Brand storytelling is an actionable step that businesses (or their online marketers) can take to get more visitors to their website. Brand storytelling is a method to gain trust from search engines, and result in higher rankings in Google, Bing etc. It’s not a vague philosophical idea to make the narrative sound “visionary”, rather a way to “de-anonymize” your brand.
Storytelling does take more time and and effort than “traditional” SEO methods, but produces profitable long-term effects for the brand. It does not “replace” SEO, it exists beside it.
In this article, my usage of the term “brands” refers to any kind of individual entity: business brand, a personal brand, or any other kind of brand that represents a company, corporation, or identity.
[Websites] that have brand stories rank [better], regardless of niche […] even if the brand story contains information that nobody is asking about.
This is my SEO Prediction for 2026 and definitely going forward:
Brand storytelling will become a central facet of SEO-strategies to rank better in search engines, including to get quoted in AI overviews! The reason is that it gives the website an additional authenticity that is difficult to mimic.
I don’t expect readers of this article to agree with me.
Google’s synthetic persona
Google did not “create” SEO, linguistics, and semantics. My assertion is always this: Search engines, such as Google, try to quantify human behavior to synthesize a persona, and evaluate content using this persona. (Personalized search result is just Google trying to mimic you.)
With that assertion as background, I make the assumption that any behavioral patterns that real humans express is also something that Google try to mimic in order to predict humans’ expectations when they type something in to the Google search bar. The patterns include acting illogically, and assess information with emotional attributes.
What is brand storytelling?
Brand storytelling is process of creating text content to present a brand from the perspective of it’s founders, employees, and users — it explains what the brand is about beyond merely listing facts. The intent is to give the brand or company a personality, a DNA — making it less synthetic.
Brand storytelling is not a sterile listing of the classical “brand purpose”, “brand vision” or any of the brand “elements” in the Kepler Brand Identity Prism framework.
Brand storytelling explains then inevitable existence and attributes of the brand
Well-crafted and convincing brand storytelling consist of deep-diving stories that gave birth to brand’s attributes and values, that show that the brand is the result of genuine “life experiences” and “personal growth” — where the birth of the brand was an inevitability, not a templated fabrication. These kinds of stories reveal the true motivations behind the intentional actions taken by the founders — stories that are as honest as they can be (without risking putting the founders in jail).
Storytelling allows the author to attach human-like, non-digital attributes such as personality, culture, and philosophical beliefs by making it part of real-life events and physical locations. This makes the brand appear more authentic and grounds it in the psychical world. A simple “About Us” page on a corporate website is not enough to achieve that.
Brand storytelling might seem very easy, but it’s quite complicated as the story has to be cohesive. Most companies and people, when they write about themselves in SEO, know they should to be factual. Factuality is great, it can be tested, it can be confirmed, it can be used to compared sources and assess credibility of those sources.
A brand story gives you the opportunity to tell a wider story that people might not know, but also show from what light – from what facet – you want to be seen or what you want the market to understand about you.
Do you want to be seen as superior due to your PhD, or do you want to show that – despite lack of relevant education – you have a passion that is in line with your companies niche.
I’d rather hire a person that is obsessed about a topic, not the one that is formally educated without indication that they are truly interested and emotionally invested like the topic. I have higher formal education in 3D-modelling, but I have no passion for it – a 16yo that is obsessed with it will beat me without even trying.
A brand story allows you highlight details that are emotionally rooted and may be perceived as more important. If you obsess about a topic, it becomes emotionally rooted. Feelings become relevant, as they drive you to action.
Content uniqueness
Brand storytelling allows us to say unique things, because the brand story can only come from the founders, only come from the internal ethos, the internal ideology, the internal active choice of how to act. Brand stories can also signal and reflect how we want to be without stating that this is how we are. We can make goals. We can have missions. We can make promises. We can decide things. And brand story is a way to express that and the reasons behind it.
Two competing brands can have identical brand missions and brand values, a brand story can add another layer of these official statements that act as unique content that we can rank with.
Why does brand storytelling matter for SEO?
By far the biggest challenge that SEO-consultants face in 2025 is acquiring authorship and credibility, attributes necessary for ranking high in Google, this according to Google’s own SEO guidelines. Anyone can create thousands factual articles with the help of chatbots, but that alone is not enough.
Google wants to know that there is a real entity that publishes the content, that is transparent about their intent for what they publish online. Human don’t come to exist out of a vacuum, neither do brands. Humans that openly, and happily share their background in detail will appear more genuine and credible. Brands with a story are more likely to be real.
Storytelling gives your brand credibility and authenticity. It shows that the content is more than just a copy-paste from a SEO content generation app, SaaS, ChatGPT, Claude AI, etc. I believe that, for credibility, storytelling is very important already and will become ever more so.
Honest brand owners love to talk about their brand – It’s their love and pride!
I have worked on about 650 websites since 1999, I have been responsible for SEO for a majority of them. Since 2019 I have been rejecting most potential clients, and accepting only the bigger and passionate ones because their founder absolutely love to talk about their brand and companies.
From my own experience, websites that have brand stories rank substantially much better, regardless of niche. The founders love and pamper their brand as if it’s their own child and just won’t stop talking about it.
My assertion is that Google sees that as a strong positive attribute, even if the brand story contains information that nobody is asking about. (Just like a parent that shoves photos of their kids in everyone’s face.)
Again, storytelling has to be – like any other story – consistent, and make sense. The narrative might become somewhat of an origin story or a plan for the future. But what it mustn’t be is a loosely connected set of information or ideas that lack cohesion.
The brand story must makes sense!
If it’s “just” a story, and presented as such, why does it matter if it’s just random and incoherent? People don’t like when stories doesn’t make sense, even if it’s a fictional story in a movie or book. If it doesn’t make sense the credibility is ruined, and anything you publish on your website will be seen with skepticism.
Faking brand stories is complicated
You might be asking, can’t anyone just fabricate a brand story? Yes, they can. But it takes effort. If you are inconsistent with the assumptions, facts, details, anecdotes that you make, the story falls apart. And it feels disingenuous or intentionally false. Think of cross-examination. You have the intellectual capacity to fabricate a story, but if you do, it must be cohesive and rich in details that cannot be disproved.
Google cutting out the middlemen
I believe that as going forward, Google will, and already is, cutting out the middlemen, cutting out the affiliates. For affiliates, to be able to acquire credibility, would need to do a fantastic job at creating a brand story. Trust me when I say it’s a massive, massive task. You cannot even start to write a brand story before you have all the facts or attributes done.
SEO in competitive niches
Why not just focus on presenting facts about the brand, the company, publishing their policies, documents etc? Isn’t that what Google wants? Yes, but it’s not always enough.
For example, if you are a company in a niche where you need to be clear that you have a permit, then there’s a limit of documentation that you can present. There’s a limit for the revealing of all the collaboration and connections you might have, including the biases, especially if you publishing incentivized content (such paid-for articles).
Creating a brand story
In my experience, it takes approximately three to six months, to understand a brand, or an entity, enough to be able to start creating a plan for a brand story. The reason is that the seemingly trivial details and anecdotes create the full story, not just the overarching basics, such as the official and generally accepted milestones and time lines that the brand has currently on their website.
Ghost writers need a close relation to the person that they are helping with the ghost writing to understand and pick up on the small nuances of what’s being said, to understand the emotions and their relevance, and the significance of their anecdotes. These are stories that you do not talk about during investor meetings.
Haste leads to mistakes – A storytelling mistake
There are two types of starting position when authoring of a brand story:
The first position is that you already have intimate knowledge because you are one of the founders, and there is no source that is more credible than you – or you have made your research well, and have detailed information from the best possible sources.
The second situation is that you don’t know the brand, but you mistakenly think you can start writing anyway. You will end up writing a story and find out that there are details that will be nonsensical and mismatching with other quotes, anecdotes, and ideas from various other parts of the story. Basically, you create the story and then you have to immediately rewrite it.
If you write such erroneous story, and you are not the source, the final text signals that the writer has been hired to do the writing or you want to fake it (for whatever reason). Not being the original source, it’s improbable that you will create a convincing cohesive story.
There will not be a red thread that is consistent. It will be chaos, therefore, easy for Google or any system to find inconsistency and inaccuracy. Therefore, the story, even though asserted to be to be a brand story, is rejected.
Good brand stories are difficult to dispute or alter
A good, cohesive brand story becomes 100% unique content, which search engines love. For anybody to skew the original narrative would require a better story, a more accurate version. It would be incredibly difficult for a writer to create, say, a book called “Lord of the Rings”, have the same characters, the same foundational story, and to convince Google, or fans of the original that remember every detail, that your book is the accurate one.
Brand storytelling for increased E.E.A.T
The longer and more detailed a brand story is, the harder is to get a rewritten version to get accepted (assuming it’s cohesive and without blatant contradictions.) This is why I think short “About Us” pages on websites, without an additional long-format brand story, is missed opportunity to assert credible experience, expertise, authority and trust – the “mythical” E.E.A.T that Google keeps nagging about. (I say “mythical”, because all SEO consultants talk about it, but almost none can define it without regurgitating Google’s SEO guidelines.)
What should a brand story contain, and how long should it be?
A brand story published on a website should only contain stories that matter for the brand. If you describe an event that influenced the brand directly, or had indirect consequences later on then it should be included. Stories and anecdotes must be presented in a way that makes it clear why they matter. Don’t try to guess if the reader will find it interesting, of if it’s “good or bad for SEO”, instead ask yourself if it mattered to you!
A brand story is not about a perfect fairy tale, as with humans, the brand story surely had it’s high points and low points. Include both the positive subplots and the negative, that will create a balanced understanding of the brand persona – and make it even more believable and authentic. Struggle and mistakes are not discrediting to the brand, rather a sign being battle-tested.
From my own experience with brand storytelling, I think it should be at least 20 pages long, 100 page is fine too if there are enough details. Ground the story info into groups that are focusing on specific aspects of the brand, and post as individual article, which together create an article series.
Brand stories as authenticity of existing
If you believe that brand stories are nonsensical, redundant and useless for SEO, then ask yourself, why do people love origin stories, even about brands? Why can a brand story, even if the brand is generally disliked, sell well? Brands that are loved, still sell well. I refuse to believe that Google would rejecting that part of human behavior. I therefore think that Google sees brand stories as part of the total body of “proofs” that your brand is authentic and really exists, and is not mass produced AI slop.
I assert that brands can gain a persona, that will vastly improve credibility, with the help of long brand storytelling.
I think a comprehensive storytelling length should be at least 50 pages.
Rank for more than just your brand name
So where does that position your brand and your story in SEO, why does it matter? Again, credibility, and therefore, ranking, not only for your own brand, which you do already, but for everything that you write, everything that you publish.
Glossary
- Kepler Brand Identity Prism
- a classification framework for analyzing brand identities, categorizing them into specific, hierarchically organized groups. The framework consists of six elements: Physique, Personality, Culture, Relationship, Self-Image, and Reflection. Unlike traditional brand models focusing on single-dimensional attributes, the Kepler Prism encapsulates allows for a more comprehensive understanding. Its distinction lies in its ability to integrate both tangible and intangible aspects of a brand, setting it apart from other concepts that may address only visual or communicative elements.
Author’s note: The Kepler Brand Identity Prism is a framework, a tool for when working with branding, it’s not a “solution”.
