Author: Neil Patel / Source: Quick Sprout If your business is not a brand, it is a commodity. ~Donald Trump So maybe not everyone is a
If your business is not a brand, it is a commodity.
~Donald Trump
So maybe not everyone is a massive fan of the prez these days, but you can’t deny he knows a thing or two about branding.
And I think we can all agree that online branding is incredibly important.
This is especially true if you’re in an already crowded industry, where being identified as one of the premier brands can literally make or break you.
Gaining a high branded search volume is just one of the ways companies come to prominence and build a strong reputation.
But how do you do this?
How can you increase the number of branded searches your company receives?
In this post, I’m going to cover some fundamental strategies you can use to achieve that objective.
I’m also going to discuss some of the specific benefits of maximizing your branded search volume (besides the obvious benefit of building brand equity).
What are branded keywords?
First things first.
I think it’s a good idea to quickly point out exactly what branded keywords are to make sure we’re on the same page.
Serps.com defines a branded keyword as
any keyword that contains the company name or ‘brand’ that you are working with. If you were the SEO for Pepsi, some ‘branded’ keywords might be, ‘pepsi’, ‘pepsi cola’, pepsi.com’, and so on.
In other words, a branded keyword search includes the name of your brand or some variation of it.
The benefits of branded searches
Why should you put the effort into increasing your branded search volume?
Will it really make that big of a difference?
In short, yes. It can have a significant impact.
In fact, Rand Fishkin of Moz, in his Whiteboard Friday last year, discussed the big rewards of influencing branded searches.
Here’s a screenshot of some of the key benefits:
Of course, there are the given benefits of improving your brand-related ranking and increasing conversions.
But what I really found interesting is that gaining more branded search volume can potentially improve your rankings for non-branded queries.
While this was only speculation from Moz, Rand brought up an excellent point.
Here’s another screenshot that explains his logic:
And this logic totally makes sense to me.
If you can get your brand to appear in a high volume of searches along with a particular unbranded phrase, it’s reasonable to think that Google could associate your brand with that phrase and deem it highly relevant.
In turn, your rankings could improve across the board.
The bottom line here is that receiving a large number of branded searches is a very good thing and can provide your company with a major boost on many levels.
Do everything possible to increase your volume of branded searches.
The way I see it, the following strategies are your best bet for accomplishing this.
Work “cross-departmentally”
Rand makes another great point in his Whiteboard Friday video mentioned above.
According to him,
We’re going to have to work pretty cross-departmentally in our marketing teams to be able to make this happen because some of the best tactics require things that SEO doesn’t always own and control entirely.
In other words, it’s important to branch out and spread your tentacles to several different areas of marketing.
Some of which aren’t even online.
Here are some ways you can do that.
Create curiosity
Let me ask you a question.
What’s the most straightforward way to get more people to search for your brand on Google?
It’s simple.
Make them curious about your brand so they take the time to do a branded search.
But the bigger question is: “How do you create curiosity?”
That’s where things start to get a little tricky.
Rand actually suggests using old school offline techniques like TV, print, billboards, etc.
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