What Can SEOs Learn From Brand Strategy Experts?

Brand strategy and SEO are two sides of the same coin. A strong brand drives higher click-through rates, attracts backlinks, and earns authority in AI-driven search. Meanwhile, SEO builds brand awareness, controls your narrative, and reveals audience insights.

Joining our host David Bain to share how to align both for success was Martin Dyhouse, Jess Tofi and Chris Bullick.

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Transcript

David Bain  

What can SEOs learn from brand strategy experts? Hello, and welcome to the June 2026 edition of the Majestic SEO panel, discussing what SEOs can learn from brand strategy experts. 

I’m your host, David Bain and joining me today are three great guests.

Jess Tofi  

Hi, I’m Jess Tofi, a Brand Strategy Director at Valiant. We’re a B2B branding agency, and I’ve spent about 16 years in branding, and a lot of that time has been working with businesses at real turning points, so be it growth acquisition or private equity backing, and my main focus is obviously positioning and delivering commercial results from that.

David Bain  

Thank you so much for joining us today. Jess, also with us today is Martin.

Martin Dyhouse  

Hi, I’m Martin. I’m currently the Director of Brands for a gaming company. I’ve got a wonderful history of working across multiple sectors and industries, including gaming, banking, financial services, SaaS software, all within a brand and strategic lens throughout the marketing funnel. 

My job is focused a lot on positioning, or strategy, and a bit of execution, but mainly trying to get the business to think in a more brand-orientated way.

David Bain  

Superb, thanks so much for joining us, Martin. And also with us is Chris.

Chris Bullick  

Hi everyone. Thanks, David. So I started my career at Procter & Gamble, where I cut my marketing teeth, and probably a bit unusual in the sense that I’ve kind of had a foot in both camps, both Digital Marketing and SEO, and also Brand Strategy. 

So, briefly after working at P&G, I moved on to be the EMEA Director of Marketing for Motorola. So that was a bit of a jump. In about 2008, I founded two businesses, which had some synergy together, I think. One was Pull Digital, an agency that kind of speaks for itself, and also a US e-commerce business. That was really founded on SEO strategy. I sold out of that business in 2018 and probably about that time pivoted, pulled away from digital, really, and towards what I’d say is kind of my first love, therefore, which is brand, and I’m now a Brand Strategist for Pull London, where we focus 100% on brand development.

David Bain  

Thanks so much for joining us as well, Chris. So, a really knowledgeable panel in terms of brand strategy there. We’ve got an audience that is primarily SEO orientated, but keen to find out more about brands and how to incorporate brand more in terms of what they do on a day-to-day basis. So, if you’re watching this live, please use this as a great opportunity to ask questions, and I can try and incorporate some of those questions as part of today’s live discussion. 

Of course, we’ve got a great listenership in terms of audio podcast, as well, so many people consume this as an audio podcast after it’s being discussed, so that doesn’t necessarily apply to you. But come on board and join us live for the next one if you can, as well. 

In terms of topics, so much we can cover as well. We had some great suggestions from the panel beforehand. Martin, I’d like to start off with you. You said that brand strategists talk about mental availability. What do you actually mean by that, and what does this actually mean for SEOs?

Martin Dyhouse  

So, mental availability is the probability of your brand coming to mind when a customer goes to make a buying decision or part of the buying journey, and it happens before anyone opens a browser or anyone goes downstream of that challenge, and it is built through emotionally resonant exposure over time to things that the brand wants to talk about and deliver. 

From my perspective, SEO really captures people already in a buying moment, which is horrifically kind of invaluable, but it means that SEO is downstream of that brand-building work that has made that search kind of moment happen, and the two have to work together to really kind of maximize the opportunity for the customer.

David Bain  

Okay, Chris, I see you nodding away there, and SEO downstream of the brand-building work, would you agree with that?

Chris Bullick  

Absolutely. First of all, I entirely agree. For those not familiar with the idea of mental availability, I think it was really created by Byron Sharp, who’s probably the world’s greatest branding academic. And if I had one bit of advice to offer any SEO, if they want to get into branding, as it were, it’s by “How Brands Grow” by Byron Sharp, and he, he talks about the key elements of any brand that are required, are really mental and physical availability, so physical distribution, and as Martin has just described, the place the brand occupies in people’s heads before they’ve got the point of thinking about buying it.

There’s another writer I think has done a great job of getting into this, which is James Hurman. I don’t know if you’ve come across him, but he’s one of the founders of Tracksuit who are a brand tracking organization, and he talks about current demand and future demand, which I think a very good way of looking at it. 

Current demand is these are two equally important jobs, and I think that the point about performance marketing, let’s call it, is really about harvesting current demand, whereas the brand manager’s role is really one of cultivating future demand, which requires a more emotional approach, for one thing, as I think Martin alluded to.

David Bain  

I guess many SEOs will feel that they’re cultivating future demand as well as serving current demand. 

One challenge with SEO is there are so many different ways to do SEO, or aspects of SEO, different SEO type roles, and obviously some roles are very much brand sector centric or bottom of funnel centric, where there are the phrase that they’re targeting is likely to be hopefully resulting in some kind of call to action straight away, but you’ve got your long tail, maybe future-orientated keyword phrases and content that is bringing people to the website who hasn’t actively considered that brand or doesn’t even know who that brand is.

So Jess, should the SEO be working hand in hand with a brand strategist in order to actually tailor that early consideration phase towards the target consumer?

Jess Tofi  

Yeah that’s really interestingly, actually. So we do a lot of upfront work in insight building and SEO keyword stacking to find out what’s really driving traffic to sites, and this forms part of our big 360 insight at the start of a project. 

So, what I’m encouraging more and more now is SEO experts coming in a little bit earlier in the journey, because it often used to be that brand positioning was done, and it’s kind of then piled off onto an SEO expert agency to kind of work out what to do with it and how to make that actually work in the digital world, whereas now we’re starting to kind of build it more upstream that we’re looking at those keywords and really understanding who we need to get driving to the website, and what are our key audiences of the future? That’s them formulating a really clear messaging framework, which is what we naturally build in brand strategy anyway, to really understand the waterfall messaging that needs to work for different audiences. 

So it is really key to look at it more upstream and not as a sort of bolt-on at the end, which is often what has happened in the past.

David Bain  

Okay, interesting. And maybe just staying with you for a second, Jess, how would that initial discussion look in terms of the brand strategist and SEO getting together? What needs to be covered from both sides, and to ensure the best possible outcome, really, for the long term?

Jess Tofi  

From a brand strategy perspective, we are looking at that three-to-five-year vision, really. However, we need to directly impact a brand from launch. If we’re talking about a repositioning, then we need to see metrics building and I think that’s part of the challenge, really, in that we are formulating sort of short-term tactics as well as long-term vision building. 

One of the things that we’re starting to do is look at what our differentiation point is within the market, how we’re really driving that rather than following in behind the market. A lot of the challenges sometimes with SEO is that we’re building keywords that are ultimately just driving traffic to a particular type of business or particular type of market. 

What we’re looking at is really creating hierarchies of messaging, so at the top of that funnel it’s things that are unique that are standing out that are positioning led versus things that are more kind of important but hygiene, so things that are naturally have got to be part of the communication structure in order to feature in search, however we’re needing to drive that difference in terms of uniqueness and differentiation in order to make the right people come to the sites and the content that we’re creating.

David Bain  

Chris, we had Jess talking about three-to-five-year timescale in terms of brand strategy, and I think that’s a lot longer than the majority of SEOs would be considering, even though many SEOs are relatively long-term thinkers. What generally is incorporated within that timeframe?

Chris Bullick  

Yeah, I think that’s an interesting question. It makes me think of, again, another approach, the long and short of it. You may have heard of that, I’m sure all of you guys will have. And again, I suppose it speaks to the idea that brand strategy is the long of it. It’s about developing long-term awareness, and it takes time, and it uses tools like emotion. The short of it is more rational. It’s what performance marketing does. It’s the harvesting the current demand that I referred to earlier.

One of the tools we use, whether we’re creating a new brand or developing an existing one, is we develop something called a Brand Blueprint, and you can probably kind of guess what that is, it’s all the foundational elements for the brand, and these should be unchanging elements that don’t move.

We’ve just started a job recently for a client we worked for 10 years ago. The first thing we did was got the blueprint out again, and just as a kind of check, made sure the brand was still on on track in terms of the founding values that are contained with it, and the great benefit of taking that long-term approach is that everything, all the campaigning, and therefore all of the performance marketing, ultimately that is derived from that, should be exactly that, should be derived from the long-term vision for the brand, and the foundational values, the vision, the mission, the brand personality, positioning, all of those things.

David Bain  

Martin, anything you’d like to add to that?

Martin Dyhouse  

No, I think it’s great what everyone has covered. I think when you’re talking about the long and short of it, the most important part of that is the word, and that the two things have to work in combination together. I’m a brand strategist. I love it. I can talk to death about it, and none of my colleagues and friends will agree to that fact, but you kind of need both of them working together, because ultimately, I talk about this kind of thing when I’m talking to people all the time, you know, our brands aren’t important things in people’s lives. We are tiny, tiny parts of people’s lives. We make decision-making, hopefully, a little bit easier. 

When we talk about customer journeys, customers don’t really have journeys. They’re fictional things that we’ve invented to make things in presentations make more sense to us. Actually, that what they do is messy, it’s irrational, it’s all context driven, and it kind of needs those two things, both in terms of someone able to capture demand as well, and being relevant at the buying moment, which is what kind of SEO kind of tries to do at the same time, kind of making sure you’ve got that kind of mental availability that you’ve got those things that are really important to the brand, to Chris’s point on the blueprint, that will kind of endorse you, do have that front of mind availability differentiated in that, in a way that just talks, which is becomes really, really important to help the customer.

David Bain  

What struck me really was the long-term versus the short-term. We talked a little bit about what SEOs can learn from brand strategists, but maybe we can actually talk a little bit about what brand strategies can learn from SEOs, because everyone can learn from everyone, and maybe there are elements, perhaps more short-term performance related, or particularly how to position a brand that brand strategists can learn from SEO. 

I see you nodding away there, Jess. Is there anything in particular that you’ve learned or amended the way that you go about your brand strategy work as a result of discussions with SEOs?

Jess Tofi  

Oh, David, I’m always learning, I think that’s the key to life, really. I think with things ever evolving online as they are, and I know I wasn’t going to try and be the first one to mention LLMs, but the influence of LLMs, and how that’s really changed the format of search, is really impacting how brands need to tonally change, even in sort of the content that we’re producing. 

I think, particularly for me, in terms of SEO learning, it’s really seeing what people are putting in a search or a question. For me, the data and insight around that really feeds a lot into the strategic positioning that we look at upfront. You know, for us, it’s really about getting under the skin of who are we trying to target and talk to how are we connecting with them, and are we doing it consistently enough, and I think there’s a number of pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, if you like, that you have to build at the start of a project like that, and SEO is kind of a fundamental one, really. I see it as quite an important piece, because obviously, we need to be out there, we need to be visible, and we need to be appearing in the right spaces for authority.

That builds a huge picture at the start of a project, both from an external perspective, but we build a lot of insight internally as well, so we’re. Talking internally with employees, as well as externally with potential customers, or and the wider world. So, there’s a lot of 360 insight we build in at the start of a project to ensure that we’ve got the right strategy for the future.

David Bain  

Chris, have you learned anything in particular from an SEO?

Chris Bullick  

Well, I hope so. I’ve worked with them, and I’ve been one, as it were. So, yeah, I think I mean, it’s as I mentioned the outset, I think it’s unusual to work on both sides in that respect. Although, for instance, we in our agency team had very, very good digital marketer, and to, you know, just the point we were talking about, like pre-show, about SEO is maybe pivoting or moving to a different kind of career role.

One of the things she did was the Ritson MBA, which I would generally recommend, and has moved on from, you know, a pure sort of performance marketing role to become a brand strategist. She’s now responsible for a major insurance brand, and I think for her that was the most amazing journey, because of the way she expanded her horizon. 

I think one of the challenges with operating in pure digital or performance marketing is you see this slightly narrow slice of the pie, but, of course, ideally you’re working together in the way we’ve discussed, and Jess alluded to it and made a good point about the need for insights to be informed by SEO data and insights. 

I think one way of looking at the topic of this webinar really is not so much what can SEOs learn from brand strategy, but how can the two parties work together really well. If the people work in the long understand the short of it, and vice versa, those working on current demand understand those which working on future demand, and we start most, most of our brand development projects whenever we can, doing full on quant and call consumer research to gain those insights that Jess was talking about, so SEO is obviously another source of that, that’s that’s really useful. It makes sense to build, build that in I would say.

David Bain  

Martin, you shared before that most brand strategies are built around a specific competitive set of alternatives a customer actually considers, and SEOs tend to optimize against keyword competition. So, why is that? Are they the same thing, and does it really matter?

Martin Dyhouse  

Oh, what a good question. So, I think that they are different things in terms of what people need be optimizing around, or thinking about from, from a brand set. It’s about having a clear positioning in the market, it’s about making sure that whatever blueprint you use, whether it’s values or whether it’s a promise or whether it’s associations, it’s about really getting that clear in the customer’s mind, and then when can you’ve got that intent comes into the SEO perspective, it’s then thinking, well, kind of hopefully you’ve kind of primed the audience already to understand what the category is and what they’re looking for, and therefore kind of make better choices, or even ensure you’ve got the right visibility coming up. 

They basically attack the same problem, but from different ends of it. So, yeah, the brand is assuming almost no knowledge, almost the customer is almost uninformed, and kind of driving kind of those right associations and kind of category information and knowledge, whereas the SEO kind of expert is thinking about, well, how do I respond to that, and how do I capture the demand in a way that actually, hopefully, there’s an informed customer, but what do I do if they’re not informed, and how do I make sure that that works and comes together?

David Bain  

Jess, is there anything you’d like to add there?

Jess Tofi  

I just think it comes back to that long-term and short-term vision, really, and how it all works together. For us, it’s about understanding what a business might need to activate right now, and in order to get the sales in the door. So that’s ultimately the vision, I think.

Really interestingly, there was a study out a couple of years ago that said 92% of B2B buyers already have a brand in mind that they are going to shortlist, and I think that was really a telling point in the way that brand is perceived and brand role plays in search, and but in a purchasing journey is really quite fundamental to that, so they both need each other. 

They need each other in order to win, but ultimately, the brand positioning is about who you are, how you’re different, you know, what’s the reason for choosing you, and really SEO, I believe, should support that and kind of re-articulate that to get the right people chosen as part of that audience choice.

Martin Dyhouse  

Just to add to that, what Jess was saying, the biggest challenge is getting on the short list in the first place, because if you’re not there, then it doesn’t matter how much technical SEO expertise there is, then they’re not going to pick you, and therefore it’s that combination, the two working together.

David Bain  

You’re talking about brand positioning there. How does that translate into the language and messaging that you put in front of audiences, and where does search intent fit in?

Jess Tofi  

So that’s one of the biggest parts of any project that we’re doing, because ultimately, we deal here with quite complex and highly technical businesses, be it manufacturing, technical, B2B, so we’ve got almost also quite complex audience profiles, very different kind of needs, requirements, and choices.

I know we’ll come on probably to talk about consistency in a bit, but ultimately from a brand strategist perspective, you’re after that key top message to be landing your proposition very clearly, and then it’s about delivering the waterfall messaging for each of those audiences, and we do have to keep a consistent thread that runs through all of those.

However, the solution that we’re meeting, the challenge that we’re meeting with a solution might be slightly different depending on what audience, so we are having to tailor a brand, if you like, brand proposition, brand story for each individual audience, and make that work through a digital space as well, so we’re building that through thought leadership articles, PRs playing an awful lot of bigger role nowadays in terms of that kind of more authority online, so we’re kind of looking at the trickle down effect, really what we call the waterfall effect of that messaging, and how it really, you know, sings to the right audiences.

David Bain  

Chris, let’s get your perspective on this as well, obviously Jess was talking about delivering messages for different audiences, and from an SEO perspective, that can be quite challenging, because you don’t want to be targeting the same keyword phrase on multiple different pages, you want to create one authoritative source for a particular query, but I guess there are different messages that you wish to target towards different audiences, so if you have multiple audiences, how does that work with SEO?

Chris Bullick  

I might be being a bit heretical here, but I think that’s a lot of heavy lifting to ask an SEO to do. I’m not really sure it’s the role of SEO, I mean, it’s been a while since I’ve been a, say, an SEO practitioner, but the feeling when I developed a couple of things, and why I kind of moved back to brand, as it were, is that, in the end, brand trumps all. The best way to convert is to have a strong brand. 

This is this idea that the short of it, that performance marketing is really harvesting rather than creating, if you like, and it’d be interesting to see if those in the panel agree with me that if you have a really, really strong brand, then SEO becomes less important, I actually believe, so I’ll give an example, and I may be, you know, doing something again truly heretical. 

Here, we haven’t really fundamentally search optimized our website pool, but we perform really well in organic search. Now I’m not saying that we’ve done no SEO. All the metadata is in good shape and in a good place, and reflects the content of the site, but the real reason the site performs well is not because of the optimisation. It’s because we’ve got 10 years of valuable content in there. We have a large number of articles, we have research papers, we’ve got white papers, they’re all downloadable, and you know, there’s this point where I feel I found a long time ago, I still feel I may be out of touch now, that the SEO is kind of housekeeping, you have to make sure that stuff is available to the search engines, that nothing is in its way, but it’s the content itself and that the long-term brand positioning strategies, which actually deliver results again in the long term.

David Bain  

You could argue that maybe three or four years ago, Google was getting quite clever in terms of knowing what you really meant to do with your website and delivering what it thought was the right thing to deliver to users, but over the last two or three years or so, we’ve had AI search engines become a lot more popular, and they’re a little bit more simplistic in their approach, and surely SEO is becoming more important, and technical SEO, done correctly, is becoming more important in the age of AI search.

I know this is potentially a little bit of a technical question, but it also relates to the way that brands work with SEO there as well. Jess, I’m going to pick on you for this one, because you were nodding away there as well. What would you like to add to that?

Jess Tofi  

I mean, I would agree with you, David. I do think SEO is going to play quite a fundamental role in that LLM search. I think so. We’ve done a lot of optimizing on our own website, and a lot of our incoming traffic is through ChatGPT, so a lot of businesses are searching that way now, and it’s really interesting.

There’s a lot of parts to that, technically, and I think that we probably won’t go into in this call, but in terms of the mix of SEO, you know, authority critical sort of delivery of information, be it articles, thought leadership, PR, etc. all the backlinks, etc. etc. are all forming quite a key crescendo, really, for everything to be working together really hard to prove that that brand is the right brand for somebody.

So I think I think the role is slightly morphing, but I think it is, it is critical now for brands to be seen digitally online, specifically for LLM search. So, I do think SEO plays a key role in that.

David Bain  

Martin, where does AI fit with brand strategy?

Martin Dyhouse  

I mean, that’s an open-ended question, kind of right there. I think I always think about AI in kind of three fields, or three kinds of areas. 

One is, what are you doing internally in the business itself to activate AI, and I mean that can mean so many things as part of your product, your service offering, in terms of how you solve customer problems, and what that looks like. 

The second bit is in terms of actually, how are you using it internally as a tool to solve and accelerate processes and augment existing processes to what you’re doing better, but for internal staff, whether that’s asking it to help write copy, whether it’s to look at reports, whether it’s to do keyword analysis, is actually kind of using that tool.

Then the third bit is thinking about where in that customer journey are LLMs popping up as an influence and as a route to actually kind of people finding your brand, and that’s how I categorize it across the board for AI.

David Bain  

Chris, obviously you’ve worked in SEO before as well, and you’ll be aware that SEOs love certain metrics. What metrics that work specifically in brand strategy should SEOs be aware of? You know, how do brand strategies measure brand health over time?

Chris Bullick  

I think there are two specific sets of different metrics, and in the same way we talked about the two sides, as it were, strategy and SEO working together, I think it’s really important that both have a reasonable working understanding of what metrics the other party is using.

From a brand perspective, or from brand strategist perspective, we’re talking about higher level metrics. I mean, the obvious one is market share, brand awareness, brand consideration, brand attributes, maybe to a lesser extent. 

My rule of thumb is any brand that’s over about 100 million, and that’s kind of a sweet spot for us in terms of size and turnover, should start doing brand tracking, external brand tracking, which they can get from, say, an outfit like Tracksuit, and other brands are available, and what they’ll do is they’ll measure those important things on a monthly basis.

I think what’s important about them is that they are more sort of leading indicators, in the sense they don’t change rapidly, they don’t change depending on your immediate performance, marketing, media spend, or whatever, so therefore they, you know, they give you a visibility of how well your brand is likely to perform over the coming months, and that makes them very different to the metrics that you know, CPA and things like that, that the performance market has been used, but again, it’s really important for the brand strategist to understand those metrics, how they work and what the implications of they are.

David Bain  

What really impacts these brand metrics, and can SEO have a significant impact on these metrics?

Chris Bullick  

Well, my simple answer to that is no, not really, because it’s short-term versus long, so the ones I’ve identified as strategic or brand metrics change, only, over the long period, and things like awareness don’t change very rapidly at all. The bigger the brand, the less quickly they change. 

That’s not to say that in the long run, the cumulative effects of all the short-term activities don’t also impact your long-term brand performance, so again it’s that understanding of the linking and the gearing of the two, but I think typically I think it’s fair to say you couldn’t expect the performance metric type of the work that influences that to have an immediate big term impact on the brand, because it’s like, like a big ship, all you’re doing is throwing hooks over the side, you’re not changing the direction of the ship.

David Bain  

We’ll carry on that discussion point, but just taking SEO away, what has the biggest impact on the metrics that you use to measure brand success?

Chris Bullick  

Well, if the things like brand awareness, then it’s typically the big scale above the line advertising that takes place for a brand, and the bigger the brand is, the bigger the media budget, and the bigger the effect you’re going to have.

David Bain  

Jess, what are your thoughts on the impact that SEO can have on brand?

Jess Tofi  

I think it’s quite significant in terms of relevance, reach, and traffic driving. Over quite a few years, we have built it into how we work, basically, to prove that we’re not just the fluffy people that do the fluffy marketing stuff, and so value realization is something that we embed in our process anyway. 

We measure before we start a project, as well as six months in, and then 12 months in, so that we can really see what impact the brand positioning and work has done. I think crucially to that, it’s a range of kind of core KPIs, really. 

Brand perception is one of the biggest ones. Are we also tracking on the right keywords based on the new positioning, because often what’s happening is that we’re seeing a lot of keywords being featured, but they don’t really fit the future positioning of the business, so therefore we need to divert away from that. We might be scoring really well on something that we don’t actually want to track for, so we’ll be looking at how that kind of influences and changes over time, I think, as well. 

Another one, which is really key, is to understand in search terms the brand ranking, is that growing in ratio versus organic search? You know, are we kind of featuring as a branded offer rather than just an IT services company? So, I think those sorts of things are the sort of things we will measure along the route to kind of see how we’re improving those with the new positioning and the new messaging and new content.

David Bain  

Let’s go back to Martin, maybe for the next question, and that relates to touch points and consistency over time, and brand strategists probably obsess a lot more about consistency over touch points, so Martin, what can SEOs learn about that, and maybe what can SEOs improve about the things that they do in order to ensure greater consistency between different areas of focus that they happen to have?

Martin Dyhouse  

It’s about those internal conversations, and being really clear about what it is to be consistent about and it’s that internal alignment to ensure that they have a really clear idea of brand strategy, but it’s also the job to communicate it with everyone, not just the SEO experts. It’s everyone throughout the customer journey chain, and it’s being really clear about actually what it means to be consistent from an SEO perspective, whether that’s from a branded word perspective, whether it’s looking at content, looking at keywords, what does that mean over time? 

I think you can respond very, very quickly to the market and what kind of search engines want you to optimize for, right, and those keywords versus understanding what the customer behavior is, and what they’re looking at around, and it’s that alignment to understand that over a longer term period. 

Actually, are you just responding to kind of immediacy about what’s happening right now, or actually you building up over time to something that actually allows consistency, and that longer term execution of kind of what the brand’s trying to do and understand for and mean.

David Bain  

Chris, what are your thoughts on consistency across touch-points and what SEOs can learn from brand strategists?

Chris Bullick  

Yeah, well, as Martin says, I think this is an interesting one. I think I look back on debates that we we’ve had in the past about optimizing our own our own business website, and this is where I think the conflict can arise, because you know the SEO will be promoting the idea of using converting terms, and you know the person who’s the brand is dearest at heart, the brand strategist, whoever it is, the brand manager will be wanting to be absolutely true and consistent to the brand, but the question is, then you know who wins, as it were. 

You can probably guess already where I be coming down the side of that consistency to the brand is is the most important thing to do, and I would sacrifice overuse of converting terms versus consistency, and sticking with the hierarchy of messaging that Jess has referred to, the consistency of messaging that Martin has referred to, that needs to be core to, you know, the truth of that brand, and promoting it, and so I think that, you know, a bit of horse trading and negotiating sometimes has to take place. 

I would always want, expect, and ask an SEO to be as consistent and true to the brand as possible.

David Bain  

Martin. You said beforehand that brand positioning is fundamentally about saying no, choosing what you’re not for, and that kind of relates to that as well. But what happens if a significant percentage, a significant majority of your target audience, wish to communicate using terminology that doesn’t reflect what you want to position yourselves as a brand?

Martin Dyhouse  

Ultimately, SEO has a slightly different incentive towards the brand manager, and I think that constraint is something that has to be made up front, and that has to be kind of aligned and agreed upon from that approach, in terms of it’s definitely a positioning decision and positioning kind of discussion that you have to make trade-offs.

Or if you’re from a brand perspective, if you’re positioning against something or saying no to certain things, and you’re saying yes to those things, and it’s about leaning into harder into those things, and they’re the consequences of those, might be commercial, it might be a drop in conversion, it might be kind of losing kind of some element of those in market right at that moment in time, and but that’s a trade off that I think holistically you have to make from a business perspective and for a long term brand perspective, rather than either treating it case by case or kind of kind of in the moment.

Chris Bullick  

I totally agree with that, and I think that one of the important jobs any brand’s website should do is a kind of qualifying of the buyer, and if you’ve, you know, used got given in his temptation of using highly converting key phrases that bring people to the website and turn them into an inquiry, and I bet Jess sees this in B2B, you’re not going to get the right quality of inquiries, so I think that’s another reason to be for this consistency to run through from being true to the brand on the page and also off it.

Martin Dyhouse  

Just to add to that, in that moment you are kind of choosing your customer and you’re kind of choosing your future, and if you’re always being after those that are instantly in market and instantly kind of available now, depending on your product and your business, and kind of what you go to, you might not be getting the quality of cohort and the quality of customers that you want for the long term. So that’s an important trade-off discussion that you have to have within the business.

Chris Bullick  

It’s worth mentioning, probably, that the Long and Short of it from Binet and Field always, I think they, they quote only 5% of people being in-market, and that’s going to vary according to whatever category you’re in, whether it’s B2C or B2B, but it’s, it’s really important element to look out for here, because it means that most of the time you’re addressing people that aren’t in the market and that has to be more in mind the whole time, I think.

David Bain  

And how often should you be reconsidering your brand positioning, if at all? Because the market changes, people are looking for changes.

Chris Bullick  

We have a kind of a running joke in the business about using the term repositioning or rebranding, which I kind of resist, and my argument is by the time if you get to the position where you’re talking openly, even in your own business, about repositioning or rebranding, you’ve left your ongoing brand development and bringing your brand up to date, modernizing it, which all brands have to do all the time. 

I always talk about progression. If you don’t progress your brand, you end up having to reposition it or rebrand or something even more drastic, and that means you kind of got lost. Look at the Jaguar scenario. There’s a huge debate about how effective their marketing was. Not to get into that, the really important thing about Jaguar is that they ran out of product, basically, and they were forced into a rebrand, so now they’ve thrown all the cards they had over the shoulder, and they’ve created one new one, and the entire feature of the brand will be staked on that one item, because they failed to progress the brand like someone like Porsche did.

David Bain  

Jess, should rebranding ever be proactive?

Jess Tofi  

Yeah. We deal with a lot of businesses that have grown beyond what their existing positioning is. So, what we’re often doing is looking at the stretch and the repositioning of them in that essence, because essentially their services, or what they offer, has grown beyond what their existing brand is currently saying.

Typically we work with predominantly PE-backed or brands hoping to be acquired, etc. within like a three to five year period, so they need some quite significant growth turnaround, and equally, brand plays quite a key role in that, in terms of positioning them in the mindset of the of their customers, and also delivering on growth, so yeah, it’s quite fundamental to quite a lot of businesses out there at the moment who are kind of shaping around what the future looks like and and what we need to do for customers of tomorrow.

David Bain  

Let’s finish off today’s discussion by asking each of our panelists, what’s the biggest mistake that they see SEOs making when it comes to brand, and then just reminding everyone who our panelists are and where indeed they are from. 

Martin, let’s start off with you? What would you say is the biggest mistake that SEOs are making with regards to brand?

Martin Dyhouse  

I think it’s more working in isolation. I mean, it’s my point back before it’s that internal alignment, it’s thinking of it as a separate part of the customer journey, and it’s kind of in that moment kind of helping that acquisition tunnel. 

So, it for me it really is that kind of alignment internally, it’s about ensuring that even though you might not have a massive impact on how the brand strategy comes to life, actually you do as part of that customer journey, and that’s really important, because I think it helps to kind of end to end make sure that that works come together as part of holistic kind of kind of journey for the customer.

David Bain  

Lovely, Martin. And please remind the listener who you are and where they can find you.

Martin Dyhouse  

Martin Dyhouse, I’m all over LinkedIn. Yeah, brand strategies, forever learner. There’s always more to learn and more to do.

David Bain  

Thank you so much, Chris. What is the biggest mistake that an SEO could make in relation to brand?

Chris Bullick  

I think it’s a question of perspective that we’ve already touched on several times, and maybe underestimating this thing that I’ve pushed about brand trumping all, and a stronger brand has a much lower CPA (Cost Per Aquisition). 

I’ve worked many times with people in full performance marketing, they kind of know that, and they see it in the data every day, but they also sort of forget, so I think that’s the most, that’s the most important thing that they must remember.

David Bain  

That’s a great point. Yeah, I mean, it can be demonstrated in Google search results. If someone types in a generic keyword phrase and they see a brand that they recognize, they’re much more likely to click through, and that’s the door CPA for you.

Chris Bullick  

Exactly, exactly.

David Bain  

And where can the listener find out more about you, Chris?

Chris Bullick  

So, again, obviously, you can find me on LinkedIn too. I am Director of Brand Strategy at Pull London.

David Bain  

Thank you so much for joining. And, Jess, what’s your thoughts on one thing that SEOs do particularly badly when it comes to brand?

Jess Tofi  

I think it’s probably wrong to call it badly, but I think ultimately it’s looking at the bigger long-term picture, and I know we’ve touched on that a lot today, but I think thinking of when a brand positioning gets landed on them and they find it irritating, they’ve got to certainly make something work with that. 

I think it’s looking at the long-term vision of a brand and the influence that it can have. I don’t think that’s a problem per se, but I think it’s something to consider in order to view the sort of impact that you can have on a long-term future of a brand, which is really important as well.

I’m Jess Tofi, and I’m Brand Strategy Director at Valiant, and we’re based in Farnham.

David Bain  

Wonderful, I’ve been your host, David Bain, and you’ve been listening to the Majestic SEO Panel. 

If you want to join us live next time, sign up at majestic.com/webinars, and of course, check out SEOin2026.com.

Thanks so much for joining us this time. Bye bye for now.

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