Recently there have been many discussions about the impact of brand searches on SEO. People have been wondering if their site will be negatively affected by showing up for branded keywords/phrases. What are brand signals? How important is it to have a strong domain authority and content quality scores when it comes to having a successful online presence? Let’s take a closer look at these questions and hopefully shed some light on this topic.
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What Are Brand Signals In SEO?
When Google crawls sites, they assign a “domain authority” score based on certain factors to make sure good content ranks at the top. These factors include how many links point to the site, if it has other sites linked to it (backlinks), and the domain’s age. Back in the day, all you needed to do was buy a bunch of backlinks to rank for something. Nowadays, it is much more difficult with Google Penguin updates that have become much stricter about penalizing people who are trying to boost their rankings by buying or earning backlinks from low-quality or inappropriate sources.
Brand Signals In SEO
Many times when someone searches for a product or service online, they will include the brand name before finding results. For example, one might search for “Apple iPhone 5” instead of just searching for “iPhone.” The reasoning behind this can be traced back before internet marketing was well-known and established. If you wanted to find information on a product, the best way was through word of mouth or by finding people who had already bought it.
Why Do People Search For Brands?
One reason that has been cited is that they want to see how others feel about the product/service before trying it out themselves. This can be especially true for expensive purchases such as cars and houses but also applies to discretionary spendings such as electronics and fashion brands. People want to know what others think of it before heading down and spending their hard-earned money at a store.
Importance Of Brand Searches In SEO
Many marketers have asked this question: will having strong brand signals in SEO hurt my rankings? The answer is that it depends. What are your intentions behind having a website? If you want to be ranked for keywords outside of the brand, then these factors will have no effect on your rankings.
Important Brand Signals For SEO
Having one or more of these signals will not hurt your site’s rankings but could help if they are strong enough. Exact match domains will also have an advantage in terms of ranking because there is no question as to what the site/page is about with them. If someone types in “Cars” into Google, it would be logical for them to click through on car-related results, like Cars.com. However, results like NewYorkCExposed (https://www.newyorkcexposed.com/) would not stand a chance of ranking highly for the keyword “Cars.”
How To Increase Branded Searches And Traffic?
There are several ways to help push your site up in the ranks for branded keywords research, but there is also data showing that it might be more difficult than it sounds. The best way to do this is to build quality backlinks from other sites. If you want to get serious about it, one company has advocated using Wikipedia as an easy place to get links if you can legitimately reference them on their site. Of course, this will take some work and time before you see results.
Bonus Tip: You Can Run Google Ad Your Competitor Brand Keywords
A great way to get brand traffic is to do pay-per-click (PPC) ads with Google Adwords. By typing in your competitor’s brands and seeing what people are searching for, you can figure out the key points about how to interact with their target audience. Then, by creating ads that align with this knowledge, you can ensure that you will be seen as one of the top choices for these searches.
There You Have It
Brands are important because it gives an indication of what a site is about through different signals such as Facebook page likes, official LinkedIn company page, brand mentions on top stories, unlinked brand mentions on other sites.
Having strong brand signals might help rankings but not necessarily. There are other ways to help push your site up rankings for branded keywords; one is by building high quality backlinks from websites that matter. You can also use Google Ads to gain traffic through competitor brand keywords.
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