Brand queries as a ranking signal?
-
Hi folks,
I may be shooting WAY off the mark here for it to be laughable, but I wondered if anyone else was thinking about this.
I was trying to get to sleep last night, but was thinking about rankings (as you do... You DO think about rankings instead of counting sheep don't you... I'm not weird or anything am I... AM I?) and it occurred to me that maybe Google uses frequency of brand queries as a ranking signal - was wondering if anyone had done any research into this?
Assuming that if more people are searching for a brand name, then there must be an outside influence on this behaviour (offline ads or editorial for example) - and this all points to a site or company being popular or interesting - maybe Google looks at the growth in brand name queries, and boosts based on this...
I have done no research into this (I was just thinking about it instead of counting sheep last night... because I probably AM weird...) but was wondering what people here thought of this.
Also, I don't have time (or intelligence TBH) to run an experiment on this, but maybe one of you bright sparks would?
Best wishes,
Amelia
PS - if I'm being STOOPID please be gentle with me
-
I thought pagerank algorithm was largely redundant these days? But good points, thank you!
Yes, I am very interested in universal search.
-
I feel this would detract from Google's entire PageRank algorithm, if they were to base popularity off search query data. Although this would be really hard to test because as the popularity of the brand query grows so will other factors like links and anchor text. It would be really hard to tell what is affecting what.
A related study was done on the impact of brand mentions: http://moz.com/blog/panda-patent-brand-mentions ...But these are not tied to brand query data alone.
Where you might find some interesting insights is how universal search is affected by query popularity. I.e. the influence of news results or in-depth articles as a particular query grows in interest.
-
Phew... I'm not weird!!!
Thanks for your comment, you raise a good point about bad user experience. I'm looking at stuff to improve ours, but tbh it's not that bad... I need to look at our longtail landing pages in better detail, but our main core pages have low bounce rates which I take as being a positive thing.
I used to work for a company that had a subsidiary company that did online videos, the premise for selling the videos to SEO clients was that if people watch a video then bounce rate goes down and dwell time goes up, which is a good thing for rankings... Been thinking about this as an option, but it's expensive to get GOOD videos. (I don't mean over-priced, I mean out of my price range).
Amelia
-
first of all I am glad I am not the only person who thinks about this before sleep (its when I come up with my crazy ideas and thoughts) - tip, have a notebook next to you otherwise you might forget by the morning.
I've never seen any direct correlation between this and I would guess it would be very hard to prove either way, but I would tend to agree.
Google wants to rank sites which are more popular and answer their users experience, so if a lot of people are searching for 'x' and search term. I.e. 'bbc televisions' and someone else did a search for televisions, I wouldn't be surprised to see bbc ranking higher as a lot of people had suddenly been searching for the site. The only caveat I would add would be, that if your site has a poor user experience and a lot of people search brand name an query and bounce, you would probably rank lower.
I have never seen any evidence for this, however its not a silly question / thought.
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
-
Broken images & Rankings
Hi I have seen a big drop in a keyword going from position 3 to out of the top 100. The only thing I can see that went wrong, was an issue with broken images - could this be the reason for the drop? Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
My page ranking dropped after I made it responsive
Recently, I made one of my site page responsive. It was ranking on 13th Position and after I made the page responsive, it dropped to 24 desktop and 35 on mobile rankings. I ran mobile friendly test and it said "awesome, your page is mobile friendly". Not sure, what went wrong here. Page in question is: https://www.itcontractorsuk.com/ Can someone please advice? Please Note: My site is partially responsive.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThinkWebUK0 -
Ranking on google but not Bing?
Any reason why I could be ranking for Google but not Bing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Meta Keywords: Do They Hurt Rankings
I know that Google doesn't use meta keywords, but does it hurt to have anything in there? Just wondering if I need to remove all the meta keywords that are on my site, or are they harmless to have. Also, would meta keywords ever be used by an internal search plug-in if we were to install one in the future, or do they generally look at the product title and description for that info?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b4cab0 -
Bing Ranking Factors
I'm curious about the relationship (or lack of ) between Google rankings and Bing rankings. We took a huge hit last winter with Google and have since gotten back up to the top 3 and have been holding steady on all our most important terms. Most of our losses since regaining Google, have been with Bing. This week, we dropped 44 points on Bing and Yahoo! for our most important term. Are there known factors for Bing ranking? If so, can anyone please enlighten me? And does anyone think Bing rankings even matter these days?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gfiedel1 -
My brand is not ranking on Android Google SERPs
In the new blog post here, she links to mobilemoxie, a site which allows you to do searches on various different smartphones. I tried a search for my brand, "ixl.com" on an iPhone 4 and a Android phone, the Motorola Droid X. On the iPhone, our brand appears in #1 like normal, but on the Android phone, our result doesn't appear on the first page. Any ideas as to why this would be the case? We're currently developing a mobile version of our site but we don't have one yet. Could that be the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | john4math0 -
Why our site dropped in rank for a main keyword
Hello, Our site nlpca(dot)com dropped in rank for a few terms, including the main term "NLP". Could you look at our site and tell us what might be the cause? Thank you so much, Bob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Website Ranking Issue
Hey All My question is specfic to a particular website. The category of the website is Kitchen Appliances. The keyword is extremely competitive. The website I am currently optimizing has loads of products and many pages as well. I am constantly building links from industry specific websites for the website as well as composing articles and leading the users back to the website with keyword rich anchor text. I have been doing this for around 3 months and I do not see the website in the first 30 pages of the SERP (for the keyword kitchen appliances - the site is a page rank 2 BTW). No bugs reported as well in Webmaster tools. My next step is to add these articles to the website (www.example.com/KitchenAppliances ) with keyword rich metatags as well as content with internal links to my product pages. I also plan on sending traffic to these pages to build the pages link popularity. Do you think I can expect better results for the article pages than my original website product pages or do you think I should continue with the link building activity I was performing originally for the website. regards Ryan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO5Team2