Branding and reputation are everything in the business world. Businesses work very hard to make sure their brand is perceived by their customers in a certain way. When a business comes in at #3 on SERP, with competitors coming in at the #1 and #2 spots, then adjustments must be made to correct such branding problems.
When this happens, it is time for a serious investigation into what is causing these results to determine what needs to be done to solve the branding issues.
1. Understanding Client’s Requirement
Our client not only wanted to rank at #1 on the query for brand name, but also wanted to have all of their website pages on the first page of SERP. So it was a matter of taking over the whole first page for this single brand.
2. Analyze the Situation
In order to perform an analysis of the situation, first we needed to figure out what brand names actually were ranking on that first page. If any of the website pages were under investigation, then we can just ignore those for the time being. We asked the following 3 questions about the pages ranking for brand.
- How similar are the brand names that are ranking?
- How many backlinks do those pages have? How many come from brand name as anchor text?
- Is the brand name mentioned in prominent places of web pages (like title, content, etc.)?
When you find these answers jump to next step.
3. Create a Plan of Action
Once we had the information we needed, we took steps to correct the problems and achieve the desired SERP rankings.
- We decided to have only a few (2-3) website pages in top 10 rankings.
- Register for social media profiles and get them in top 10 rankings.
- Work on establishing a presence on authority websites and get them in top 10 rankings.
(Reason for this action plan was considering Google’s domain crowding factor)
4. Getting Plan into Action
We have taken the following steps to change SERP results.
- The brand name was integrated in the content, the title, the header tags, and the Metatags.
- Targeted keywords were used for internal linking.
- The brand name was integrated as an alt tag in the logo.
- Build the footer by integrating the copyright line and the brand name.
- Used schema.org formatting to integrate the address and phone number.
- Created a Google place account.
- Google authorship was also configured.
- Updated and improved all appropriate social media profiles, and linked them to the website. Choose Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, etc.
- Distributed content to relevant websites in the form of PPT, Videos, white papers etc.
- Improved or created new profiles on authority websites and created backlinks to the main website. Choose yelp, yellow pages, squidoo, crunchbase, etc.
- Used the brand name for anchor text, and created quality backlinks from chosen authority sources.
Conclusion
It took approximately two months to see the positive results of our action plan. Within that time, the first page was filled with our client’s web pages, social media profiles, and authority sources which booted their competitors to lower ranks.
Have you done similar job? I would love to hear your strategy, and what you have done differently in the comments below.
Altaf is a Founder and Partner of Eminent InfoWeb LLP. He is passionate about compete Digital Marketing, but is handsomely experienced with Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Usability and Web Analytics.