“Build a brand” has become one of the most repeated phrases in SEO over the past year. It is offered as both diagnosis and cure. If traffic is declining, build a brand. If large language models are not citing you, build a brand. If organic performance is unstable, build a brand.
The problem is not that this advice is wrong. The problem is that it is incomplete, and for many SEOs, it is not actionable.
A large proportion of people working in SEO today have developed in an environment that rewarded channel depth rather than marketing breadth. They…
