Whiteboard Takeover - Branded SEO for Page 1 Domination

Posted by Koozai

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

The Koozai team are taking over the SEOmoz Whiteboard today with Mike Essex and Samantha Stratton presenting on effective techniques for controlling branded term searches. So if you want to stop negative press, counterfeit goods and bad reviews appearing for your product or brand name searches we will show you how. So for more sales with Page One Domination, watch on:

Video Transcription

Howdy SEOmoz fans. Today's video is brought to you by the Koozai team, and we're taking over the SEOmoz whiteboard to show you how to make more money for brand term searches. Now, we're calling this presentation Page One Domination because that's effectively what it is.

You want to dominate your brand when people search for it online in order to make more sales. You don't want people to see negative reviews, bad comments like, "I hate this product." You don't want to see affiliates on there taking money or a cut off your sales, and you don't want to see counterfeit goods on there taking money away and misleading your customers.

Bad PR, as well, if that's on there for your brand term search, you're going to damage customers' perception of your brand.

Now typical SEO, we will optimise for short tail and long tail keywords to get people to our website initially, which works really well. But the problem is that if they've never heard of your website before, they're going to go back and research you by putting your brand in the search engine.

What they see at that stage is a little bit out of your hands, or at least it's thought to be. But what we've seen is that by having strong profiles registered on other properties that are optimised for your brand terms, you can inject extra content into here to push these negative entries down.

In this video, we're going to show you how to do that and how the top brands in the world do it as well. What we've done is research the top hundred companies to see how they have positive page ones. We've drawn up a list of ten different strategies that you can use that I'm going to go through now in order.

At the bottom we've got videos. Now these are really at the bottom of the list because they're used less frequently, not necessarily because they aren't as good as what is to come next. There is definitely a time investment here, but videos are fantastic for when the search engines want to show multimedia content and results.

When people search for your brand, Google doesn't just want to show them text links. In fact, for any search now Google wants to show a nice mixture of content. So if you can have a video entry in here, it will make your brand look more interesting for the people searching for you, and it's better content for the search engines to show. Videos are absolutely worth doing, and it doesn't just have to be a boring corporate advert. You can also show people using your product to help demonstrate the effectiveness of it, or you can have fun videos as well, educational videos about what you do or that help your industry niche.

Videos are the first step. Then we've got industry profiles. Industry directories would be a great example of this or local directories as well for people searching in your local area. Registering them as well allows you to have a nice bit of corporate information about your brand that you control as well. So they're nice, safe profiles that brand well.

Then we've got voucher websites. Now people always want a bargain. It doesn't matter what the product is or how cheap it is or how expensive it is, if I can find a website that will save me money, I'm always going to search for brand name plus vouchers in the search results. What you want to do is make sure that it's your website that appears for that type of search. If you register your brand name plus the word vouchers, that's a good way to be there every time. Also, you can give vouchers away to other voucher websites that are out there in the industry. So see where your competitors have got them or just see extra voucher websites that rank well for the term "vouchers."

If you don't feel that you want to give people any money off your product, the voucher could literally just be free postage and packaging or a 30-day trial. Something that you probably offer already could just be repackaged as a voucher.

Then we've got niche websites. These are things like bloggers talking about your product. Your typical blogger engagement here is to go out and find the bloggers who are talking about people and things in your niche, then give them your product to review. Give them your information about your product as well so they can post it on their sites. Keep them informed in what you're doing, and the more times they reference your brand, the more chance they've got of appearing in this set of results for your products.

Next up we've got social profiles. We've got Twitter, we've got Facebook and there's LinkedIn. I've grouped them all together here because it seems to be a little bit random what Google will show. The nice thing about social profiles is you control the content. Also, if people search for your brand and they see a social profile with a company that's engaging with their customers and it's got a lot of fans, that helps build trust in the research stage and will help them come back to your website to make that all important sale.

Then we've got our customers. We mentioned earlier that customers can actually be a bad thing. Customers can write bad things about you and they can damage your brand. They can also write good things about you as well. They're the type of entries that we want to seek out. We want to search for our brand name, find people who are saying nice things about us, and then optimise those profiles so they rank higher, and that's what Sam is going to show you in the next step of this video.

Number four, we've got financial information. This is something I rarely see companies doing, but which is really, really effective, which is why it's so high. If you're a limited company or you've been trading for a while you've already got publicly available financial information, so just provide it to the likes of The Financial Times and other financial websites to track things like share prices and company profits. It'll rank well, and also if your company is performing well, that will help add extra customer confidence when they search for you.

News is another one which can be bad for you, but which can be good as well. One thing I always recommend is to always have a press release in reserve that is positive. Write up a press release that isn't time- specific, that could go out any time of year or maybe even in a years' time. Then if someone publishes a bad piece of news about you, you just submit your good piece of news through PR services. It gets picked up over the Internet, and then because it's fresher than the other news stories, a lot of the time it will outrank them straightaway and you can push that bad news down before it's even been read.

Number two, we've got Wikipedia. If you search for most one-word, two-word generic phrases, a Wikipedia page is what will appear. This is the same concept. It's a very generic term even though it's a brand name. So Wikipedia entries appear almost all the time when you search for big brands. They are hard to get, but it's really worth trying to get one, asking people to create one for you, adding citations, maybe even doing things for charity so your company seems a bit more worthwhile to appear on Wikipedia will help. Fundamentally, it's the second most important step on here. So try, try, try to get a Wikipedia page whenever you can.