Brand SERP Domination

[AshSEO2011]

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):

1. Our homepage (with the 6 pack of prominent pages beneath it)

2. An advert that we control

3. An advert that we control

4. An advert that we control

5. An advert that we control

6. One of those random business directories - we don't control the listing

7. Something not related to us at all

8. Something not related to us at all

9. One of those random business directories - we don't control the listing

10. 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

[AshSEO2011]

Thanks for the answer Kris!

Regards,

Ash

[AshSEO2011]

Thanks for your answer Nathan!

Regards,

Ash

[AshSEO2011]

Thanks for the excellent answer and helpful link Anthony!

Regards,

Ash

[KrisRoadruck]

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.

[AnthonyMangia]

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.

[Prospector-Plastics]

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.