Using Brand value for SEO: Can we use keyword with brand name?
-
Hi Moz community,
I am curious to know this. Let's say there is a brand value for a company. It has it's own popularity that it's been mentioned across the internet and social media directly with brand name without their service or industry keyword. Now if the company started promoting themselves like keyword along with their brand name, will it help them to rank for that keyword. For example, Moz is already famous, now they want to rank for "SEO" and related keywords, so they started calling themselves on internet "Moz SEO"; will this fetch them in ranking for keyword SEO? My ultimate question is, using primary keyword along with brand name will work out in ranking for that primary keyword or not?
Thanks
-
I agree with Robert. So of course with the Clarks examples pages may be:
Clarks Boots
Clarks Sandals
Clarks Slippers
And each of those pages would be different. Filled with contextually rich content surrounding those terms.
"It won't put you on the 1st page" - I don't agree with this. I have many clients who have been hoiked up to page one by adding contextually relevant content to a key phrase (Brand + Category) constructed the page. If you _are _the brand and you construct pages like this (With 300+ words contextual content) you will be No. 1 or 2 in Google, never mind just on the front page.
Just search 'Carousel Projects SEO'
Regards Nigel
-
Hey vtmoz,
Short answer: It will probably help your rankings for that keyword/phrase.
Longer answer: It won't put you on the 1st page, but it will go some distance in helping your rankings along with other established factors.
Potential issue: If your brand features other products or services for which they wish to rank that are irrelevant to the keyword you wish to rank for, be careful that you do not gain rankings for your selected keyword at the expense of others on your site.
For example, say you want to rank for "keyword 1" so you target "Brand" "Keyword 1". If you also have "Keyword 2" and "Keyword 3" that are not relevant to "Keyword 1" you have just shot yourself in the foot for those keywords in order to gain ground with "Keyword 1".
This may not be a problem for you, but something to be aware of.
Personally, I'd be more inclined to make internal pages for keywords I am attempting to rank for, and introduce the brand and specific keyword to those pages to help Google with context. The last thing you want to do is switch up Google's understanding of your site by "traffic hunting" (i.e. putting keywords into your site content to increase traffic rather than to serve your visitors). In this way you might even lose traffic by making the change you have highlighted.
Let me know if you'd like clarification on the above - always happy to help!
Cheers,
Rob
-
Hi vtmoz
It's funny you should say "so they started calling themselves on the internet 'Moz SEO' " because Moz used to be called SEOMOZ and they changed to just MOZ so that they could concentrate on building the brand. There is evidence to suggest that if an article is written about a subject and your brand is linked from that article that Google will recognise the contextuality of the article and associate your brand name with that subject.
For example, one would expect that Nike and 'sports', 'sports clothing' etc would occupy the same space. In the same way - if your brand sold Tennis Rackets, for example, Google would begin to associate your brand name with that range of products.
In the same way, when we SEOs are optimising a page we will use Keyword Explorer. The tool would give us contextually relevant keywords to use alongside a brand name in order to strengthen the SEO of a page.
So if I were writing an article on Nike and I hadn't used the words 'sports', 'sports clothing', 'sports footwear' or even 'Phil Knight', then MOZ will suggest these as relevant keywords to use to strengthen the page's SEO.
I wouldn't include them in the brand name but I would use them on a page. In this way, they become kind of 'baby anchor text' in that they surround the brand.
In order to strengthen that further, you might write an article that is submitted to a blog with a specific anchor text backlink which is not your brand name but the most relevant keyword. So if Nike wanted (and it does of course) to be found for the term 'Sports Footwear' then it would link back to its own page with that anchor text.
Very often when I am constructing Meta titles and heading for a brand page then I would use the subject after the brand as that is often the way someone may search for it in Google.
Example: I would title a page 'Clarks Boots' as the opening two words of the title and as the H1 on the page if I wanted that page to rank for the brand and the category. I would then fill the page with boot products along with a good 300 word + description of the types of Clarks boots, the gender, heels, ankle, mid, high and any other contextually relevant keywords.
I hope that goes someway to answering your question,
Regards
Nigel
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
-
Does personalization that changes meta data display in SERPs impact SEO?
My company has been rolling out personalization at the page level across our site using behavior paths embedding content from cross pathed pages as well as customer journey mapping. The dynamically generated content doesn’t change the URLs. In the SERPs I’m seeing that our title tags and meta descriptions also seem to be dynamically generated even though we have these elements crafted. The way our elements are crafted: Title tag: descriptive Keyword rich phrase | Brand Meta description: Keyword rich, grammatically correct description tied to title tag and page content for consistency. I search a specific URL: Title tag display: Keyword rich phrase | Brand – Brand Meta description display: Random content pulled from the page I search a phrase that includes Brand + keywords in the URL: Title tag display: Title tag we crafted Meta description display: Meta description we crafted I search a phrase that includes Brand + keywords in the title tag: Title tag display: Title tag we crafted Meta description display: Random content pulled from the page Does Google crawl the page and digest the title tag and meta description we crafted? Or is Google going to ding us for having the brand twice, exceeding the length of the title tag, etc.? I have been searching the interwebs, forums and the cosmos, but the only information I’m finding is related to the fact that URLs are changing and how that would impact SEO. That’s not the case for us. Thoughts on how all this is impacting our SEO efforts?
Algorithm Updates | | NStarJM0 -
Which seo firms produce the most authoritative SEO studies?
I'm not talking about conjectures or guesses -- but SEO studies that is actually backed up by hardcore data. Which SEO firm produces excellent data-driven studies you always trust?
Algorithm Updates | | Brand_Psychic0 -
Old school SEO tools / software / websites
Hey Mozzers, I am doing some research and wonder if you can help me out? Before Moz, Hubspot, Majestic, Screaming Frog and all the other awesome SEO tools we use today what were the SEO tools / software / websites that were used for aiding SEO? I guess we can add the recently closed Yahoo! Directory for starters! Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | RikkiD220 -
What's the best way to go about building/using interactive snippets?
I'm starting to see interactive snippets (I guess they're called islands) like the attached image in our SERPs, so I figured I would look into experimenting with them, but I'm not entirely clear how to proceed. I have only seen them in adwords, so is that the only way you can use them? Is there some way to set them up or some service you need to set them up organically? Lost, but intrigued, Ruben SW7ak4d.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Can Google penalize a country keyword
Hello again guys Thank you for your previous help with www.kids-academy.co.uk - we are slowly getting there! I wanted to ask something I cannot seem to find an answer to, can Google penalize you by country? By this I mean; Search term
Algorithm Updates | | LeanneSEO
Nursery franchise UAE Page 1
Nursery franchise UK Nowhere to be found! The page in question (well a section of the site) has been optimised for UK, however, as they do have a sister site in the UAE, it mentions those areas too. The pages I have been working on are now ranking reasonably well to say there is a long way to go, but for long tailed keywords NOT including anything to do with the UK. There are no naughty backlinks with the anchor text to do with the UK, the server is hosted in the UK, it is a .co.uk URL (no geotagging but I would like to know if this is of any use with this type of URL, everything says no, but it cant harm can it?) - is it possible Google due to bad practices in the past have slapped a penalty on the specific keyword area? Not something I have come across previously but I am scratching my head over here! Time for a brew break 😄 Thanks in advance guys! Leanne1 -
Should I use canonical tags on my site?
I'm trying to keep this a generic example, so apologies if this is too vague. On my main website, we've always had a duplicate content issue. The main focus of our site is breaking down to specific, brick and mortar locations. We have to duplicate the description of product/service for every geographic location (this is a legal requirement). So for example, you might have the parent "product/service" page targeting the term, and then 100's of sub pages with "product/service San Francisco", "product/service Austin", etc. These pages have identical content except for the geographic location is dynamically swapped out. There is also additional useful content like google map of area, local resources, etc. As I said this was always seen as an SEO issue, specifically you could see in the way that googlebot would crawl pages and how pagerank flowed through the site that having 100's of pages with identical copy and just swapping out the geographic location wasn't seen as good content, however we still always received traffic and conversions for the long tail geographic terms so we left it. Las year, with Panda, we noticed a drop in traffic and thought it was due to this duplicate issue so I added canonical tags to all our geographic specific product/service pages that pointed back to the parent page, that seemed to be received well by google and traffic was back to normal in short order. However, recently what I notice a LOT in our SERP pages is if I type in a geographic specific term, i.e. "product/service san francisco", our deep page with the canonical tag is what google is ranking. Google inserts its own title tag on the SERP page and leaves the description blank as it doesn't index the page due to the canonical tag on the page. Essentially what I think it is rewarding is the site architecture which organizes the content to the specific geo in the URL: site.com/service/location/san-francisco. Other than that there is no reason for it to rank that page. Sorry if this is lengthy, thanks for reading all of that! Essentially my question is, should I keep the canonical tags on the site or take them off since Google insists on ranking the page? If I am ranking already then the potential upside to doing that is ranking higher (we're usually in the 3-6 spot on the result page) and also higher CTR because we can get a description back on our resulting page. The counter argument is I'm already ranking so leave it and focus on other things. Appreciate your thoughts on this!
Algorithm Updates | | edu-SEO0 -
SERP and SEO Moz ranking
Until a couple of months ago the predicted SEO Moz ranking for a specific keyword was fairly close to what I actually experienced with my website. However, since then the correlation has not been good. For example, according to SEO Moz I am ranked #1 for a specific keyword with google.ca and google.com yet my site actually shows up consistently at #3 for that keyword. Has anyone else noticed this divergence?
Algorithm Updates | | casper4340 -
WIll embedding affiliate links from Amazon, commission connection services, and AdSense damage your SEO?
Will having affiliate marketing links and images on your website damage search engine ranking on certain terms? Those affiliate links are just for office tools and online document services and nothing like an adult contents or spamming.
Algorithm Updates | | WebMarketingSmart1