The surprising SEO benefits of winning an award

It’s no secret that winning an award can be a brilliant boost for your business, but what you may not realise is that it can also bring some pretty impressive SEO benefits too. With search engines now the dominant tool for researching potential service or product providers, your brand reputation and online visibility has never been more important.  

To succeed against hundreds or maybe thousands of competitors online, your brand needs to build authority, credibility and recognition. Winning a business award brings these benefits organically, and can be used to improve your SEO strategically.  

EEAT up the organic SEO benefits 

Whatever targeted SEO you might be doing, there are lots of organic signals that influence your search rankings too. From an SEO, GEO (generative engine optimisation) and customer perspective, demonstrating your EEAT – experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness – is a powerful tool.  

While proudly showing off your awards on your own website, you’ll also be gaining credibility from wider sources, such as the awarding body’s website, media mentions and shout-outs on social platforms. Google gobbles this stuff up, so use your web content to highlight your depth of experience and expertise too, reinforcing the signals already pointing towards you. Back this up with case studies and testimonials, and you’ll soon see a serving of some lovely SEO gains.  

Backlinks and PR 

Buying backlinks is (thankfully) a thing of the distant past but if they’re earned, that’s a different story. In much the same way that the types of citations mentioned above can improve your SEO, backlinks from high authority domains will, in turn, improve your own site’s authority.  

While a lot of this work will be done for you, you can also exercise some digital PR skills to encourage more mentions and links. Reach out to industry websites, thought-leaders and local online publications, and offer to provide an interview, guest blog post or a free product for testing… be creative. 

Keyword targeting  

Another SEO benefit from winning an award is the opportunity to introduce targeted keywords into your strategy. You can now optimise your web content, whitepapers, blog posts and any online content using terms such as ‘award-winning’ or ‘best [sector] provider in [location]’ with integrity – something that non-award winners can’t rightfully claim.  

This will give AI and traditional search engines more compelling reasons to cite you in results, and show your brand above your competitors. These words also win over human visitors. With growing visibility in the search results, include these keywords in your meta description too and you’ll almost certainly benefit from better click-through rates (CTRs).  

Have you got what it takes to win an award? 

With all these opportunities to improve your online visibility, an award win can be a huge marketing asset for your business. Being cherry-picked by esteemed, independent professionals adds weight to your own claims and substantiates your expertise, creating a sense of trust in your services.  

If you’d like to reap the rewards of an award, we can identify the best options for your business to enter, or help with the entire writing and submission process – so drop us a line if you’d like a chat.  

Not only can our experts elevate your entry and improve your odds of winning an award, but our partner copywriting agency can also help you maximise the SEO benefits once you’ve recovered from the ceremony!