This week on Whiteboard Friday we pull a secret out of the SEO secrets vault. This handy strategy helps you take advantage of the specific types of results that Google chooses for people and company based searches and helps you dominate your brand search engine result page.
Dominate Your Brand Search Engine Result Page (SERP)
Build YourBrand.com
Building a brand hub is an obvious suggestion but not necessarily for the reason you might think. Use these types of websites to promote what other domains are saying about you or your brand elsewhere on the Internet. This gives those pages (social media profiles, interviews, etc...) link juice and improves their relevancy, thus helping them rank for your brand SERP. (Hint: Use anchor text like "SEOmoz on Twitter" or "John Doe in the New York Times"). You can see an example of me doing this tactic on DannyDover.com
Build an Alternative Brand Site
After building your brand hub and linking from its homepage to the other pages you want to rank, you should build another brand site. In practical terms I recommend using a single page on a related domain. (I use this page targeting just my first name, Danny as my alternate). This helps you command a second result in the SERP because it is on a separate (and in this case, a more powerful) domain.
Create Social Media Profiles
This is obvious. Social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc...) are both great search results for people/brand searches and are on very powerful domains. This makes them great resources to fill up your brand SERP.
Do Interviews/News
Linking to relevant articles/interviews on your brand hub site is an excellent tactic for filling the remaining spots on your brand SERP. Like the last tactic, these pages are helpful search results for searchers and are usually on powerful domains.
Do PPC
This final tactic is less intuitive. Bidding on your name/brand allows you to control the ads on your brand SERP. This is helpful for branding (der...) and it actually tends to increase the click through rates of the number one result on the page as well as the ad.
Update: You can see 4 more excellent suggestions from seo-himanshu in the comments below.
Follow me on Twitter, Fool!
or
Follow SEOmoz on Twitter (who is slightly less rude)
If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!
nice post Danny. Since the whole idea of dominating your brand SERP is to protect your brand reputation, I would like to add four points where dominating your brand SERP is not always possible and what one should do in that case:
1) Claim you local business listing on Google places, Yahoo local and bing local and all top notch review sites like yelp, citysearch etc so that spammers/ competitors can't misue your brand name.
2) Encourage your clients to leave good reviews about your business on review sites as they often come up in top 10 for your brand name.
3) Company's videos and pictures can be used to populate the video and image results.
4) Keep a close eye on review sites and industry blogs. Whenever their is a mentioning about your brand on such sites, they often come up in top 10 for your brand name and can cause great damage if the reviews are bad.
Really great points Himanshu. Claiming your local listings and building the good reviews are excellent additional tips.
Yep, good points, as well as using your social media logins to comment on relevant blogs, I found that for internet marketing econcultancy comments come up in the results for my name.
Another great WBF Danny and great additions there himanshu. And as a bonus to getting all those listings at top rated review sites you get the citations that will help push your google places listing higher up the charts. Obviously it wouldn't matter too much when it comes to a brand search, but for local kw searches it defintely gives you a good bump.
Just added you to the post! Thanks for excellent suggestions.
Please don't take my job ;-p
Thanks Danny for the recognition :)
himansu, HIMANSHU, GO HIMANSHU!
Way to go Himanshu. :-p
Great adds...
and I would add a last one, which can sound obvious but it not so always a first priority for many small businesses (but also for personal use): buy all the main termination of your domain name in order to avoid others to steal them and misuse them... and to use them as Danny suggested.
@seo-himanshu and others as well, Google Places is even better when you include tags. For as low as $25 you can get the highlights i.e. https://www.google.com/accounts/lbc/screenshot.gif and from my earlier experiments the business does show above free ones ;-)
If used properly you can appear under some high-cost keyword too (in your area of course). 2 thumbs up for Google on this one.
Emil
Great job Danny, good video!
Couple of other reasons why everyone should "own" top 10 listings for their brand is to prevent spammers "stealing" your brandable keywords, as well as possible bad reviews about the site/business.
Year ago I worked with the client where their brand name had few bad reviews from unhappy customer and A.M. Best Co. article about downgrade to their financial strength rating from A to C+. Yes the site was listed #1 and #2, however everything down below was a disaster.
So own what belongs to you, or someone else will :-)
Right on target Danny. Keep it up man!
Cheers,
Emil Uzelac
Loving the attitude in this video. It's nice to finally see someone who doesn't have a beard.
On top of that it's an excellent video.
One question I have for you is this: what do you do if you've always used an alias, but want to promote yourself as a brand? I've been using the alias "traxor" for just under seven years and now I'm starting to work on a design for my new domain LukeJones.me. The problem is that I've always used the alias "traxor" and, whilst my profiles always say my real name, I'm concerned that I'm going to lose out by not using that alias.
Edit: Thanks for featuring my design by the way. I know you guys are SEOs so if you ever need me to do any css/xhtml just shoot me an email. I'd be happy to do it free-of-charge as long as I get an honourable mention.
Edit #2: And maybe some SEOmoz pants.
>Loving the attitude in this video. It's nice to finally see someone who doesn't have a beard.
I for one won't stand for pogonophobic remarks especially not from upstart young whippersnappers, you shaver.
;0)>
LOL. FYI, trax is not a shaver. He's still a boy (his words, his words)
I'm still a little upset that Danny shaved. I haven't decided whether I'm speaking to him at the PRO seminar or not.
What's funny is that right before this page loaded, I thought to myself... "Hmm, I need a shave." haha!
Hey Traxor,
This is a tricky one. I guess you just need to pick one "personal brand name" (I feel sleazy saying that phrase) and stick with it. Either be "Madonna" (an alias) or "Bob Barker" (a real name). Once you make that decision, use that brand name for everything.
Its especially important for companies to own these branded results. These people doing brand name searches must have heard about you or already visited your site. Return visitors and visitors who were referred to your site by a friend are much more likely to purchase products or take the action you are looking for.
In one case with a travel company I'm working with, their brand name isn't unique so there is competition. In this case I found it is helpful to use a geographical identifier i.e. 'Ride Em Cowboy Travel - Montana' which differentiates from the 'Ride Em Cowboy Travel' company in Texas, for example.
Great review, Danny. We get variations of this question a lot in Q&A.
One I'd add, that people sometimes don't think about - link to partners and sites you trust when they mention your brand. Say, for example, Distilled had a page or post announcing their partnership with SEOmoz. SEOmoz might want to help boost that trusted page - it'd never outrank the main SEOmoz site, but it could get boosted up to #8 (let's say) and help fill out those Top 10 SERPs.
Ultimately, it's not about hogging the links for yourself - it's about making sure the ranking sites reflect you in a positive light.
Thanks Danny, it's good to "meet" you. Very interesting how top PPC ads helps click thru rate of #1; the correlations between PPC and organic search is good info.
TGIWBF
you left out the best tool of all! https://namechk.com lets you check availability of your brand name as a username accross every social network site. use it before you decide on your brand name
Hey Danny, thumbs up for being cool enough and secure enough that you incorporated traxor's design advice in the video layout!
I vote that trax should get a month of free PRO.
I had a question for you about today's WBF. When you were suggesting that you "express your brand" so as to differentiate between other identical names, what exactly did you mean?
If you meant what I think you meant, you would add copy to the top of your page, but then I would ask another question.
What could you add to your copy if someone is simply typing in Danny Dover (to use your example)?
I think the point Danny was trying to make was that when someone is searching for a name or brand they are looking for information on a specific person. What you need to do is make that search easier for them by adding copy that makes it easy to immediately identify that the page is about the specific person they were looking for.
Obviously there could be a lot of listings for a specific name but the copy should clearly differentiate between the Joe Smith - Carpenter and Joe - Smith SEO Consultant.
I was interpreting it to mean that it was possible to bump the other person out of the top of the SERPS using copy.
You're saying that the meta description would be the purpose of the copy, and the competitor would still be in the top of the SERPS.
Gotcha.
I double vote this, and can I just say that I am in NO WAY affiliated to "trax", "traxor", "traxor designs" or "luke jones" so this recommendation is completely legitimate and should be taken into account.
Hi goodnewscowboy,
Dthompson1321 is right. I was referring to making it easy for users and search engines alike to understand which version of the brand name the given site was targeting. For a person search this might be "Danny Dover - Seattle" or for a brand it might be "Apple Corps - Music Publishing" (the publisher for the Beatles rather than the Cupertino based company).
OK, that's what I thought you were saying originally Danny. But that would require the user to type in more than just "Danny Dover", they'd have to type in "danny dover seomoz" or like you said above "danny dover seattle".
If the user typed in just "danny dover" then the SERP's placement of your site vs the college student sharing your name's site would remain unaffected.
The user would have to add a qualifier in his/her search for this tip to effect a change in the SERP's.
Now I'm square.
Danny, you forgot to include subdomains! (did I let the secret out?) Having subdomains can help fill out those page 1 placements, and works exceptionally well for a site that has fantastic domain authority.
e.g. StumbleUpon, interestingly, reviews.stumbleupon is currently the #1 listing, as of this posting, when using the site: parameter on GOOG.
(copy and paste the proof below)
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=10&lr=&as_filetype=&ft=i&as_sitesearch=stumbleupon.com&as_qdr=all&as_rights=&as_occt=any&cr=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&safe=images&pws=0
Create subdomains with unique, great content, link out to these from your root site or DubDubDub, and presto! You'll start to see these take over those blue links on page 1, and move down any unsightly links that aren't yours (I mean your brand's).
Subdomains are cost effective, you've already paid for the domain, just add labour!
You're welcome! :)
I was thinking about this just the other day, dominating the SERPs first page just for the brand name, good info Danny, and excellent follow up comments by everyone else, a lot to go on in achieving this ... if there is ever anything else in the 'safe' to drag out I'd happily watch it on another WBF.
Hi Danny,
Really great idea. I'm trying to do it for a keyword, but there's two Wikipedia entries and two Microsoft entries in the first 10 search results.
Do you think its' possible to knock them off so to speak using your technique?
Thanks
I have been working on my name for a while now. Competing against a racing driver on Wikipedia can be quite frustrating at times. Hopefully I can use some of the social profiles to bolster my position in the SERPS.
How can i watch the video?
wistia always problem...
I recommend Christian's tip: subdomains are a very effective way to dominate your personal/company brand SERP.
We're in the middle of creating a second site right now for another brand. I think it's important not only for SEO, but also to help with a client's perception of your company. If you do a little of everything, then you aren't really 'great' at anything. Concentrating on a particular topic on each domain creates a more specialized presence on your site. Niche markets are always easier to aquire than the popularity among the masses.
I had almost beat the trash NYT article out of the SERPs for Carter Cole but them I redirected a spam campaign at myself to watch links and traffic but it think i got a little hit... that stupid result jumped from 10 to 2
LAMENESS!
lol after i looked at it i added pws=0 and they went back down to position 9
This is why I have recently change my name from "Graingerkid" to my actual name here on seomoz.
Question..
Do social media sites perform better the more you use them? As in do you actually have to use digg to rank with it or can you just set up the profile and happy days?
That has not been the case for me but I can think of one side case.
If when you use the social media site more, it causes your profile to get more links from people talking about you, it would potentially cause that page to rank higher.
Guess It makes sense, but even nofollow?
I would say , if we can do some video marketing and Organic SEO along with the above mentioned work which will create a great impact in terms of brand marketing... One single youtube or vimeo video can drive a huge traffic and market your brand...make more visible in front of people. Also if you are coming all the way on search engine specially in Google with multiple keywords it will create a huge brand as well.
Hi Danny,
can you share the source of the PPC + organic = more traffic than just the sum of both info? Up until now I only used this create an entry barrier for competitors (to keep bids low for my keywords).
Yep I want that source too, "increased ppc clicks will increase #1 organic CTR"
I found a source in "Marketing in the Age of Google" by Vanessa Fox (page 12). Vanessas source is https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1491315.Greetings
I've been on the fence about getting Vanessa's book, but this might be the tipping point.
How would you rate it on a 1 - 10 scale Sebastian?
It's more focused on strategie and seo for companys. You can't learn seo tricks or beginner-knowledge with this book. But for businespeople it's great to read. I'm very happy with it.
Thanks Sebastian. It's been on my short list to get for awhile now. I'll probably get it next since Danny's book I ordered from Amazon back in February is still months away {grumbles at Danny's publisher].
Thanks Sabastian (and Vanessa!).
I have seen this work for two of the clients I worked with and heard it repeated at SMX Advanced and SMX Sydney.
My advice is to test it on your SERP and see if it works. There are so many variables that it is possible that it won't work for you but it does work for some people.
Great WBF Danny.
One question: you recommend linking out to people who mention you, but what if they link to you? Doesn't that make the link reciprocal and therefore of lesser value? Would you want to link out only to sites that mention you but don't link to you (or the links are nofollowed)?
Danny,
What do you do about Google's spelling suggestion tool when it happens on your company name? Search for Gotmerchant. Google suggests Goemerchant, a competitor of ours! BUT if you search for Goemerchant, it doesn't suggest us. Tried asking Matt, but no response. :(
Curtis
Great info, i love the site. Rather have text than video but helpful none the less.
Great post, thank you for doing this video!! I have a question, I run all my businesses online but wondered if I should submit my address for those sites like Google Places, Yahoo Local, etc. and still have customers/readers leave positive reviews on there? Thanks!BambiOutImpact.comBambiWeavil.com