Owning Your Branded Keywords In The SERPs
Branding is a vital part of every business and in the digital age, effective brands are about much more than the logos seen on packaging and business cards. For many businesses the first point of contact that they have with their customers will be their website, and the way that those customers are going to find your business will most likely be by using the search engines. This makes the keywords that they will use to find your business online one of the essential links in your marketing plan, and having a good SERP ranking for the branded keywords that your customers are likely to use to find you can be an effective way to generate sales.
The most obvious brand keyword that you will want to own in the SERPs will be your business name, and for new enterprise start-ups, it is vital to check online to see who it is that you will be competing with for your business name, and ultimately, your brand. While your business name may be unique in your location, or even in the country, on the World Wide Web you are competing with thousands of other businesses worldwide and your choice of business name may not be as unique as you thought that it was. The same can be said about any trademarks that you own on the products that you are selling. The best way to discover how much competition there is for these fundamentally important keywords is to look at what the search engines turn up for those terms.
The sites that turn up at the top of the SERPs (assuming that they aren’t your pages) will be your main competition for the branded keywords that you want to use. Look at their websites and see how they are using the keywords to determine if you can do it better and gain an edge over them. If the brand is mostly being used as image titles or as links to sales pages on the same site then you could leverage some of their page rank in the SERPs by using the same keywords in your headings and in high quality content like review articles. The higher-quality content attached to the keyword will give it more authority and the search engines will rank it over the lower quality links to catalogue pages.
For established websites it is possible to examine the keywords that people are already using to find you online and seeing how many are brand related. If all of the top referring keywords are generic to your niche and there are no brands among them, then it may be that you are either not mentioning those brands enough in your content, or worse, that you haven’t branded any keywords on your website at all.
The next step is to use a keyword analysis tool like Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool to see how much competition there is for your brands as keywords. While this may produce predictable results for most of the larger brands, it may also provide some surprising insights into which brands you have very little competition for. It will also generate a list of associated keywords, many of which may be brands as well, and these may be useful to support the main keywords that you want to rank highest for in the SERPs.
Taking ownership of almost any branded keyword is possible by persisting with solid SEO for that word or phrase that is also based on good quality content. For assistance with taking ownership of your brands as keywords you should contact InfintechDesigns.com to design an SEO building campaign for your business’s most important keywords.
