Businesses spend a lot of time and money in building a brand. From an SEO perspective, there are two reasons why you must focus on branding. Firstly, branded search queries are relatively easier to rank for. search engines, including Google, are likely to rank your website on top if it’s your brand that the user is looking for. Studies also show that branded search queries have a higher CTR than non-branded queries.
There are however a few challenges to contend with. Because of the relatively lower competition that branded searches face, it is easier for competitors to influence the search user with content that disputes your business’ claims. For example, a search for a query like “MailChimp” or “Salesforce” can show results containing reviews of these products that are put up by competitors. These reviews could undermine the product to show competing products in a better light.
Owning these brand searches is thus critical to ensure that your branding exercise is not hijacked by competition. Here are a few tips to get this going.
Create content on third party websites
Marketers have little trouble in ranking first for their brand search. However, you have nine other spots in the organic listing on Google that can be hijacked by competitors. To avoid this, it is a good idea to create company pages on authoritative third-party platforms. For instance, a search for “Hubspot” will show results from websites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Facebook and Pinterest that all point to profiles owned by Hubspot. This leaves little room for competitors to butt in with counter-claims about your brand or your products.
Simply creating these pages alone may not be enough to get these pages to rank on Google. To achieve this, it is important to work on a coordinated link building strategy that will make these pages move up the ranks on Google search for your brand query.
PPC ads
Over time, Google has constantly redesigned their search results page to give more primary real estate to paid results. As a result, it is not uncommon for more PPC ads than organic search results in the top-fold of SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages). What this means is that competitors can occupy a slot above your organic listing if they paid Google for this. The only way to own this space is by advertising for your own brand query.
Not surprisingly, a search for terms like ‘MailChimp’ or ‘Hubspot’ will show you two results to their homepage – one from the ad spot, and the other from the organic listing. But unfortunately, this is still inadequate to completely own your listing. Competitors can still bid for the second or third spot on the Paid results and this can take away a significant number of visitors to competitor pages.
You can avoid this by creating landing pages on multiple domains and advertising them all for your brand search. If you are targeting the mobile web, you may also advertise the Play Store or App Store link for your app. If your mobile analytics shows a lot of search coming for app-related queries (example: “GPS app for Android”), then you may also create content targeting these queries and advertise them.
This shoots up the ad costs for competition and acts as a disincentive. While this may not completely protect you from competitor ads, it is still a viable strategy to keep most of your search users on your own websites.
Content marketing
Branded search queries do not stop with just the search for your brand name. Prospective buyers also lookup several other related brand searches pertaining to your pricing, reviews, and alternatives. Given the long-tail nature of these keywords, it is not realistic to rank for all these terms with just your homepage or third party profile pages.
Content marketing is an effective strategy to tackle this issue. This refers not just to your blog content, but also your YouTube channel, Facebook posts as well as guest contributions you make on related industry blogs. With hundreds of such content pages, it is possible to rank prominently for your related brand search queries.
Similar to your website SEO, it is a good idea to build backlinks for all these third party platform pages as well. Google typically restricts the number of search results from any one domain to two per result. Building backlinks to all your third party platform content is a good way to get all these pages ranking for your long-tail brand searches.
Customer reviews
Sometimes, Google tends to show your business profile prominently on the right side of its brand search results. This is usually the case with big brand businesses. These business profile boxes also contain links to reviews posted by users on the Google business page. Invest resources in capturing reviews from legitimate buyers on your Google business page. This allows prospective new buyers to get a real-world account of your product or service and helps them make an informed choice about your business.
As your business grows, the volume of visitors coming to your website from branded queries is only expected to increase. With the right strategy, it is possible to make sure that visitors who come to your website off such queries continue to trust your business and convert into paid customers.
Online visibility is essential for building a business. Being seen on the web directly leads to business and brand growth which is what makes the acquisition of new website visitors so valuable, especially today when the competition is very high.
One of the best ways for increasing your website traffic is through a joint effort of content marketing and SEO. The collaboration of these particular fields has provided us with all kinds of strategies and techniques getting more and more people to visit your website. In a sea of different possibilities to incorporate, one stands out for being extremely effective – the Skyscraper Technique.
What Is the Skyscraper Technique?
in 2015 Brian Dean first described The Skyscraper Technique in a case study where he explained how he discovered a method to double his organic website traffic in just two weeks!
Over the years, the Skyscraper Technique has been replicated many times along with some minor tweaks and embellishments. Still, the core of the strategy remains pretty much the same which is to find content with lots of backlinks and create a better version with a goal of collecting a portion of those backlinks.
The Skyscraper Technique plays on our psychological tendencies to be attracted to the very best and finest. The idea is that people will take a look at your improved version of content and will feel inclined to enrich their page with a link to yours. Following that logic, the more obvious it is that your content is superior the better your chances of acquiring a backlink are.
How to Execute the Skyscraper Technique Properly
In the last four years, many have tried to replicate Brian’s method and managed to increase their website traffic profusely. Ryan and folks from Creative Live used it to promote an infographic on calculating your freelance hourly rate which resulted in over 70 000 new page views along with just under 3500 new subscribers.
That being said not everyone was able to reach similar levels of success. Such is the case with Olga and her team at Chanty. In an in-depth post-mortem, they described that missing the keyword was the critical point that completely derailed their Skyscraper link building attempt. It’s clear that a lot of it has to do with proper preparation and execution.
1. Discover the Right Candidate
There are several characteristics that will help you make the right choice for your brand when deciding on which content you want to compete with. First and foremost, explore top-ranking content that is relevant to the services you’re providing. This will ensure that your efforts will attract the right type of audience for your brand, meaning they’ll be more likely to become your clients or customers.
Use Google Search to find content that is already performing and ranking very highly for a popular topic relevant to your niche. While exploring various topics, analyze the number of backlinks to a high-performing piece of content using SEO tools such as Ahrefs or SEMrush. Acquiring a backlink profile for a particular page will help you determine the number of backlinks, where they are coming from and some other useful metrics like URL and domain authority.
The key factor that should help you decide should be the sweet spot between the number of backlinks a content page has and the perceived room for improvement. If you are able to find a piece of content that has lots of backlinks but you’re confident you can produce something significantly better – you’re on the right track!
2. Create a Tempting Alternative
Now that you’ve narrowed down the topics and the competitors, you can work on creating a superior piece of content that will provide a more up to date, richer and more insightful experience for the readers.
Some of the characteristics that make a piece of content more appealing are length, freshness, structure, design and rich media. However, all of these factors need to contribute directly to the quality of your content. Adding 5 lukewarm tips to a pretty extensive list just to make your version longer will actually hurt the quality of your article!
The most important thing is that your content does a better job of presenting the topic to the reader. Your main focus should be on providing them with a unique perspective and revealing valuable insights in a way that’s truly engaging. If you’d like to learn more about how to make engaging content – click here!
3. Reach Out to Your List of Targets
The first two steps will set a framework for your success but only by doing quality email outreach will you be able to realize its full potential. From the backlink profile you’ve acquired in the first step, you can create a list of targets for your outreach campaign. You’ll need to explore all pages that have linked back to the content you’re trying to top and find people are the decision-makers for those particular pages.
When reaching out, explain why you’re doing so, provide a link to your superior content, clarify what makes it a better fit and ask them directly to refer to your link instead. Getting the right formula will take some time and effort but always be mindful of the fact what’s really in it for them.
And don’t get discouraged if you get negative responses – it’s just a part of the process. The Skyscraper Technique is in its essence a numbers game. This just goes to show why you should target content with lots of backlinks in the first place!
Final Thoughts
The Skyscraper Technique has proven its value through many different case studies. Still, it’s not exactly hard science and lots of aspects are context-related making it very difficult to write an overarching bulletproof guide. Additionally, lots of different external factors will contribute to the results. If you’re just starting out and don’t have a large online presence and a strong personal brand it may prove to be less effective and more difficult.
The great thing about it is that it guides your content but in no way limits what you can do with it once you’ve finished the process. Good, quality content is a useful marketing asset in and of itself meaning you can gain value from it in more ways than one. There are other ways in which you can promote it or even repurpose it. Whatever happens, if you’re flexible and resilient – none of your work goes to waste!
Web Moves is excited to begin collaborating with the American Society of Pharmacovigilance. ASP is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit biomedical and healthcare network with membership open to all healthcare professionals nationwide. Its primary mission is to rapidly and dramatically reduce the high rate of suffering and mortality due to adverse drug events in the US. ASP represents the unity of different areas of expertise coming together to have a bigger impact on addressing the fourth leading cause of death in the US.
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As most of us (hopefully) know, one of the greatest problems facing our planet today is pollution. Tons of carbon emissions and immense trash heaps drown the environment, and this problem only increases with the population. We continue to create more and more waste, and fail to find an effective way to manage it.
But what does this have to do with Google search results?
Well, there is another kind of waste hiding beneath the headlines, impacting our daily lives: digital waste. This “digital waste” clouds up our search results, inhibiting us from finding the answers we need.
Google uses a variety of highly complex algorithms, with simple and often adorable code names (like Panda or Pigeon) to bring us results for each query we make. Googlebot constantly crawl public websites and add them to the system index. These sites are ranked on many factors to determine where they appear in the results page. The most important factors include technical aspects, popularity of the site, quality of the content, and age of the site. Google’s algorithms mostly produce accurate, relevant results from authoritative and trusted websites, and everyone’s happy. However, in specific types of searches this system fails, leaving us with stale results, feeling frustrated.
Stale results pop up when the older, authoritative sites are shown by Google, even when they are offering outdated, maybe even inaccurate information.
Let’s look at some examples.
Here you would like to know the shortcut for taking a screenshot on your mac computer, so you search “how to screenshot on mac.”
A good landing page could increase conversions by up to 300%. Stop directing people to the homepage and drive them towards targeted content! This infographic will help you to put together the perfect landing page – from tips on message prioritization to CTAs – that’ll foster engagement and grow your revenue. (more…)
