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
-
Domain: Product brand or company brand?
I work for a company with a very strong brand. We have a product with an even stronger brand. Right now, our product marketing pages look like this: https://www.company.com/product/.... I believe this leads to URL bloat, and I think we're probably missing some search rank on product-branded keywords that we would automatically get if, instead, our product marketing was here: https://www.product.com/.... An example of this structure is Colgate Palmolive (http://www.colgatepalmolive.com/en/us/corp), the makers of Colgate toothpaste (http://www.colgate.com/en/us/oc/). We already own both domains, but of course right now SEO rank is entirely owned by company.com. If we put product marketing at product.com, of course the company site can still link to the product site anywhere, and vice-versa, which means (I think) that both domains help each other out. But we wouldn't have to spend as much time worrying about the branded keyword in product content. I have found some posted opinion that tends to support my hunch here, but I haven't seen anything more concrete in support of it. Has anyone got direct experience with this question?
Branding | | hoosteeno0 -
Help! Odd SERP results on two branded terms.
We have had the ODDEST thing happen to our Branded search. Last week we started seeing our Women’s subdomain (women.duluthtrading.com) outranking our main Duluth Trading domain (duluthtrading.com) on searches for “duluth trading co” and “duluth trading company”. Sample of odd results page: http://screencast.com/t/cKgkaYc1 As you can see- our Women's sub domain is ranking #1 then our main domain, THEN what used to be our organic site links are now listing 3-6. If you search for "duluth trading" though, you will get the typically results page: http://screencast.com/t/qGLDWiM0f We have been trying to figure out how or why this has happened. Our website went out for 30 minutes on January 4th. We thought maybe that is what happened but it has now been 7 days. Any help or suggestions would be great!
Branding | | sderuyter0 -
Serps display
Good Morning Everyone, So by now i'm sure you've all heard about the search engines like Google and Bing displaying Emoji's in the Page titles of the SERPS. Does anyone know how to input the emojis into your page title? I have a magento site and have no idea where to find the emoji's and how to place them in the title. Any help/guidance/advice would be appreciated. Thanks!
Branding | | Prime851 -
Brand Name Cratering - possible N-SEO or Black Hat Attacks
Hello to the Moz Community, Let me start by saying, we are not an SEO company. We are the in-house agency for our parent corp, and the 7 companies in their portfolio. We manage their PPC and other digital items. None of the companies use an SEO company. Their "SEO strategy" is to not have one. They internally post on their own Social Media account, their own Blog, and send out their own Press Releases (which we help write the copy sometimes). One of the accounts encountered a very bizarre, and serious ranking problem around Dec 25th-30th. In the past when you Googled the company's brand name you would get 5-6 pages of internal content show up at the very Top of the results. Pages like Home Page, Blog Home, Contact Us, About Us, Client Reviews Page, etc. (core pages). There were then several other non core pages that would show up in the Top 20 results (my recollection is they controlled about 12-14 of the Top 20 results for the brand name). Unfortunately, around Dec. 25th this all cratered. And the only internal page that would display when you Googled the brand name was the Home Page (totally gone; even checking 100 rankings deep). So the question we have spend weeks trying to figure out is, what in the heck happened? We got together with the company to find out any and all possible changes or things could of happened since the first of December, which could have contributed to this cratering. Here is what we found: #1 The company made an acquisition of a smaller competitor in 2014. Around Dec. 10th they sent out a great press release announcing the acquisition. Since the press release was involving someone in the TV/radio advertising agency industry it was very popular (the best release they ever put out). The release was picked up by over 100 high page rank local TV stations, all across the U.S. (along with the normal companies that pick up online releases). The headline of the release was "Brand Name Reviews Assets of TV Ad Agency Competitor." Most of the stations that picked it up placed "Do not follow" links, but it was still an amazingly successful release. #2 Around Dec. 15th this 8 year old company received their first negative "client review." The review was not from a real client though, it was posted on Rip-Off report by a fake client, the Internet Mafia (reputation management co.) or a former employee/contractor. The posting was deliberately optimized. The URL and the Title Tag contained all sort of words like "Reviews" "Complaints" the "Domain Name," and the Company Brand Name (whoever did it, knew what they were doing). #3 Towards the end of December and into January the company received 6-8 bizarre root domain links. The links show to of come from domains that were just registered in November/December. Yet the domain name was already voluntarily forfeited by the beginning of January. Google Webmaster Tools is still showing the links, but when you go to the domain "all it shows is "cannot be found." WHOIS has screenshots of all of them though. Here is one: http://www.domaintools.com/research/screenshot-history/lizardeyephoto.com/ The domains themselves had nothing to do with the type of business this client account operates in, but the information after the / contained partial pieces of the company brand name. Here is an example: http://www.martygraveyard.com/buying-inexpensive-vehicles-at-on-line-community-automobile-auctions/ I personally don't think 6-8 new root domains could crater a website with 290 root domains (and 1500 links), but maybe those domains/sites are somehow "cloaked;" and they are actually showing bad information to the bots/spiders, but us humans can't see it? I honestly am not educated enough on the subject to know... #4 In mid January, three of the brand name pages returned: Home Page, About Us, Blog Home. However, the other pages are nowhere to be found. The companies Contact Us page, Client Reviews page (which used to rank 2nd), and all of the other Top 20 pages are totally gone. They are still indexed if you do a "site:brandname.com" search, but they won't show up when you Google the brand name. #5 Search results are almost identical with Bing and Google. So, here is the million dollar question: was our client's Brand Name deliberately attacked via an N-SEO Black Hat attack, in an effort to get it their internal pages to drop out of the rankings? Or did Google and Bing incorrectly issue some sort of partial penalty on certain pages due to the amazing success (and them believing it was some sort of link buying scheme) of the Press Release that was sent out at the beginning of December? If you read to the bottom of this, I am grateful for you doing so. Thanks in advance for anyone who tries to help us and our in-house client. Jake
Branding | | SBIM-Jake0 -
Google Changing the Title Tag to Your Brand
A while back google started changing our title tags to have our name in it, which was great and reasonable for the most part. We recently ran into a problem with it as we have some properties on our site that fall under a dba. Here is the example. Title tag: Kolea- Waikoloa Vacation Rentals
Branding | | RobDalton
Kolea is a vacation rental community is a resort called Waikoloa. Waikoloa Vacation Rentals is our company name and www.waikoloavacationrentals.com is our company site. Here is the problem:
Title tag: Hualalai Resort- Waikoloa Vacation Rentals
Hualalai is a completely different place than Waikoloa and we do business in there as Hualalai Vacation Rentals, but keep our properties on our www.waikoloavacationrentals.com site rather than microsites. How can you let google know that what they are doing is incorrect for specific pages? Thanks,0 -
Brand Exposure for Increased Awareness
Looking for a mechanism to increase my brand awareness over the web. Has anyone run across a site or method that has helped them expand the awareness of their brand significantly that can be measured?
Branding | | casper4340 -
Google+ Vanity Urls: Brand vs Keyword
We have recently been assigned a Google+ vanity URL for our Google page. By default, Google has assigned to us our top performing non-branded keyword. (Probably roughly twice the highly targeted search volume of our brand) My question is: Should I go with my BRAND NAME as my Google+ vanity url, or should I go with my TOP KEYWORD as my Google+ vanity url?
Branding | | Czarto0 -
How to encourage Google to recognize us as a "brand" in the Organic SERPS
You've probably seen that for some searches (most commonly for specific product types) that Google offers something like the following in the SERPS: Related searches for widgets: | Stores: | Widgetland Widgetworld Widgetbarn Amazon |
Branding | | PathMarketing
| Brands: | Widgetdog Superwidgets Widgey | I'm working with a reputable brand of widgets - they're not just a supplier or a retailer, but a company that designs and builds its own. Does anyone know how Google decides which brands are worthy of being recognized in these related searches, and how I can encourage them to recognize our brand similarly? So far I've done the following: Knowem.com brand protection Add products to Amazon Sell our products on eBay List our products on Google Shopping In other words, do what a popular brand would do - appear in many channels, with a large and diverse footprint. Does anyone have any experience with this sort of thing, and how to help a brand get recognized as a brand?5