Branded search, presenting results of an experiment

Last Friday I had pleasure of presenting at one of Calgary’s social media regular gatherings organized by McQ Design and called Social Media Breakfasts Calgary (#SMBYYC). Check Social Media Breakfast to learn more about the initiative. I absolutely loved the venue, the audience and atmosphere, and I’ll definitely recommend you checking these events out in the future.

My presentation was spread between the following 3 topics: branded search marketing, social networks and online reputation management. My goal was to outline the importance of branded search as well as give some practical advice on how to perform well in branded search. Here it is in a nutshell. BTW, the presentation is now on my online marketing presentations page.

What is branded search?

It’s an activity of searching for specific company / brand names using major search engines. When does it happen?

• “heard something about your product and want to know what it’s all about”
• “know what it is, I’m ready to buy, just need to buy it”

Why is branded search important?

Because branded search activity happens very late in the conversion funnel, and, as a result, leads to much higher conversion rates. Let’s take a look at an example: standard decision making process:

1. we come up with a problem
2. search for alternatives
3. evaluate alternatives
4. make the decision
5. evaluate the decision

As consumers we do general search for general key terms at step 2. We do branded search at step 4. I hope you get the point. Let me know if you have questions in the comments below.

Taking branded search for granted

As many other things in life, we take branded search for granted. We say “why do we need to pay attention for branded search if we’re already #1 in Google for our company name?”. It’s true, especially if your company name is karamba123. However, there are other listings on the 1st page of Google and what are those?

• Are they relevant to your business?
• Do they describe your business positively?
• Can you control those listings?

Do social network profiles help your branded search presence?

Most of the social networks we’re using today do not pass Google Juice or authority to your site. However, some do, and when this happens, your site can greatly benefit from a link from one of these social network profiles. Moreover, bigger social networks rank very well for branded search. So, having a profile with the right social networks can not only add some Google Juice but also improve your branded search presence.

My little search experiment

• My goal was to answer the question: what are the top social media properties that rank well for branded search terms?
• My methodology was as simple and included 3 steps:
  1. Choose local people with strong social media presence
  2. Perform Google searches for each person (brands in this case) and tabulate the results
  3. Go through the lists of properties and identify the common
• My results were the following 9 social networks that are well worth maintaining for the sake of controlling your 1st page Google rankings.
  1. Twitter
  2. Linkedin
  3. Facebook
  4. youtube
  5. Slideshare
  6. Meetup
  7. Friendfeed
  8. Business Exchange
  9. Flickr

The reason there’s only 9 is two-fold: 1) because the 10th is hopefully your site, 2) I lost one in data manipulations and could not find it for the presentation.

What are the lessons?

There were three simple lessons I wanted to share. And my hope is that these will help you improve your branded search presence.

1. Choose the right social networks to manage. Some of them are worth it, some of them aren’t. Please don’t leave your social network if it’s not part of the 9. If you have a community of people that you enjoy, by all means, please stay, make conversations, help people, share some value.
2. Cover the 1st page of Google with your brand properties. Treat Google’s first page as the first point of contact with your brand. Let the people connect to your Facebook page right from Google’s result page. This will make their life so much simpler.
3. Have control over the listings on the first page. Make sure your snippet titles and descriptions are in line with your brand / product. Ideally, you should be able to control, in most of the cases you don’t though. Do you want me to clarify this point? Just ask me in the comments.

Bonus link: at the end of the presentation I shared a bonus link to a page where SEOmoz team recommends a list of SEO friendly social networks. There’s a short list of 25 and there’s a long one of over 100. I’m not saying that you should have a profile in all of those. Choose which ones work for you and those that host your community of interest.

Next steps

And, of course, the next steps. These are the things you need to do to get started on improving your branded search presence.

1. Search your brand, company name, product name using Google or Bing. Is your brand on the first page? What are the listings that surround it?
2. Review your social profile inventory. What are the networks that you currently participate in? Are they on the first page?
3. Create profiles with SEO friendly social networks (if you haven’t done so already). Use my list of 9, as well as SEOmoz’s lists of 25 and the one that’s over a 100.
4. Make sure your control titles and description of the listings. If your Facebook page Google listing describing your business, product properly?

The presentation is available now. Take a look, follow the notes, do the next steps and, please ask questions in the comments. Let’s collectively find a better way of doing things!

Special thanks for making this happen go to: Chett (for introducing me to such a great event), Jane Waye (for organizing such a great event), Alex Poda (for emcee-ing the event), Aaron Krootje (for THE wake up call), AlexKGT (for being there). If you were at the event, please feel free to leave a comment or as questions. If you missed it, I look forward to seeing you at the future events!

How Google ranks tweets and insights on real-time search

Just read an article by WebProNews called “Google reveals factors for ranking tweets“. Below is a few key points and a bit of reflection.

Bing on the number of followers

Here’s what Bing said on the matter: “If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower”. But it’s not just about how many followers you get. It’s about how reputable those followers are. In other words if I have a lot of spammers following me, it’s bad. If Oprah follows me, I’m good ;).

Google on real-time rankings

According to WebProNews Google’s real-time ranking system is similar to its link-popularity system. As in the case with Bing, the more authority your followers have, the more authority is transfered to you and your tweets.

Here’s a quick note for those who over-uses hashtags. According to the article, hashtags are considered spam-y by Google. So refrain from using them too much. I was actually going to write a whitepaper on the Art of using Hashtags. Now I’ll have to wait until I know more on the matter. I’m sure hashtags are here to stay, they are fulfilling a purpose. It’s just the matter of balancing and using them properly.

Real-time search going forward

Both Google and Twitter teams collaborate on real-time search and there’s still much to do. The key is to understand that they strive for relevancy of real-time search results. Link-popularity analogy is another great lesson. And although we’ve been talking about Twitter = “real-time search”, it’s not the only source of real-time data. More on real-time search on Google.

Search marketers to rethink Bing

Just read an article about the Bing search engine introducing new search features. The article covers a set of new functions added to the Bing interface. I want to share a few thoughts on how this impacts search users as well as online marketing professionals.

Bing search functionality to a search engine user

What got my attention is the trend of “getting things done with search“. Like many of my colleagues, I’ve been in love with Google (and I still am), and I didn’t think there was much room for innovation left on the front end of search technology. Backend algorithms, on the other hand, should always, in theory, be up for improvements.

The front end of a search is very significant. Now that users are starting to use longer queries and learn the logic of searching, the industry starts to pay attention to additional functionality to optimize the search process and get more things done with a single-query search.

The key is to make it easier for the user. Google is still good but I have a new found respect for Bing. For those of you who’s not familiar with Bing here’s a bit of background info: Bing Search Engine on Wikipedia.org

Bing search functionality to SEO professionals

So, what does this mean to the search engine optimization professionals? Do we need to learn one more thing? Do we just let Bing build a better search tool and then jump in and capitalize on it? Or do we experiment now to be the first to capitalize on these new features? Here’s a few things on my mind and I’d greatly appreciate your feedback or comments.

• Content relevancy: Categorization of the content becomes extremely important as Categories become the first step in the search process.
  • Takeaway: we should be considerate while categorizing and tagging properties within web directories.
• Results browsing and meta information: Now that users pass the first “query” / “categorization” screen they are presented with a number of browsing options. Users now have more information about a single  listing. This means that they don’t need to click (to go to a site) to make a decision about your website.
  • Takeaway: all this information is just meta that characterizes your listing, so you have to make sure that your site / page is properly setup with meta data. Proper use of Webmaster resources such as Google Webmasters, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster has never been of more importance.
• Results sharing: The web is increasingly about sharing. The more you share, the “bigger of a person” you become. Bing gets that and adds sharing functionality to its search results.
  • Takeaway: sharing tools and plug-ins on your landing pages are important. Make sure your visitors can tell their friends about your great product.

This article was originally written by me for Apis Design Inc. Visit Apis Design blog to see more articles on the topic of online marketing.