You're likely already familiar with optimizing your site for specific keywords. You may have a list of specific
keywords and phrases you're targeting, or you may be more in the "add amazing content and see what happens," camp. However, the idea of optimizing for branded keywords may not have crossed your radar. Branded
terms are words or phrases that are specific to your company. They often include your business name,
but also may include certain trademarked product names or your website name. For Apple, some
examples of branded terms might be:
Apple
Apple Computers
Applecom
Apple dot com
Aple (a misspelled version)
We want to rank for these branded terms because there are three main types of search queries: informational (e.g., looking for answers to a question), transactional (e.g., looking to make a purchase), and navigational (e.g., looking for a specific company).
People who fall into the third category are specifically looking for your business or website. If your site doesn't show up in the first few spots in the SERPs, your competitors will be benefiting from these branded searches. Fortunately, ranking for branded keywords isn't fundamentally different than ranking for more generic keywords. Here are four tips for ranking for your own branded terms.
1. Build up citations.
While it's obviously important to build up high-quality
links to your site, non-linked mentions ("citations")
can be just as important, particularly for locally-
based businesses. When Google sees a website with
many citations, it recognizes your website is an
ongoing concern, active and current, and therefore
worth being in the search results.
One of the best ways to build up these citations is to
register your business with big data aggregators
like Factual and Acxiom. Local search engines
(including Google) license data from these
aggregators to populate their own index with
business-related data. So, if the data they have is
inaccurate, your local search listings will also be
inaccurate.
Other ways to gather citations include:
Getting your business listed in local directories
Getting mentions in local blogs
Getting listed in Yelp, Yellow Pages and Yahoo
Local
If you're currently being outranked for your own
branded keywords by other local businesses, try a
tool like the Local Citation Finder. After plugging in
your keywords, the tool will return a list of all the
citation site listings for the top-ranking pages.
Related: Position Yourself as an Authority, and
Watch Business Boom
2. Keep your Google My Business listing
up to date.
Considering the entire right-hand site of the SERPs is
often dominated by Google maps and business
listings, you'll definitely want to make sure your
business name is listed here. You can enter or
update your Google My Business listing here.
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When adding or reviewing your listing, make the sure
following elements are in place:
Make sure your business is properly
categorized.
Ensure your NAP (name, address, phone
number) are consistent with your other listings
and citations.
Add relevant photos to jazz up your listing.
Include business hours and methods of
payment.
Encourage customers or clients to leave
reviews on your listing.
3. Optimize your social profiles for your
brand name.
To dominate the first page of the SERPs for your
brand name requires a number of different
properties ranking for those phrases. Rather than
focusing all your efforts on optimizing your
consulting business, share the love with your social
media pages and profiles as well.
Make sure you've built up some solid citations in Yelp
and other local directories. However, you'll also want
your social media properties to rank (preferably
below your main company website).
The most important thing you can do to get
your social media profiles and pages ranking for your
branded keywords is to make sure your usernames
and page names explicitly state the name of your
business (no abbreviations or clever word plays). You
can also include your branded keywords within your
social media bios and page descriptions.
Google+ was the social networking site of choice for
SEO but I find Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even
Pinterest are far more valuable these days. While
links from these sites may not carry value in terms of
"link juice," getting these profiles and pages to rank
on the first page of the SERPs means more valuable
search real estate for your brand.
Related: 5 Tips for Staying Out of the Spam Folder
4. Do on-site optimization of your branded
keywords.
There's no substitute for using your branded
keywords in strategic locations around your site. This
will mean using your business name, website name
and trademarked product names in:
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Your title tags. Use the first few words of your
tags to describe your business (using your
generic keywords), and include your brand
name at the end of the tag.
Where relevant, use your brand name in your
header tags, meta descriptions, alt image tags
and URLs
Reference your business name in your website
and blog content, where it fits naturally
Your blog is key to improving your organic branded
keyword rankings. For example, our company is
known online as the " Payments Blog," which we
optimize for. We are consistently adding useful,
topical content that's of interest to our audience.
Create blog posts and other types of content
dedicated to discussing what it is your company does
and who you are. We are constantly putting up
information relating to the keywords we're going
after.
Within this content, include mentions of your brand
name or other branded keywords. Due to semantic
search, Google will begin to associate those branded
keywords with the services and products you provide
-- even if you don't explicitly make that connection
within your content.
If you're not ranking for your branded keywords, you
could be losing all that valuable traffic to your
competitors. Using the four strategies above, you
stand the best chance of ranking for your business or
website name, and other branded keywords
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