Commitment to brand experience should reach far past the experience of product hardware and UI. It extends past packaging, websites and great customer service interactions. Brand experience is happening before people see a site or touch a product. The ability for customers to find information on a company and its products is crucial.
From a cognitive behavior perspective, arguably, there is often little difference between physical and virtual behavior. Needs do not change between these realms. In the web environment, the ability for a company to increase its findability in search engines is key to helping users find what they are looking for in order to satisfying those needs.
A good metaphor for the value of a website's SEO happens within physical retail shopping space. We all know that the moment a customer walks into a retail environment, they begin to evaluate brand value. Even if that customer doesn't immediately see the brand that they are looking for or never finds it, there is an experience being recorded. Don Norman, the cognitive scientist, said, "Consciousness comes late, both in evolution and also in the way the brain processes information; many judgments have already been determined before they reach consciousness." Companies have been fighting for strategic shelf real estate for decades because of the understanding that where a product lives in the retail environment affects not only the possibility for a sale but the entire buying experience.
When we translate this knowledge to an online brand experience, it's obvious to see that the search result ranking of a site is crucial in the initial moments of that interaction; not to mention the obvious, if a customer doesn't find your site, usability, interaction design etc. are irrelevant. In the minds of online consumers, the top search results are where the leading products and services live. Out of sheer need to find what is needed, customers have developed sensitive intuitions towards brand value. The overwhelming volume of information people are confronted with today, has them rely on tools like search engines to initiate a sort of information Darwinism where the fittest get pushed to the top and the rest are, well, on page two. A similar scale of perceived value between a bargain bin products in the back of a physical store vs. the glass case presentation in the front of the store also lives true on the web. Because of the temporal nature of the web, lower search engine results also equate to a sites perishing factor. This mental value model is built on many factors such as what's the best, what's current, and often so influential, what's popular.
