If you’re searching to improve the amount of organic traffic you generate, you should start optimising for any of your branded keywords.
What is Branded Search?
Branded keyword searches are ones that include your company name as a keyword.
And that’s pretty big. Because if someone is typing your brand name then that means they know your brand. People have already completed their own research and decided that your brand was the right fit for them.
Or it means that the branded ads for your company have reached their target audience and your investment in them is paying off. No matter what the reason, it usually means one thing: these people are willing to invest in something you’re offering them. A service or a product.
This is why your branded keyword search results are important. If you can’t encourage people through your results, or you mention a competitor, you’ll be driving potential sales away.
In fact, today’s most popular browsers encourage users to search instead of just entering the domain name to access a website. When you simply write the name of the domain or the company in an address box, Safari and Google Chrome both provide Google’s search suggestions.
Avoiding Branded Search Confusion
When brands have similar names as each other, some confusion can occur.
And it’s not just in one page of the search results, either. Brand name battles can happen in the other search result pages as well like in the News page or maybe in the Video Results. And this is something that will always happen with brand names that are similar because there’s a guarantee that they’ll be competing over having the same branded keyword.
In this age of digital marketing now, it’s ideal for brands to take more incentive in innovation and creativity so they can avoid confusion in the SERPs. But having a unique bran name isn’t the only way to avoid misunderstanding.
Making sure that your target audience, or anyone searching for your brand, completely understands your brand name is important. How are people going to search the name of your brand correctly if they never understood what it was? Instead they’re going to be typing in what they remember on Google and hoping the search engine can help them out.
But if your brand name is shared… That might be bad luck for you.
Now, it’s not bad to have similar brand names to others but it can make your job in reaching an audience a little harder.
To prevent brand exploitation in the marketplace, marketers should concentrate on brand awareness efforts. Consistently using your brand name will help your audience learn about your presence, which will promote adoption and accuracy.
Brand Monitoring
Marketing firms and data tracking platforms use the phrase ‘brand monitoring’ to refer to the process of identifying brand mentions online.
There are many tools that can assist you in keeping track of these mentions so that you have a record. Your internal team or marketing firm can help increase the frequency of online brand mentions in a variety of other methods.
Although it won’t guarantee the top rank in branded search, brand mention frequency will go a long way. It’s really more about getting your name out there as much as possible, to get more people talking and mentioning your brand in order to enhance the awareness of it.
Optimising For The SERPs
Employing different methods to optimise for the many sectors of search engine results is practically a requirement today. And it needs plenty of resources.
Organic Search Result
Standard search results, commonly referred to as ‘blue link’ listings, have been displayed beneath the search box ever since search engines were first created.
Brands typically use a mixture of both on- and off- site SEO tactics to optimise their websites in an effort to rank near the top of the organic search results. They generally use the brand name as the first element in the homepage title tag to target branded keywords.
Using branded keywords on other pages is often practised as well. So that other pages of the website are also associated with these keywords and also just in case page titles are ever cut.
Organic Local Results
Locally based companies might choose to take up space on the right side of a results page on the search engine. For their result to be optimised, local businesses need to first register and claim their business with a Google My Business (GMB) account.
Once your page has been approved, you can optimise it by adding accurate company details like your hours of operation, services you offer, your address, and more. Both the company and customers that visit your establishment can add images.
Furthermore, you can ask some of your clients can post reviews on your Google My Business page which will appear in the search results.
Organic Video & Image Results
For related searches, brands with YouTube channels can have their videos show up first in the video results page as well as the top of the SERPs. Top-performing videos usually show up in the video results for a brand when their channel name contains their brand name.
Marketers can direct the appearance of images that reflect their brand in natural image results. Similar to video results, brand image optimisation calls for marketers to tag photos with the brand name.
The brand name might be used surrounding the image in text, headlines, or even the page title. All done to further optimise branded photos integrated within content, such as team photos on a ‘Meet the Team’ page.
Conclusion
It takes more work than it used to in having control over every aspect of a branded search and seeing organic results from branded searches will take time. It’s not an immediate fix.
Not to mention the way that branded keywords and general brand search queries will evolve and change over time. So you need to be able to adapt to these changes and make sure they continue to help you gain traffic rather than have a negative impact.
How GrowTraffic Can Help You
SEO is the foundation of all digital marketing strategies. Strategies which will only work in effectively increasing the exposure of your brand and attracting targeted traffic to your website.
And why not get in touch with us if that’s something you’re interested in? We can assure you that we are at least marginally qualified. Well, perhaps more than marginally if our 10+ years of experience and multiple agency awards are anything to go by.
But who’s boasting, really? (Us, maybe just a little bit.)
If you’re interested in what we can do for you, have a look at our services. You can call us on 0161 706 0012 or send an email directly to info@growtraffic.co.uk.
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