Dominating for your Brand Name in Search Engines

The idea of SEO is for your website to appear higher up in the search rankings for your desired keywords, or at least the keywords that will deliver you the most traffic. Ranking for your brand name is a great place to start. In most instances when someone types in your company name, you should be ranking relatively high up anyway, if not, then there’s plenty of SEO work that needs to be done.

But what about totally dominating the first page or even the second page as well with your own branded properties? That means, whenever someone types your name into search engines, not only are they presented with your website, but also your social media profiles, reviews, news stories, directory listings, and much more. This kind of domination will only serve your brand well. But how can this be quantified? What are the real benefits of brand domination within the SERPs?

First of all, you’ll be the only brand that ranks for your name, which means that no competitors or unscrupulous brand hijackers will be able to out-rank you with a fake website, a false social media profile, or even bad reviews.

This brings us onto the second point. Your brand is your most important asset, so when someone attempts to harm this, it can have disastrous consequences, especially if a bad review or a negative website begins to rank well for your brand name. There’s nothing worse for a potential customer of yours to type your name into a search engine, only to find your website listing sandwiched between negative listings.

Whilst this is beginning to sound devious, it’s actually far from it. This is not to advocate that your business can deliver a poor service or supply terrible products, and then just sweep the negativity under the carpet for potential customers not to see. Your business should always operate in the right manner and deal with any criticisms levelled you way. However, if you have dealt with negative feedback, bad PR, negative reviews, counterfeit sites, stolen domain names, or damaging forum threads still persist in the SERPS, then dominating for your brand name is a sure fire way of knocking such negative listings from these SERPs.

So, how is this achievable? Through the art of SEO. Spend time focussing on optimising other properties that contain your brand name. Things like social media profiles, blogs, videos, company news and press releases, as well as positive customer reviews. Obviously this is going to take time, but its time worth investing, as a SERP that contains positive listings for your brand name can be the difference between someone clicking on your site or not.

With search engines placing more focus on brands, ensuring that yours is well optimised is essential. You may have noticed that search engines like Google now have larger listing for brand terms, with added mega site-links just to further dominate the SERPs. This is all good news for you and your brand. However, to get to this stage, you need to work on your branding efforts, and that includes dominating for your own company name.