Type your brand name into Google. Like what you see? If you’re not being active about managing your brand online, you probably don’t. Even worse, other people could be making your brand look bad. Try Googling the keyword ‘Qwikster’ if you want to see what I mean.
Now take a look at the image below. If your brand keywords look like the one on the left, we’re going to take it to the one on the right. Nice, right? Let’s figure out a way to dominate Google for your brand.
Disclaimer: Google is always updating it’s algorithm. Keyword stuffing, thin content, buying links and unnatural language just won’t cut it anymore. These techniques are not quick fixes to help you rank higher. This is a way to help you protect your brand and increase your authority when people search for you.
Before You Get Started
Before even worrying about protecting your brand keywords, make sure you have them clearly defined. There are many companies that buy multiple domains and names linking to the same site. Not only is this confusing for the customer, it looks bad in search.
For example, below a company is known as MTP parking but has the domain LongIslandCityParking.com and MTP nowhere to be seen in the title.
Free Site Links
If your website and domain are operating correctly and have been around for a while, Google most likely has given you site links. These links are determined by the most internally linked to content on your website. Usually this is determined by your navigation.
If you have links that don’t make sense, you can request for Google to demote these links via Webmaster Tools. They will then remove that link and promote the next most internally linked page. To make these look even better, be sure to give all your pages semantically correct title tags and meta descriptions.
Go Local
Search is going local with Google. This is making it easier than ever for local small businesses to compete with the big guys.
Your brand will show up first if people are within a 40-mile radius of your business or type your location name with your brand keywords. For example, try typing in “Joe’s Pizza New York.” To get started, visit the very convenient Google My Business page.
Don’t forget to ask your customers to give you reviews on your Google+ Page. If you don’t like the reviews you have now, the best way to get rid of them is to bury them with positive reviews from your best customers.
Become a Publisher
Google Authorship may be dead, but the Google Publisher tag is alive and kicking. Your Google+ page and latest post will show in search. You simply verify your domain and then add the rel=publisher tag to your site. It’s a simple two-step process and only one line of HTML.
Claim Your Social Pages
Claiming all your social pages is not only great for brand protection, but having profiles on Twitter and Facebook linking back to your primary domain will give you great search authority.
Even if you’re not going to be active on a particular network, it’s not a bad idea to claim those pages and save them just in case. A great tool to check availability and see what’s out there is NameChk.
Buy Your Brand Keywords on Adwords
Even if you have not budgeted for competing for non-branded keywords, you should budget to buy your own keywords. Google Adwords does not sell ads to the highest bidder. Adwords uses your bid calculated with a quality score to determine which ad shows first.
If your site contains your brand keywords such as, “Joe’s Pizza,” and your competitor is bidding for, “Joe’s Pizza,” and their site does not contain those keywords, they are getting a low quality score.
You can also further dominate the whole page by adding a giant birthday cake of ad extensions that Google now offers. These include site links, mobile app buttons, call buttons, and more. For a complete list visit the Google Adwords support section.
Going Forward
Protecting your brand in search is only a small part of a sound strategy. The above assumes that people are already aware of your brand and searching for your keywords to check you out. Using great messaging and optimizing these results will protect your brand and increase your overall authority.