The appearance of Google’s first page of search results for brand related queries is very important for your brands reputation. Many people will get their first impression of your brand from a Google search.
By Mark Pitt, SEO Account Executive at Tug
If a user searches for your brand name and see’s a page full of bad reviews, negative news stories and irrelevant content, they are not likely to think of your brand favourably. Take for example, Simplyelectronics.net:
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Doesn’t look encouraging does it? The 1st page is littered with negative comments on forums and answer sites, a Youtube video slating the company, and frequent appearances of the words ‘WARNING’, ‘Beware’, and ‘Scam’ which are seen by the searcher before even clicking on any of the links. If we take another electronics reatailer, newegg.com, we see a different story:
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Even if Newegg’s service were as bad as Simply Electronics’, you wouldn’t know it. Newegg dominate the first page of search results with web properties owned by or influenced by themselves. Firstly, we see Newegg’s internal site-links taking up the first 4 positions, while Youtube, Wikipedia, Twitter and Facebook take up the next 4 spots.
With Newegg’s own properties well optimized and claiming most of the top search positions, there simply isn’t room for any negative comments to sneak in. Essentially, Newegg have near-total control over what user’s see when they search for their brand in Google.
Controlling the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)
So, in order to lay claim on the first page of Google search results, the following should be on your checklist:
Sitelinks
Sitelinks are small links that appear underneath a website’s listing on Google which provide shortcuts to a particular section of the site, like so:
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Site links are excellent for brand reputation because they take up several SERP positions. A website displaying sitelinks can essentially occupy the top 3-6 Google positions, rather than just position 1.
Unfortunately however, site links cannot be implemented at will. Whether or not your website displays sitelinks is determined by Google’s algorithm.
Best practices nonetheless are to ensure that your website is coded correctly, and to use internal anchor text appropriately so that Google’s web spiders discover a structured navigation system on your website. It’s also important to gain authoritative inbound links to your website – if your site has gained high authority itself and is well established, sitelinks are more likely to appear.
Social Media Pages
Regularly updated and well optimized social media profiles on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Linkedin (for personal sites) and Youtube are very likely to rank on the first page for brand related search queiries. This can make it easy for you to claim another 3-4 spots on the first page and cannabolize the SERPs.
One of the keys to helping social media pages rank for brand terms is to tie them together with appropraite html tags. For large brands, this isn’t always needed as Google usually has no problem recognising their social media pages are official due to the large amount of digital markers signalling that this is the case.
For smaller brands however, it is useful to include the ‘rel=me’ attribute in all links to social media profiles from the official company website to inform Google that these profiles are owned by the brand.
Create Pages on Related Company Websites
If your brand is a sub-business of a larger comapny, you could claim another spot in the SERPs by creating and optimizing an informational page on your master company’s website.
A good example of this is Unilever, whose website contains independant pages for all of their brands. Do a quick Google search for Bovril, Marmite or Pot Noodle and you will see Unilever’s page for that brand appear in one of the top 5 search positions.
Reachout to Influential Bloggers
Reaching out to influential bloggers in your online community can help you build a positive brand reputation for review based brand queries. This could include allowing an influential blogger to test out and review your product or service. If your post is placed on an authoritative and popular blog, there is a good chance that their review post will appear on the first page of Google’s search results. This can also give you glowing references from trusted sources.
Respond to Negative Content
If you are seeing negative comments appear in brand search results, be sure to act upon it and give an official response on behalf of the brand. This will at least show that you care about the criticism you receive and that you are making efforts to improve your service.
Remember, the first impression of your brand can determine whether or not potential customers gain enough trust to pay for your service, so make sure you’ve taken the right action to get in the good books of Google’s many many users.
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