OwlBlog
Ross
Monday, 26 October 2009
Who ranks for your brand name?
Type your own brand name into Google and you would hope to come top of the list. You will probably have one internal web page listed underneath the home page to your site. How about the other 8 results which make up the first page of results that appear whenever anyone searches on your company name?
Could this be a problem? Well yes, it could be!
Reputation management is something all companies should be aware of. Most people have heard of horror stories where something has gone wrong for a company (or an individual who works for that company) and the story is picked up and appears all over the web. What if one of these stories appeared on a webpage about your company or an employee, even in a blog or forum post? What if every time your company name was searched on, this negative story appeared in the SERP (search engine results page)? That kind of thing can really harm business!
To head off this potential damage companies have a fair few tactics at their disposal. Firstly, if a brand is big enough then a Wikipedia page will certainly appear on the first page of results, so looking into creating a page would be a good start. However, unless a company is of a certain size then Wikipedia editors will probably pull the page as it may not be deemed of interest.
Social media is another excellent way of taking up results. By having profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and by having real content on these, you can add more pages that remain in your control to the SERP. Investment of time can be an issue here but a little bit of updating can go a long way. To make these profiles more likely to rank in your first page of results you can link from your site into them. LinkedIn also allows you to specify nofollow links to 3 sites - these should include one to your own website and perhaps two other social media profiles.
In addition it is also a good idea to create business profiles on industry specific sites. Along with well-known national directory listings these can rank well and are relevant for other areas of SEO and general marketing purposes as well.
It is also possible for companies to explore the use of other domain names for related projects that will also rank highly when your brand name is searched. BT is a good example of doing this. The top ten search results for BT are all returned as their primary domain, or other brand related websites used to cover their products and services.
The overall idea is reputation management, and being in control of the top results for searches on your brand name. Your brand may not have current issues with reputation management but that is not to say it won’t be an issue in the future. Being on top of the situation before it happens is a lot easier than trying to put fires out at a later date!
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