every answer – reinforces a consistent, cohesive experience.
Orchestration means more than alignment. It means integration. It means building campaigns where the media buy, the messaging, the landing page and the search snippet all sing in harmony.
That’s the future. And the brands that get there first will win.
