A brand SERP is the results that Google provides when a user searches for your brand name. A digital strategy is how a brand positions itself in the online ecosystem.
I’ve been talking about branded SERPs since 2013. I’ve learned that a branded SERP isn’t just a “nice Google business card”.
When you incorporate SEO into a brand’s existing digital strategy, you grow the brand’s SERP and digital strategy in tandem, and dominate your niche.
Why are brand SERPs important?
Exact match brand name search results are Google’s evaluation than that brand’s audience will find most useful, relevant and valuable.
This means that the brand’s SERP is your guide to what’s right and what’s wrong with your digital strategy. It allows you to focus on the right elements and use SEO to help “educate” Google.
Instead of letting Google feature your brand, make sure the brand SERP represents what you want your audience to see.
This article will focus on the main points common to most branded SERPs.
How to analyze a brand SERP
Enter an exact brand name, view the search results, and follow these steps.
1. Always start at the top
The first result should be the brand website with rich sitelinks.
If the name is ambiguous or keyword-focused, your job is to foster Google’s understanding and trust in the brand.
For most businesses, the starting point will be something like this:
The home page looks good, but the rest could be better.
The quality of the titles and descriptions gives you great insight into the structure of the site and the quality of user-centric pages such as About Us, Contact Us, Login and Category pages.
Fix those first. Google’s understanding of site structure and content is vital to all of your SEO efforts.
We often see structural issues manifest here. For example, the site is in the wrong language, there is no About page or an unimportant article.
Type of bonus: See the Schema.org implementation. If the website has not used AboutPage, ContactPage and other types of web pages properly, it is a sign that the company has chosen to focus on rich visible results that impress the boss.
Quality, consistent Schema.org markup across your site is essential to ensure Google has confidence in its understanding of your brand.
Rich sitelinks provide incredible insight into the improvements needed for an effective digital strategy.
2. Look at the social profiles that rank
Which social profiles appear in a brand SERP depends on multiple factors, but user engagement on each platform is the most important.
Let’s say your client is investing heavily in a Facebook strategy, but Facebook isn’t ranking in their brand’s SERP. This indicates that your strategy is not engaging enough with the relevant audience.
In this case, a critical analysis of what, how and with whom they share and engage will generally provide insights that will assist this strategy.
The Facebook profile will rise in the ranking as the strategy gains traction. This is a good KPI for the social media team.
Kalicube’s Twitter charts show that we have a strong and effective Twitter strategy, and our Facebook ranking (with reviews) shows that we’re doing well on Facebook.
While user engagement is a priority, make sure the brand focuses on the right platforms.
Look at competitor brand SERPs. If TikTok rarely ranks in brand SERPs for this cohort, but LinkedIn almost always does, you can assume that the company’s audience spends more time on LinkedIn than on TikTok. Resources spent on LinkedIn are more likely to yield direct returns.
3. Watch videos
Is the client investing heavily in YouTube? If so, your YouTube channel should be listed with a well-marked video box and thumbnails.
Disney has video boxes on its SERP brand. But the layout is inconsistent because the videos come from multiple sources. Even his channel offers a video with a sub-optimal thumbnail.
4. Look at review sites
Start a service review strategy. Get company and customer service reviews on the most relevant and valuable platform in this niche.
Platforms like Trustpilot dominate, but these big players aren’t necessarily the most effective for any particular market.
For example, Serenata Flowers, a UK flower delivery service, has over 200,000 reviews on Trustpilot and a good rating. It is placed in fourth position.
But then there are three coupon sites, two with good star ratings from reviews. Track and nurture these sites as they are visible in the brand’s SERP.
A quick note: Your customer will also need product reviews and the relevant platform will be where they collect service reviews.
But don’t make assumptions. Conduct an independent SERP analysis of the product brand.
Get the daily search newsletter marketers trust.
5. Look at news sites
In some markets and industries, news is simply not a “thing” because information is perennial (or at least stays fresh for several months).
In others, it is a top priority because the information is time-sensitive (for example, financial industries) or voluminous (for example, entertainment industries).
Your client’s brand SERP may not have news boxes, but that doesn’t mean news isn’t important in the industry.
A brand SERP cohort analysis (just that “entity equivalents”) will tell you right away if your client’s PR strategy should focus on trending topics or if they can take things more slowly.
It will also allow them to focus on the right four or five news sources instead of the scattershot approach. This saves a huge amount of money.
6. Watch “People Also Ask”
If there isn’t, your client has a problem. 70% of branded SERPs have people-also-asked (PAA) questions.
If Google can’t think of any questions their audience might ask, then they don’t understand your client’s audience and the relationship you have with them.
If Google shows PAA, check if the questions are relevant. Create a FAQ section on the website and answer them clearly if the site does not have the answer to the questions.
Here, Ubigi (a client who has implemented our process) has answered all the questions and they have absolute control over the PAA in their brand’s SERP.
If some of the questions are off-brand, they are topical questions critical to the customer.
The customer must answer the questions because Google sees the relationship between the brand, its audience and the topic and expects an answer from you. (This is lovely news. Google is improving its brand understanding.)
7. Look at the filter pads
Filter pills are clickable pill-shaped icons that appear below the search bar in search results. They offer great insights for your strategy.
Users can inspect different parts of the brand in different verticals. They are Google’s version of a word association game.
In the case of Kalicube, our audience is interested in Kalicube Pro, the Kalicube Academy, and our Knowledge Nuggets video series.
Then check the related searches below. These pills indicate more areas of focus for digital strategy.
Our partnership with WordLift is something Kalicube needs to focus on. We should continue to communicate about “The Kalicube Process”. Google understands Kalicube’s topic authority in the Knowledge Dashboard and Knowledge Graph space. (We can see this in the “kgmid” and “entity home” filter pills).
8. Is there a knowledge panel?
A Google Knowledge Panel is a search results feature that provides a concise summary of information about a company, person, or brand collected by Google from a variety of credible sources. It’s Google’s understanding of the facts about your brand.
If the business doesn’t have a knowledge panel in their brand’s SERP, they have a big problem. They are not in Google’s Knowledge Graph and Google does not understand who they are.
A knowledge panel is a “must have”. Without understanding this, Google cannot assess your relevance to an audience or assess your credibility (EEAT) as a solution to the subset of its users who are your audience.
You’re at least a year behind on your digital strategy without an insight dashboard.
I’ve talked and written about this hundreds of times and won’t go into detail here.
Focus on the entity’s housing, consistent corroboration and signage.
9. Look for the generative experience
Search Generative Experience (SGE) is already a focus for most SEOs. The key to managing SGE results is to view them as dynamic knowledge panels or highlights of various elements.
Whatever form Google SGE and Bing Chat take, one thing is clear: this is where we see the SERP summary.
Both Google and Bing aim to condense the information behind the results to save users time when researching.
Instead of clicking five or six links, reading the pages, understanding the information and remembering it all, the answer engine (SGE/Bing Chat) gives the user an accurate, useful and useful summary.
Google’s summary of your brand will usually be positive. A negative summary means that the company has a significant online reputation management problem.
Here’s an example of a brand that does it right.
Cedreo has a clear, simple and accurate description, its website on the cards on the right, plus two relevant review sites and great follow-up questions that lead users along the customer purchase journey.
They have a clear and robust digital ecosystem that is the minimum goal for every brand.
10. Mark SERP pages 2 to 10
Reputational issues aside, the real information is found in positions 20-100 of the search results. This shows that you are doing poorly or not doing as well as you could.
If you’re investing in video, but YouTube results aren’t near the top of the SERP, you’re wasting resources.
If you’re pushing customers to review your business on Trustpilot and it’s ranked 30 or lower, there’s a better platform for your market.
If the article about your company in Forbes is in position 20, then Forbes was not the most relevant public relations publication.
Either the writing wasn’t well focused, or you didn’t communicate the most valuable information to the reporter.
If you want more opportunities to improve a digital strategy, analyze the brand’s SERPs for “{Brand} reviews” and focus on those as well.
A sustainable digital strategy for brands
This article is a quick and easy overview of how a brand SERP identifies key issues and prioritizes different aspects of a holistic digital strategy for a brand over time.
As an in-house, freelance, or pure SEO agency, it can be difficult to reach interested parties:
Social media managers, website developers, content creators, marketers, customer support and brand managers to collaborate on anything, let alone agree.
Branded SERPs are a huge opportunity because it brings them all closer to representing the overall strategy together and has a shared KPI that is a fundamental part of SEO.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
[ad_2]
Source link
