Branded search results represent who your brand is and what you do. It is vital from a business perspective to get search engines to display your brand’s message to your audience in the way you want when anyone searches for your company’s brand name. This article walks you through some key insights from our recent webinar with a panel of expert speakers, including Brand SERP Guy himself,
Jason Barnard.
3 Types of Branded Search
The three broad categories of branded search are:
- Exact Match — otherwise known as a brand SERP, this is how your brand appears in a search engine when someone searches your brand name either to navigate to your site or find out information about your business
- Branded — this category is based on how your brand appears for purely informational search queries related to what you do
- Product — these pages are what users see when they search for commercial queries about products or services
Brand SERPs - Informational and Navigational
For large brands, exact match results are often navigational, which means that the search result for that brand presents links to various pages on the site. The reason for the search result being navigational is that when searching for well-known brands, such as Facebook, searchers typically just want to go straight to the website.
For lesser-known brands, exact match results have a more informational slant. The search engine provides information about what the brand does. This information often comes from services like Google My Business.
In either case, the brand SERP represents the search engine’s understanding of your brand and your relationship with your audience. Among the three types of branded search, it’s helpful to start by optimizing how your brand appears in exact match search results. Getting well-optimized for exact match results provides a solid foundation for any other types of branded search queries.
Who Are Branded Search Results Important For?
All three categories of branded search - exact match, branded, and product, are important for the following three parties.
- The A-list of people who really matter to your business. These people include clients, prospects, investors, and partners. Think of your branded search results as a business card for your company to get an indication of its importance for this group of people. When searching for your brand, if the search results don’t look credible or professional, potential prospects, clients, and partners might consider other businesses.
- Google (and other search engines) also see brand search queries as important. You can think in terms of these search results being the search engine’s opinion of how the world sees your business. If Google thinks you have strong expertise, authority, and trust (E-A-T), your branded search results will look great.
- Branded searches are important to you as the owner or stakeholder of a business. These pages give a window into your digital ecosystem by informing you about what search engines think you’re audience is interested in and what’s important about your business. Diving deeper into pages two and beyond of search results can provide great information about what you’re conveying to search engines about your brand.
So, what can you do? Start with the brand SERP and work to educate Google so that it builds your brand SERP to serve your audience the way that you want. This means thinking about your site and its pages (about page, Contact Us, etc), your social media presence, your content strategy both on-site and off-site, reviews, and PR.
Search Terms That Contain The Brand Name
This second category of branded search queries includes post-funnel and bottom-of-funnel searches, such as “Brand X Revenue”, “Who Owns Brand X”. Approaching this category from a question and answers perspective proves useful because you can start to think about the questions people ask about your brand and answer them on your website.
The actionable strategy here is to get a dedicated FAQ page on your site that answers all the questions you can think of about your brand and your products or services. Organize this FAQ into categories so that users can easily find the question they want to answer. Make the answers collapsible by default so that users aren’t inundated with thousands of words on the FAQ section.
You can also create How-To Videos and product/service demonstrations. By making these simple changes, you’ll start to dominate organic results, featured snippets, and People Also Ask sections for search terms that contain your brand name.
Commercial Branded Search Queries
These search queries are for products and services that brands sell. An example is “Adidas Stan Smiths”. To optimize well for these queries, you need to treat your unique products or services as entities. An entity is a well-defined concept that you can link to a knowledge graph. The interesting thing here is that when viewing products or services as an entity, you loop back to the first category of exact match brand SERPs. The optimal SEO strategy for commercial branded searches is, therefore, to build a great brand SERP, or entity SERP, for all of your products or services.
Quick Wins for Branded Search
To round things off, here are some quick wins for improving your branded search results:
- Fully complete your business listing in Google My Business and in any other search engines that have similar services
- Get a basic site structure in place with actual content on your About and Contact pages
- Audit the schema on your site’s pages to make sure there are no technical errors. Schema is a type of microcode that provides search engines with extra information about your pages, which they can use to provide rich results
- Look at competitors’ branded search pages and other industry leaders who have rich, professional results and use what you see as inspiration for your own branded search strategy
- Post about business promotions and other announcements on Twitter and any other social media streams that appear for your brand
