I touched on brand and branding last week, and I want to follow up a bit more on how your brand affects your website. It powers over basically everything else. Do your technical SEO correctly, get your branding right, and you’re going to get the ranking you want. The hard part is getting that branding where you need it.
Here’s an example: back in 2012, Dollar Shave Club came up with a hilarious ad that turned them into a household name. The video ad went viral, making them one of the top search results for the word “shave”. That’s phenomenal! It’s still ranking like that today, all on it’s branding. The amazing thing is when you look at their website, it’s a dog’s breakfast. Very messy, lots of subdomains, just a pile of junk. I’m pretty sure this hasn’t affected their rankings; it’s all about their brand exercises.
BloggersSEO is another site that’s ranking, despite not having the best technical SEO on the site. But it ranks because it’s popular, and that can mean a lot of things. Popular can mean high search volume, lots of mentions on social media or lots of clicks on the site itself. Google adds all that together to consider a site’s popularity, before adding it to the ranking results.
What we’re telling everyone now is firstly you need to take care of your technical SEO. You’ve got to get that right. But after that, you need to work on your content. That could be an ad, it could be blogs, it could be articles. If you’ve got deep pockets, it could be television or radio ads. The important thing is to work on your branding, and keep the work consistent, associating your brand with the thing you want to rank for.
Jim Stewart is a leading expert in search engine optimisation. His business StewArt Media has worked with clients including Mars, M2 and the City of Melbourne.
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