You need to improve your Branding and trust in your clients. SEO will automatically improve.
Yes you are right Branding is the only way for SEO..
In all the SEO work that I have done (which is quite extensive) I have never seen a single situation where I would recommend what you guys are suggesting to a person who is trying to rank higher. Branding and SEO are two totally different things.
It is very common to have an excellent brand (worldwide well known brand) and still not be able to rank for valuable keywords. In most of those cases, branding has nothing to do with SEO at all.
Let me offer you an example.
If you go to Google right now and search for this phrase - best fast food restaurant franchises - That might actually be a phrase that a person who is researching buying a fast food franchise might search for. If you perform that search you will see that there is not one single well known fast food franchise brand that ranks in the top ten for those search results.
If SEO was just about branding then you would see companies listed there like McDonalds, Burger King, Subway, Taco Bell, Wendy's, Tim Horton's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, etc.
Yet, there is not one single one of those names listed there. And the reason for that is because branding and SEO are two totally different things.
Having a strong brand will make your SEO efforts easier because it is easier to generate publicity for something people already know about. But increasing your brand awareness will do absolutely nothing "by itself" to help you rank better. You still have to do all of the SEO work whether you have a well known brand or not.
If one of those fast food franchises wants to rank high for that phrase I mentioned, then they will have to create a page on their website that targets that phrase using all of the traditional SEO practices (on-page SEO, site-wide SEO and link acquisition). If they don't do that, then chances are they will never rank for that phrase.
SEO does not depend on branding at all. If your SEO strategy is to increase your brand awareness, then you will be outranked from now till forever by the most unknown competitor who did actual SEO work for their website/web page.