Brand SERP Domination
-
Hi Mozfans,
I've been asked by my management to try and "Dominate" our Branded SERP (I've also posted this question as a private question to the Moz staff but would love to know what the community thinks of this or if anyone has "Brand SERP" experience);
For our brand name, the first page SERP currently looks like this;
================================
Current SERP 1 (Google UK):
-
Our homepage (with the 6 pack of prominent pages beneath it)
-
An advert that we control
-
An advert that we control
-
An advert that we control
-
An advert that we control
-
One of those random business directories - we don't control the listing
-
Something not related to us at all
-
Something not related to us at all
-
One of those random business directories - we don't control the listing
-
Something not related to us at all
================================
As you can see from the above list, we are already dominating the top 50% of our branded SERP page, however management would like 100% (of course).
Now two obvious things that are missing from our Branded SERP page are our Facebook Page and our Twitter Profile, however, how do I get those to rank?
I believe I read somewhere (it might have been on the SEOmoz/YOUmoz blog) that the answer is to build links to those profiles (with your brand name as the anchor text).
Would that work?
We currently use an external SEO company for our link building so could it help if we asked them to build links for us pointing at those two social profiles?
Also, are there any other methods for dominating a branded SERP?
What would you recommend?
Thanks in advance everyone!
Regards,
Ash
-
-
Thanks for the answer Kris!
Regards,
Ash
-
Thanks for your answer Nathan!
Regards,
Ash
-
Thanks for the excellent answer and helpful link Anthony!
Regards,
Ash
-
You should be able to control positions 1-3 with just your primary domain. Work on pushing up some of your sub-pages for your brand term.
Once thats done consider tossing a blog or something else (presskit, video content, employee directory) on a subdomain. That should net you another 2 spots on page one with your domain with a little effort.
Once thats done, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin and Youtube can take the other 5 spots.
-
Most strategies that work well for dominating your brand name SERP usually rely on piggybacking off another website's massive domain authority, optimizing the on-page factors as much as possible for your brand, and running a small linkbuilding campaign towards these webpages to give them a page authority bump and a backlink profile with targeted anchor text.
Sources that work well for this type of campaign are :
- Social Media Profiles - Facebook, Twitter, Google+ (especially since Search Plus Your World), Youtube, LinkedIn
- Review websites that you would use to build citations for local SEO such as Yelp and CitySearch
- Blogs on strong domains like Tumblr or Blogger
- Guest Blog Posts on the influential blogs in your niche with strong domains/readership (this has potential personalized search benefits as well)
- Microsites that you develop yourself (this was way more effective when exact match domains were stronger, but their strength seem to have been toned down a bit lately)
Additionally, make sure you have Sitelinks properly set up, as this can sometimes make your website the only search result above the fold.
Another amazingggg strategy that I read somewhere last year is to always keep a generic, can-be-released-whenever press release written and ready to go. Get a negative blog writeup or some bad press that's appearing in your search results because it's at the top of Google News? Release your PR and push it out of the way. So. Effing. Smart.
-
You're on the right track with link building and anchor text. It's important to sculpt your priority pages with the branded terms (on page and in the code). You're lucky to have a team working on link building as that takes effort, but well worth it.
I think it would be tough to obtain 100% dominance, but one thing you might try is adwords with your branded terms. In this way, you appear more on SERPs. Kind of like driving down the highway and seeing multiple billboards vs just a few. With more, searchers are more likely to click on your links. Adwords is also a great way to test branded keywords to see traffic and click data, that you can apply when creating your webpages around those terms.
One more think is anchor text linking within your site so that the architecture throughout the site has pages with branded terms linking to your important pages.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Really, what are the benefits of creating a Google Brand page for an e-commerce site?
We have a jewellery store client who already have a Google My Business page set up for its store front business. Should we also create a Google Brand page for its e-commerce site (which has a different business name to the jewellery store)? This client already has a pretty robust Facebook profile. Is it worth it maintaining a Brand page then - since it targets Google plus users?
Branding | | Gavo
And what are the chances of a Brand page appearing on search results when you're not a Nike or a Calvin Klein? Thanks heaps in anticipation of your response.0 -
In Google SERPs some companies / government agencies have a Google-generated card for their organization and it references their Wikipedia page. It does not show for all companies /orgs that have a Wikipedia page. What is the criteria to have it shown?
Does Google have specific criteria to show a large card in the top right of SERPs that links to a national organization's Wikipedia-referenced info? These do not appear to be the Google Business Card created by individual organizations. Example having the card and org is on wikipedia: https://www.google.com/?ion=1&espv=2#q=u.s. department of labor Example no card shown and org is on wikipedia: https://www.google.com/?ion=1&espv=2#q=Occupational+Information+network
Branding | | Shirley.Fenlason0 -
My 40 year old, well established business has a brand name that I think is hurting my SEO. Need advice please.
Our business brand name has words in it which when we were using it as our domain name, was a) bad for our SEO and b) got our emails marked as spam in our client's inboxes. This was not a problem when we first got online, years ago. It eventually became problematic, but we didn't realize it for some time. When we realized the issue, we simply changed our domain name to something more SEO friendly, using exact match keywords. This was fine for a while, but eventually, algorithms changed again, and now with Google putting an emphasis on Brand Names and not looking as kindly on exact match keyword type domains, we are again at a place where we don't know what to do. We can't change our brand name. I don't want to post our real name or business here, but I will give an example. Brand Name: Living Free Travel The Issue: "Free Travel" gets blocked by spam filters, gets us useless traffic from people looking for free travel (which makes out bounce rates very high), gets our domain blacklisted. The Solution: travel2europe.com is the website of Living Free Travel The New Issue: travel2europe.com is not our brand, and probably doesn't look like one to Google, especially since on our site, travel2europe.com is never really mentioned because it is only our domain, not our brand. "Living Free Travel" is generally the anchor text for travel2europe.com wherever we are linked to. We assume this mismatch is problematic for us in ways we don't even know. Are we screwed? Need advice, please. THANK YOU.
Branding | | benenjerry0 -
What marketing/branding services can you recommend to get more awareness of my site?
I am a programmer, not a marketing or social media genius. It also takes A LOT of time to market your website properly. Are there services that people can recommend that can help get my site out there and known to people more. I am always working on the SEO part and that takes time to improve. Just looking for suggestions. Thank you!
Branding | | BrickPicker0 -
Using keywords instead of brand name on G+ to rank for local terms.
I noticed something this morning, when performing a search on Google UK for "Intensive driving courses southend" the first position is awarded to a driving school that is using exact match keywords instead of brand name on their G+ page to rank for local terms. See this for yourself here: https://www.google.co.uk/#q=intensive+driving+courses+southend Until then, my site had held position 1 for this term for well over a year. Every gut instinct I have tells me that this will not work forever and its not something I should implement, however I'm interested to hear if anyone else is using this tactic, and how its working for them? How can I compete with this "grey hat" tactic?
Branding | | Silkstream0 -
What do search engines consider brand signals?
After being hit by the Penguin stick, like good content marketers we are trying to focus on improving brand signals for our site. But I keep coming up against what exactly brand signals are. I can understand that if you are called 'Ziggle' and someone links to you with that in anchor text or mentions that name, that would be a brand signal. But we're on a generic domain (descriptive of the produt type), so what would constitute brand signals in our case?
Branding | | RogerElliott1 -
Looking for examples of a B2B brand spinning off B2C products on to separate websites
Does anyone have any good examples or case studies? Right now I'm working on a site with both B2B and B2C products crowded onto one site. I'd love to find some examples of companies that have built their online B2B brand separately from their consumer products. I found the Constructive Playthings case study on Marketing Sherpa but nothing else.
Branding | | TexaSEO0 -
Is it a bad idea to have a catchy brand name url redirect to an exact match domain
A friend wanted to setup a website where people would share and vote on "widget" ideas where the winning idea got build for free. They bought cute the domain name widg.et and branded their site as widg.et. However, for SEO, they are having widg.et forward to www.sharewidgets.com. Then, to complicate things further, they changed their business model to remove the voting feature and now the site is just set to show off the widgets they've made and let people order new custom widgets. They might add the voting feature back later. "Widget" and "widgets" in this case has an SEOmoz difficulty of 72% and 71%, so quite high and none of the two word or long tail phrases have much traffic. What do you think they should do: Remove all domain forwarding and use widg.et as their only domain as it's less confusing and better for branding Get another domain that includes their keyword widget for the SEO exact match benefit Keep it as is, even though "sharewidgets" is no longer quite as applicable Many Thanks!
Branding | | skincareseo0