[Build Backlinks Online] Getting Branded Searches Right - Whiteboard Friday

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Getting Branded Searches Right -
Whiteboard Friday'

Posted by randfish
Ranking for branded keywordsis obviously quite a bit easier than for unbranded
terms, but it takes some thought. We don't just want to send everyone through
our homepages; it's far better to send them to the page that best answers their
query. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers four steps to be sure you're
setting things up the right way.




For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
Video Transcription


Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today
I'm going to talk a little bit about getting your branded search terms right.
Branded search is very important, because when people perform branded queries --
your brand name plus some other modifier, some noun, some information they're
seeking around your company and your brand -- you want to make sure you show up
correctly in the search engines.


One of the challenges here is that, as SEOs, a lot of the time we think about
trying to target queries that can bring us new traffic, which often means
unbranded searches, things where people haven't yet decided what brand they're
going with. But branded search is incredibly important. It actually makes up a
huge amount of volume of Google and Bing and Yahoo's total search queries.


Here I performed a search for ZIIIRO Watches. I'm wearing one of their
watches. I like them a lot. They have a weird spelling. It's Z-I-I-I-R-O
Watches. If you searched for ZIIIRO Watches a few months back, their website was
a little funky. In fact, most of the internal pages weren't crawlable.


I remember when I performed a search for ZIIIRO Watches, the only page that
actually mentioned that they were a watch company, I think it was either their
about or contact page would show up. That was the first page that ranks for
ZIIIRO Watches. That's not ideal.


What you really want to rank there is either their homepage or their products
page that lists all their watches. Those are the two things that I could
potentially see as being valuable, and if it were me, I'd particularly want the
watches page to be ranking, especially if they're expanding into other items
beyond just making watches.


Now what you want here as a brand, when people perform branded types of
queries, is the most relevant, useful page to answer queries about that specific
thing. That's why I said if I were the brand manager at ZIIIRO or if I were the
SEO at ZIIIRO, what I would want is my watches page there rather than my
homepage. The reason I want that is because getting to that information as
quickly, as fast as possible is likely to have the best impact on both my SEO
and on how the visitors will perform.


If I list my homepage there, I'm asking visitors to make one more step to
figure out my navigation system and get to my watches page, or whatever page it
is on my website. I don't like forcing that step. I want them to get right
there. Generally speaking, that can help with things like pogo sticking. It can
help with time on page and engagement. It can help with conversion rate
optimization. It's just the best way to drive traffic through search.


The second thing, you want a title and description right here that's going to
really earn that click. Contact ZIIIRO Watches, phone, address, email form,
that's awful, right? That doesn't entice me. Even if I did want to get in touch
with them, what I really want there is if I put "ZIIIRO phone number" or
"Contact ZIIIRO" or "ZIIIRO Help," "ZIIIRO Support," what I want to see is
something like "Contact ZIIIRO and get immediate help. You can email us, call
us, or one click to fill out our form and get responses in 24 hours or less."


That's what I want the description right there to say. It creates the action,
the desire for me to click that, and the indication that I'm going to get what I
want.


The other thing that I really like doing is making sure that the headline on
the page itself, once I reach whatever page this is, I really want that
headline, the big thing that comes up bold at the top, to closely match. It
doesn't have to mirror exactly what the title says, but to closely match that
title so that I never get that experience of a searcher clicking and then going,
"Wait a minute. This isn't the page I thought I was about to get."


That's a bad experience. That's why I try and make those match up. Then the
description as well, that intent should match.


Finally, the last thing that I urge folks to do here is to have internal links
that point to the pages that are most likely to guide the searcher's next few
steps. If I know that the next steps in a visitor's journey from the watches
page are often to check things out by price group, or to check things out by
color, or to check things out by types of, I don't know, wristband or whatever
it is, I want to make sure that those links are very prominent and easy to
access on the page that I'm showing them here.


What you don't want to do is let the wrong pages show up here, like we have in
this ZIIIRO example. I can actually walk you through a process, step by step, of
ways that I would actually urge every SEO to go through this process either once
a year, or once a redesign, and find all the pages that might be ranking for
branded queries that you don't intend to be ranking there, that you wish weren't
ranking there, and how to change those up.


Step one, you need to get a list of your branded terms and phrases. This used
to be easier than it is today, thanks to keyword not provided. But still, we are
lucky that not provided is only 90% of your Google search traffic.


There are those 10% of queries we can get some of our branded search queries
through there. You can do a filter inside of Google Analytics by performing a
search on the referring keywords. Or you can also do this in Moz Analytics, if
you set up a branded rule for your keywords.


Bing provides you keywords as well. Bing powers Bing.com and Yahoo searches as
well. In the U.S., that's about 20% of searches or so. In Europe, obviously much
less. But you can get some keyword data there.


You can use auto suggest and related searches, meaning I start typing
"ZIIIRO" here, and I hit the spacebar and I see what else populates. By the way,
the auto suggest tends to work better on Google's homepage if you set up "don't
auto send me to the search results page." You can sometimes see more search
suggest on the Google homepage than you can on the results pages.


You can use related searches, which is a box down at the bottom. If I were to
scroll to the bottom of the results, I'd generally see a box down here that says
"related searches" and five, six, seven, eight different queries that I could
look at there.


You can also use your internal search query data, of course. You can use
things like Google AdWords, the AdWords keyword tool. The challenge there is
with a lot of low volume searches, which many of the longer tail stuff in the
brand tends to be lower volume, it can be challenging to figure those out via
something like AdWords.


Step two, we're going to depersonalize and search. We're going to take the
keyword that we're looking for -- in this case ZIIIRO Watches -- and we're going
to form a search query just like this, "Google.co.nz". Why am I looking in New
Zealand? I'll tell you in a sec.
"search?q=ziiiro+watches&GL=US".


Why this weird search query format? Well, what's happening here is that if I
go to Google.com and I search for ZIIIRO Watches, I can add something like
"&PWS=0" to the end of my search query, which will depersonalize the results,
but it won't remove the geographic bias.


What I really want to see is no geographic bias when I'm performing these
searches. To do that, I take myself out of the country, out of the U.S., into
New Zealand, and then I put myself back in the U.S., thus removing any
personalization that comes from geographic biasing. You can do this with

.ca, .co.uk, dot whatever. It doesn't actually matter. I like generally doing it
with a country code that matches the language you're searching in, though.


By the way, when you do this, if you do it in a new incognito window, meaning
you're not logged in, you don't generally have to worry about also adding
"PWS=0" to remove personalized results.


If applicable, go to step three. Applicable meaning you need to localize. If
I'm searching, for example, and I want to see how this looks in Seattle,
Washington versus Portland, Oregon versus San Diego, California or Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, I can actually use the "&near" parameter at the end of a query
like this to see what it looks like in a specific geography.


You don't have to, by the way, go out to New Zealand to do that. You can just
search in regular .com. Then I can see what search results for people near
Seattle, Washington, or I think you can also now use near equals a ZIP code if
you want to get that granular.


Then your job is simply to list the non-ideal results and start fixing them
one by one. So I take a list of these keywords that I've got, a list of any of
the search results that I didn't particularly like, and I prioritize based on
how much traffic I'm either getting for that keyword, how much search traffic
that landing page is receiving, or how much the estimated volume might be in
something like AdWords.


Now I've got a prioritized list that I can run through and say, "All right,
got to fix this one. These three look good. Got to fix this one. These four look
good." For that process, you can refer to some other Whiteboard Fridays that
I've done on how to get the right result ranking for the search query term
you're looking for. Generally speaking, it's not going to be that hard when it's
a branded search term.


All right, everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday,
and we'll see you again next week. Take care.


Video transcription by Speechpad.comSign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly
mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad
links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff
you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/vEoT3Tta6Kw/getting-branded-searches-right-whiteboard-friday

You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com