Addressing The B2B Trust Deficit: How To Win Buyers In 2026 via @sejournal, @alexanderkesler

We have entered a new buyer era, one defined not by hesitation, but by a fundamental trust deficit in vendor promises.

Buyers are almost twice as likely to do business with vendors they trust; yet many have not established that trust before the crucial moment when shortlists are formed. 85% of buyers choose from their day one shortlist, with 90% having prior experience with at least one of the vendors they considered.

In short, if trust is not established early, you become invisible.

This shift demands a buyer-led approach that prioritizes enablement over lead generation and emphasizes consultative selling and outreach to demonstrate a genuine responsiveness to buyer needs.

In this article, I share a practical blueprint for embedding trust into your go-to-market (GTM) strategy using a layered trust framework as well as actionable tactics to build buyer confidence across every stage of the journey.

Buyer Behavior Has Shifted From Due Diligence To Instant Validation

What we recognize as traditional buyer behavior is centered on extended validation cycles and comprehensive reference checks. While still complex, buying journeys begin invisibly in the dark funnel, and are guided by AI to enable faster decisions.

B2B buyers spend nearly three-quarters of their buying journey researching anonymously before ever contacting a vendor, consuming up to 15 pieces of content before making a purchase decision, much of which resides outside an organization’s direct control.

This is due, in part, to buyers no longer tolerating generic, sales-led conversations. They seek experiences that address their specific challenges and provide personalized guidance through their research process.

The pressure intensifies when evaluating AI-driven solutions. Buyers must distinguish between genuine capability and marketing hype while navigating rapid technological evolution.

This may account for why 78% of buyers select products they had heard of before starting their research; for enterprise buyers, this rises to 86%. Brand awareness and preference carry a premium.

Recognition translates to consideration, consideration to evaluation, evaluation to selection.

Vendor Promises Face A Crisis Of Confidence

A significant trust gap has emerged between vendor promises and buyer confidence. Buyers express deep skepticism about return on investment (ROI) projections, business case assumptions, and sales engagement authenticity.

Only 45% of sellers claim they have fully mastered their client’s pain points and challenges. When salespeople lack confidence in their own value propositions, buyers notice.

This gap manifests in extended decision cycles and increased scrutiny of vendor claims. Buyers seek validation through multiple channels before committing to expensive, high-stakes purchases that affect their professional trajectory.

Where Buyers Place Their Trust

In North America, B2B business buyers rank competence (30%), dependability (19%), and consistency (17%), as the most important trust levers across industries, purchase contexts, and buyer roles.

Data on where buyers place their trust vary, yet all have one point of commonality; they do not include vendors as trusted sources of information:

• 59% trust consultants and subject matter experts.
• 68% trust referrals.
• 71% trust third-party opinions.
• 82% trust coworkers and internal management.

Vendors cannot control all these channels directly, but they can create strategies to influence their brand presence and reputation, and tailor how they appear in the invisible, AI-driven buying journey.

What This Means For B2B Marketers

Placement on the day one shortlist requires systematic signaling of credibility.

The opportunity lies in closing the trust gap early through content, clarity, and demonstrated value before buyers raise their hand or appear in your client relationship management (CRM) platform. This requires leaning into risk management and brand awareness strategies to establish presence in this invisible discovery process.

Organizations that enable discovery and build confidence outpace competitors who wait for inbound interest.

Building Trust Through Comprehensive Trust Architecture

Effective trust architecture addresses buyer needs across three essential layers:

• Technical trust.
• Peer trust.
• Continuous value.

Technical Trust: Integration Compatibility And Compliance

Technical trust addresses fundamental questions about implementation feasibility, security standards, and operational compatibility.

Buyers need confidence that solutions integrate with existing systems without creating technical debt or security vulnerabilities.

Embed technical trust into your trust architecture by:

• Deploying comprehensive documentation, implementation guides, and self-service tools that allow technical evaluators to assess compatibility independently.
• Providing clear information about security certifications, compliance frameworks, and data governance.

Technical stakeholders prioritize clarity, accuracy, and proven results over promotional language.

Peer Trust: Validated Success From Similar Organizations

Peer trust emerges from evidence that similar organizations have achieved measurable outcomes using your solution.

Embed peer trust into your trust architecture by:

• Facilitating access to case studies, benchmark data, and social proof that speaks to specific use cases and vertical nuances.
• Aggregating data that demonstrates typical implementation timelines, adoption curves, and outcome ranges, providing buyers with realistic expectations.
• Enabling direct conversations between prospects and existing clients when appropriate.

Peer validation carries more weight than vendor claims.

Continuous Value: Ongoing Innovation And Client Success Engagement

Continuous value demonstrates commitment beyond the initial sale.

Buyers evaluate whether vendors invest in product evolution, maintain responsive support structures, and enable ongoing optimization.

Embed continuous value into your trust architecture by:

• Establishing proactive communication cadences that surface relevant product updates, industry insights, and optimization opportunities.
• Demonstrating commitment through transparent product roadmaps, user communities, and accessible client success resources (e.g., success stories, implementation guides, templates).

Trust Enablers Across The Buying Journey

Your trust architecture requires consistent deployment of these enablers:

• Show up before the search begins: Brand awareness campaigns, thought leadership content, and industry participation establish recognition before buyers enter active evaluation.
• Deliver context-aware content that reflects specific use cases and vertical nuances: Generic positioning undermines credibility with buyers who need solutions tailored to their unique challenges.
• Shift GTM strategy from generating leads to creating confidence: Prioritize buyer enablement over lead generation metrics. Success is measured by influence on buyer decisions, not form completions.
• Create brand memory links that make your organization unforgettable before the first sales conversation: Distinctive points of view, valuable frameworks, and consistent presence build lasting recall.

How To Create A Systematic Trust Blueprint

A trust architecture defines the layers of buyer confidence.

A trust blueprint puts this into action, providing a scalable system to embed trust across the entire buying journey.

Together, they form a unified strategy: the architecture sets the vision, and the blueprint makes it real, enabling trust where it matters most.

Below is a structured approach to establishing credibility at scale:

1. Create A Unified Trust Document

A centralized trust summary consolidates critical information buyers need to evaluate your solution. This document should address:

• Security architecture and compliance certifications: Provide clear explanations of data handling practices, encryption standards, and regulatory adherence. Include industry-specific compliance (e.g., SOC 2, ISO, GDPR).
• Implementation framework and integration approach: Detail typical implementation timelines, resource requirements, and technical prerequisites. Address common integration scenarios with specificity.
• Proof of outcomes with quantified results: Present aggregate performance data across your client base. Include distribution curves showing typical, strong, and exceptional results rather than highlighting only best-case scenarios.
• Support structure and escalation paths: Explain how clients access assistance, typical response times, and how critical issues are prioritized and resolved.

Make this document easily accessible and ungated. When buyers can open, read, and share it freely, they circulate it across teams to build internal consensus. Every barrier to access slows that process and reduces momentum toward a deal.

2. Build An Enablement Resources Hub

Each individual member of a buying group evaluates solutions through their functional lens. Develop enablement resources tailored to common stakeholder roles:

• For technical evaluators: Provide API documentation, integration specifications, security architecture diagrams, and performance benchmarks.
• For financial stakeholders: Create Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) models, ROI frameworks, and payback period calculators grounded in realistic assumptions. Finance leaders scrutinize economic models.
• For operational leaders: Demonstrate implementation approaches, change management frameworks, and adoption acceleration strategies.
• For executive stakeholders: Synthesize strategic alignment, risk mitigation, and competitive positioning.

3. Design Consensus-Building Tools

Facilitate internal consensus rather than requiring target buying group champions to build it independently.

• Provide comparison frameworks that help buying groups evaluate alternatives systematically. These frameworks should acknowledge strengths and limitations across solution categories, not just promote your offering.
• Create decision criteria worksheets that guide stakeholders through solution requirements. When buyers use your frameworks to structure their evaluation, you shape the decision criteria.
• Develop internal presentation templates that champions can customize for stakeholder conversations. Reduce the effort required to socialize solutions internally.

4. Provide Progressive Validation Mechanisms

Enable buyers to validate claims incrementally throughout the evaluation process.

• Offer technical proof of concepts (POCs) with clear success criteria defined collaboratively. POCs that demonstrate specific capabilities under realistic conditions build confidence more effectively than broad demonstrations.
• Provide access to existing client references who match the prospect’s profile. Facilitated peer conversations accelerate trust development.
• Share transparent product roadmaps that acknowledge current limitations alongside planned enhancements. Honesty about product gaps builds trust more than overstating current capabilities.

5. Ensure Explainable AI And Decision Transparency

For AI-driven solutions, explainability is not optional. In the E.U., the AI Act already establishes requirements for explainability mechanisms that make decision criteria transparent, with implementation phases beginning in September 2026.

• Document how AI models make decisions, what data they use, and how accuracy is validated. Provide transparency about training data principles, model limitations, and ongoing performance monitoring.
• Build dedicated trust centers that consolidate information about AI systems, security practices, and compliance adherence. Make these resources accessible to all stakeholders without requiring sales engagement.

Organizations leading in the AI buying era recognize that trust is increasingly a transparent product feature, not just a sales promise.

Fast-Tracking Trust Across The Buying Journey

Embedding trust across your GTM strategy requires deliberate architectural decisions at each stage of the buying journey.

Dark Funnel Phase: Build Recognition

70% of the B2B buying journey happens in the dark funnel, long before brands are ever contacted or sales conversations begin. Deals are won or lost before providers know they even exist.

Visibility in hidden channels establishes initial awareness and shapes early perceptions. Below are ways to build recognition:

• Deploy thought leadership content that educates buyers about category dynamics, evaluation criteria, and implementation considerations. Content that helps buyers think more clearly about their challenges builds credibility and recall.
• Participate actively in industry communities, forums, and review sites where buyers conduct research. Third-party validation carries more weight than owned content.
• Invest in SEO, GEO/AEO (Generative/Answer Engine Optimization), and content discoverability so buyers encounter your perspective during organic and AI-led research. Being present when buyers search for solutions to their challenges creates initial touchpoints.

Awareness Stage: Confirm Rather Than Convince

When buyers initiate contact at the awareness stage, they have typically completed the dark funnel phase of their research independently and are now seeking confirmation for their initial assumptions.

The goal at this stage is to reinforce, not sell. Buyers are looking for validation that their research aligns with reality and that your solution fits the conclusions they’ve already drawn.

• Replace calls to action focused on convincing with approaches focused on confirming (e.g., “validate,” “confirm fit” over “schedule a demo,” “contact us”).
• Provide additional detail, clarify specific questions, and connect buyers with descriptive resources (e.g., guides, roadmaps, FAQs) rather than launching into standard pitches.

Listen more than present. Understanding where buyers are in their thinking allows for targeted responses that address genuine questions rather than generic positioning.

Consideration Stage: Enable Comparative Evaluation

During consideration, buyers evaluate multiple vendors systematically. They need resources that facilitate comparison across options.

• Provide objective comparison frameworks that help buyers assess alternatives across relevant criteria.
• Acknowledge category tradeoffs honestly. Buyers appreciate transparency about where different solutions excel and where they face limitations.
• Facilitate technical validation through POCs, technical deep dives, and architecture reviews.
• Remove friction from the evaluation process rather than adding sales-imposed hurdles.

Decision Stage: Accelerate Consensus

At the decision stage, buyers must achieve internal consensus across diverse stakeholders. This is where deals most often stall.

• Equip champions with resources they can use to build internal agreement. Provide stakeholder-specific materials, objection-handling frameworks, and implementation guides.
• Offer to facilitate stakeholder conversations when helpful. Executive briefings, technical workshops, and finance discussions that address specific concerns accelerate decisions.
• Address product risks proactively. Deployment risk and concerns about ROI and performance often stall decisions more than functional gaps.

Revenue And Beyond: Demonstrate Continuous Value

Trust does not end at contract signature. 80% of buyers are dissatisfied with the provider they choose at the end of the purchase process. Post-sale, client success-led experience determines renewal, expansion, and referenceability.

• Establish clear success metrics collaboratively during onboarding. Define what success looks like and track progress against those metrics systematically (e.g., product usage rate, NPS score).
• Provide proactive communication about product enhancements, industry developments, and optimization opportunities. Demonstrate ongoing investment in client success.
• Create opportunities for clients to share experiences with prospects. Peer advocacy is the most powerful trust accelerator.

Key Takeaways

• The risk-averse buyer did not disappear, but their trust has been eroded in an environment saturated with unsubstantiated or exaggerated claims.
• Build instant credibility to power your growth engine. Vendors that establish trust systemically earn earlier engagement, faster sales cycles, and stronger margins.
• Demonstrate competence through transparent frameworks, validate claims through peer proof, and maintain trust through continuous value delivery.
• Brand recall, demonstrated proof, and organizational maturity have become the new sales pitch. Enablement outweighs lead generation when buyers control most of their journey before vendor contact.
• Create repeatable trust frameworks that scale with speed and scrutiny. Make trust a GTM feature embedded across every buyer touchpoint, not a post-sale promise delivered inconsistently.

More Resources:

Featured Image: eamesBot/Shutterstock

Moving Beyond E-E-A-T: Branding, Survival And The State Of SEO

Branding has never been more important. Online audiences continue to yearn for connection, and a strong brand identity can bridge the gap.

Katie Morton, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal, sits down with Mordy Oberstein, Founder of Unify Brand Marketing, to discuss why authenticity in branding and online content matters more than ever. They also discuss the need for genuine cross-functional collaboration.

For marketers rethinking how brand identity fits into their strategies, you may find this conversation insightful. It’s filled with practical tips and takeaways from the State of SEO: How to Survive report.

Watch the video or read the full transcript below.

Editor’s note: The following transcript has been edited for clarity, brevity, and adherence to our editorial guidelines.

Katie Morton: Hey, everybody. It’s Katie Morton, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal, and I’m sitting down today with Mordy Oberstein. Mordy, go ahead and introduce yourself.

Mordy Oberstein: I’m Mordy. I’m the founder of Unify Brand Marketing. I work on brand development, fractional marketing, and marketing strategy. But my main focus is brand development and how to integrate that into your actual marketing activities and your actual strategy.

Katie: Which is just becoming so crucial these days, especially with all of the changes we’ve seen over the last few years. Branding: I don’t want to say it’s everything, but it’s definitely up there.

Mordy: Quite the topic in the performance space, suddenly.

Katie: Yeah, I’m going to say more than ever, really.

Mordy: Which is kind of what we’re here to talk about.

Katie: We are also going to talk about branding within the scope of the State of SEO overall.

Branding And The State Of SEO

Katie: Every year, Search Engine Journal puts out a survey about the state of SEO. We ask questions to try and get our finger on the pulse of what people are doing. This year, we did a SWOT analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats,  to see how everybody’s doing and how they’re dealing with it.

The subtitle of this year’s ebook is How to Survive. And I would say, arguably, branding is one of those keys to survival.

Mordy: Yeah. And it keeps popping up. It came up in the survey a bunch of times. One of the questions was, “What are your most improved outcomes?” and 34.8% of people surveyed said brand visibility increased.

They were able to increase their brand visibility in search engines. And you can see it’s become way more of a focus.

One of the comments you pulled was from John Shehata, who’s brilliant. And his quote was: “Double down on experience. It’s the first E in E-E-A-T.”

For those unfamiliar, E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, which are part of Google’s quality rater guidelines. And what John said that really resonated with me was: “Authenticity builds trust, both with users and AI systems.”

That got me thinking about this whole brand conversation. Because you keep hearing brand, brand, brand. You see it in the survey results, John’s talking about it here. But my question is: how do you do that? How do you actually build authenticity?

I agree with John a million percent – you need authenticity. And people are clearly seeing the value in brand all of a sudden, which is great. Super happy about it.

For performance marketers, though, it’s definitely a different way of thinking, a different way of operating. And one of the things SEOs especially need to be conscious of, and maybe push through, is the old verbiage.

Verbiage is a real thing. Carolyn Shelby actually wrote an article on SEJ about this whole SEO vs. GEO and the “words matter” thing. And there were so many stats in the survey about E-E-A-T and building E-E-A-T.

Part of the problem is thinking about it as “E-E-A-T.” Because that’s the context of SEO, the context of trying to deal with an algorithm. But when you’re trying to build authenticity, that’s not really the context you’re working in.

Building real authenticity does translate into building search equity with algorithms. I don’t think they’re different things. But authenticity itself comes from knowing yourself, being in touch with your brand identity, having a very focused brand identity, and having one that’s actually true to yourself.

I was talking to, I think it was a client, maybe a potential client, and I said, “You know, you could do X, you could do Y. Y is not who you are and it won’t work no matter no matter how hard you want to work so do X because X is much more in line with who you are. ”

Authenticity Beyond Acronyms

Mordy: Having the ability to understand who you are and make authentic decisions from there builds authenticity.

So if you’re stuck using old acronyms, thinking about it from an algorithm point of view and not from an actual who are we, how do we showcase ourselves, how do we transmit value to our audience, and you can’t get beyond the acronyms, I think you’re going to have a little bit of a hard time.

Katie: Yeah, Mordy and I were talking about this offline, this concept of the human element, as opposed to the framing SEOs used to go for.

And we’d really like to move the vocabulary forward and away from E-E-A-T. As Mordy said, it’s very algorithm-focused, and that in itself is kind of inauthentic. It’s machine-focused instead of looking at human morals and values, and what makes us human, and what makes us appeal to one another.

And in a previous episode, we talked about those emotional connections: who you really are, and who you’re most gifted to serve. As opposed to just trying to build this concept of E-E-A-T that’s based on these rater guidelines.

Mordy: Sounds like R-A-I-D-E-R. Rater. It’s interesting because that’s what, if you want to put it in marketing terms, we’re really talking about: your ability to resonate.

And you can only resonate when you’re actually your authentic self. Imagine you went out there and did something that wasn’t really in line with who you are. People would pick up on that. It wouldn’t actually resonate.

So to create authenticity, you have to be authentic. And in order to be authentic, you have to know, well, who the heck are we, so that we can actually be ourselves, right?

It sounds easy, but it’s very complicated. Because there are a lot of mitigating factors that come in. You try to pigeonhole things. You want to get your messaging super catchy. There are a lot of things that make it complicated.

But at its core, if you look at it at a micro level, it’s not complicated.

Where it gets complicated is another statistic I wanted to address, your eighth question in the survey. That one was about structural changes within the organization.

And one of the replies was: cross-functional collaboration increased. Thirty-seven point seven percent of respondents said, “We started to focus on cross-functional operations.”

Which is, yay. Yes. Because leaving SEO aside, LLMs, visibility, rankings, performance, etc., that’s just how your organization should function in a healthy way. It’s good, inherently, for your organization to move forward.

But from an SEO/LLM point of view, if you’re not synced up, if you’re siloed, that’s a problem. Coming from a background in enterprise, where everything is very siloed, I can tell you: if you’re siloed, you can’t be consistent.

You can have one team writing one set of content, the LLM picking it up, and another team writing a different set of content, positioning the brand differently.

This is what I really want to get into. Often, teams don’t understand the same brand the same way.

Katie: And yeah, that creates this fractured, disjointed presentation out there in the world. It makes it harder for people to understand what you’re about.

Why Vision And Meaning Matter

Mordy: Those are for people, and in turn, it makes it harder for algorithms, LLMs, and all the machines.

If you’re telling me one thing, and then I ask somebody else on your team about you and they give me a different answer – well, I’m confused. Color me confused. And that’s because it is confusing.

And it happens a lot. More often than you would think. And the reason why it happens, I want to diagnose it, ninety-nine point nine, nine, nine, nine, nine percent of the time, the reason this happens is there’s a lack of confidence and actual vision coming down from up top.

That definition or vision of who we are, what we want to do, who we’re serving, why we’re doing it, what we’re trying to achieve, and why that’s meaningful, that has to be clear.

Because if you’re just telling your team internally, ‘We want to hit this KPI, we need seventy-five percent growth, and we need to achieve X metric,’ that doesn’t get people bought in.

What gets people bought in is knowing you’re trying to do something meaningful. You’re a cohesive group of people, individuals coming together in an organization, working toward one set thing.

People aren’t machines. They need something meaningful to attach to, just like your audience needs something meaningful in order to perceive you, connect with you, and resonate with you.

Fast-Moving SEO & The Need For Real Communication

So, the people who work for you? They’re your audience, too. And if you don’t have something clear, distinct, and meaningful that they can grab onto, you end up fractured situation. One team understands it one way. The head of marketing, another way. The head of social media, another way. The head of SEO, another way. And then, without realizing it, you’re completely siloed.

I think it’s one of the things I’d really like to see more of. I’m glad the survey touched on it, but I’d like to see more conversation around un-siloing your marketing teams. I don’t think that internal comms conversation is happening enough yet. And we need it.

Katie: Absolutely. And I’ll also say another landmine in all of this is how fast everything moves these days.

For example, before we got on here, we were talking about certain points that come up in SEO. Things change so quickly. If something’s untested, different people can have different ideas or opinions about how it works.

So it’s not always just a top-down failure of leadership. Sometimes it’s simply that things are moving so fast. One team thinks one thing, another team thinks another, and they both put out mixed messages before anyone has even realized there’s a disconnect.

SEO and marketing can be as much art as science. Sometimes you need testing to bear things out over time. But in the interim, it’s like the Wild West of opinions. It’s hard to rein that in.

And it’s hard not to put out absolutes before something has been proven one way or another. And even then, it can change.

Mordy: What’s true for one website or brand might not be true for another, depending on their context.

So yeah, it’s hard now. Because you’re right. You hear different things from different places on the outside, you try to assimilate, and one team might latch onto one piece of advice while another acts on something else.

And then you end up with this idea of communication, but really it’s not. Teams say we have a monthly sync; our social team meets with the blog team to have a monthly sync…that’s not actually communicating. I know it feels like it is, but you need something a little bit different than that.

Katie: Yeah, I would say the real fluidity of communication between teams, whether that’s Slack or, you know, some people, [I’m] not a fan of the daily standup, but sometimes that can be helpful depending on the situation.

Mordy: By the way, it’s okay to get onto a daily standup and say, “I’ve got nothing new today.” That’s fine. “Okay, see you tomorrow.”

Katie: Right, right.

Mordy: That’s actually a valuable use of your time.

Final Thoughts

Katie: Yeah. It can be tough at Search Engine Journal, we’re very global. We have people across nearly every time zone. So a daily standup would be nearly impossible to accommodate. But we’re all on Slack all day, every day, and night. So the communication never stops.

Anyway, people need to figure out what works best for their team. But it’s definitely key these days, moving forward in SEO, and how to survive.

Mordy: Oh, and by the way, check out all the stats. I only picked those two, but there are tons more in there. So if you’re wondering, “Is that it?” No, there are a lot more. Those were just the two I harped on.

Katie: So, go to searchenginejournal.com/state-of-seo and you’ll see our latest ebook: State of SEO: How to Survive. Go ahead and click, sign up, and grab that.

And Mordy, what would you like to plug today?

Mordy: unifybrandmarketing.com.

Katie: Yes, book a consult with Mordy.

Alright. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today, Mordy. Always a pleasure.

Mordy: Yeah.

Katie: And we’ll catch you all next time. Bye.

Mordy: Bye.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

How To Measure Brand Marketing Efforts (And Prove Their ROI) via @sejournal, @AlliBerry3

Brand marketing is often the silent driver behind successful digital campaigns.

People are far more likely to read, watch, click, and ultimately buy from a brand they already know and trust. That’s why doing the harder, slower work of building a strong brand pays dividends when it comes to performance marketing efforts like SEO and PPC. We know this intuitively.

But proving the impact of brand marketing is much harder. Unlike SEO rankings or PPC conversions, brand-building results are not always immediately visible, which is why these efforts often get under-credited – or worse, neglected altogether – in favor of easier-to-measure tactics. This is a mistake.

Why Brand Marketing Matters More Than Ever

The irony is that large-scale studies repeatedly show brand-related factors at the forefront of digital visibility.

Semrush’s 2025 ranking factor study found that authority, traffic, and backlink signals – closely tied to brand strength – are still among the most important correlating factors for high search rankings.

Similarly, as AI Overviews and large language model (LLM)-powered search expand, brand strength is proving to be the key to visibility. In its 2025 study, Ahrefs found that branded mentions, branded anchors, and branded search volume are the top three factors correlated with AI Overview presence.

All of these point to one conclusion: Brand marketing is increasingly the engine that drives both human trust and algorithmic preference.

The challenge, however, is demonstrating its impact in a way that stakeholders can understand and value. That’s why it’s critical to learn how to measure your brand marketing efforts using both qualitative and quantitative metrics, tied back to clear key performance indicators (KPIs).

The Situation For Digital Marketing Leaders

Consider the role of an in-house SEO director. Your KPIs might look like this:

• Grow organic traffic by 25% year-over-year.
• Increase lead generation downloads by 40%.
• Drive 20% more sales from organic.

But with Google’s AI Overviews cutting click-through rates by more than 34% and users increasingly turning to LLMs for top-of-funnel research, traditional SEO tactics alone won’t get you there.

Instead, your future success depends on brand strength. Stronger brand signals lead to better visibility in AI-driven search results, higher trust with customers, and greater resilience in an evolving digital landscape. That means, even as an SEO professional, your path forward relies on executing and measuring brand marketing strategy effectively – and proving its business impact.

The good news is that as an SEO professional, you’ve likely already got quite a bit of the data you need. It may just require you to repackage some of your efforts. It may also require you to collaborate more with your fellow digital marketers, particularly those in PR, social media, and PPC, to show brand visibility growth more holistically.

Tying Metrics To The Sales Funnel

When it comes to your brand marketing, there are really four categories of efforts:

• Awareness.
• Consideration.
• Conversion.
• Loyalty & Advocacy.

Ultimately, you are looking to increase your brand strength in every area of the funnel.

You want more people to hear of your brand, which then drives them to search for it to learn more about it.

More brand familiarity and trust should then ultimately lead to more conversions.

And the more customers and followers of the brand you have, the more you would expect to see an increase in loyalty and advocacy.

All of your brand marketing tracking should tie back to one of those four categories. Therefore, the next sections of this article are broken down by stage of the funnel.

Brand Awareness Metrics

Brand awareness metrics help you measure whether your brand is becoming more recognizable in the right contexts. At the top level, awareness is measured by reach and visibility signals: metrics like impressions, social mentions, and share of voice across channels.

On the digital side, you can monitor branded search impressions and clicks in Google Search Console, track direct traffic growth in Google Analytics 4, and use SEO tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to compare your brand’s share of voice against competitors.

These metrics reveal whether people are actively seeking you out and whether brand exposure is translating into traffic.

Equally important are perception-based metrics, which capture how audiences actually recall and recognize your brand.

Brand lift studies and recall surveys ask consumers whether your brand comes to mind within your category – both aided (i.e., Have you heard of [brand]?) and unaided (i.e., What brands come to mind for [category]?). These are especially powerful after large brand campaigns, such as a national TV spot or a major podcast sponsorship, to see if awareness efforts are resonating with the right audience.

Key Awareness Metrics

It is important that you’re measuring both the quantitative signals of awareness (search, traffic, mentions) and the qualitative signals (surveys, brand lift). Together, these provide a complete picture of how visible and memorable your brand really is.

Consideration Metrics

While awareness tells you whether people recognize your brand, consideration metrics show whether they are actively evaluating your brand as a viable option. This stage of the funnel is all about engagement and intent. We’re looking at signals that potential customers are digging deeper, comparing you against competitors, and gathering the information they need to make a decision.

On your website, key metrics include pages per session, time spent on product or service pages, and return visits to your site, which often indicate research and deeper evaluation. Growth in traffic to product-related pages and increases in branded product queries (i.e., “Brand X running shoes”) are also strong signals that awareness is moving into intent.

Beyond on-site behavior, content downloads such as case studies, whitepapers, or product comparison guides show that audiences are engaging with assets that help them evaluate their choices.

Similarly, a rise in third-party product reviews or mentions on industry forums and social media reflects growing consideration and social proof that others are weighing your brand seriously in the buying process.

Key Consideration Metrics

By tracking both behavioral signals on your owned channels (site engagement, return visits, content downloads) and external validation (third-party mentions), you build a clear picture of whether your brand is moving beyond recognition and into active consideration.

Conversion Metrics

Conversion metrics show how effectively brand strength translates into tangible business outcomes. At this stage, the focus shifts from evaluation to action.

We’re looking at whether people are requesting demos, signing up for free trials, or making purchases. Strong branding makes these conversions more likely by building the trust and credibility necessary to reduce friction at the decision point.

On your website, look for form fills, demo requests, trial sign-ups, and completed transactions as clear indicators of conversion. Tracking conversion rates from branded search campaigns in Google Ads or measuring pipeline influenced by brand-related traffic in your customer relationship management (CRM) also provides valuable insight.

Additionally, monitoring add-to-cart and checkout completions in GA4 can highlight how often brand equity is driving purchase intent to completion.

Key Conversion Metrics

Loyalty And Advocacy Metrics

Loyalty and advocacy metrics reveal whether brand strength translates into long-term customer relationships. At this stage, the goal is not just to retain customers but to turn them into advocates who actively promote your brand.

Strong loyalty reduces churn, increases lifetime value, and builds a customer base that supports sustainable growth.

Key metrics here include customer retention rates, repeat purchase behavior, and customer lifetime value (CLV), which quantify how effectively you’re keeping customers over time.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer satisfaction surveys capture how likely customers are to recommend your brand. Monitoring referrals, user-generated content, and social sharing also provides qualitative proof of advocacy.

Review platforms and communities can be another strong signal. Growth in positive product reviews or customers organically defending your brand in forums shows that loyalty has translated into advocacy.

Key Loyalty & Advocacy Metrics

Turning Metrics Into A Compelling Data Story For Stakeholders

The real value of measuring brand marketing comes not just from tracking the right metrics, but from connecting them into a story that stakeholders can understand.

By aligning awareness, consideration, conversion, and loyalty metrics to the sales funnel, you create a framework that shows how brand-building efforts impact the entire customer journey.

A brand dashboard is one of the most effective tools for communicating this story. Tools like Looker Studio or Power BI will allow you to consolidate signals from multiple sources to present a holistic view of brand health.

Rather than overwhelming leadership with granular reports from different platforms, you’re providing them with a clear line of sight from brand activity to revenue impact. It can look something like: Google Search Console for branded queries, GA4 for site engagement, CRM data for conversions, and social listening tools for sentiment and share of voice.

When sharing results, keep in mind that executives often care less about the technical details and more about the outcomes. Frame your reporting around KPIs tied to growth:

• Did brand awareness lift lead to more traffic and higher-quality leads?
• Did stronger consideration metrics translate into more demo requests or trial sign-ups?
• Did higher loyalty scores reduce churn or drive referrals?

By mapping brand marketing metrics to outcomes stakeholders already value – pipeline growth, revenue impact, and customer retention – you position branding not as a “soft” investment, but as a measurable driver of business performance.

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