How To Protect Your Brand In The Search Engines - Some Dos and Don’ts
Many established online businesses still rely heavily on the Internet’s gatekeeper, Google, for traffic. So much so, that whole industries have sprung up to help business mangers optimise their site to suit the world’s leading search engine. Search engine optimisation throws up some interesting new challenges and opportunities. But rather than give away all our secrets (such as they are!), we invited friend of Arena and search engine optimisation expert Pascale Perry to write a guest post about how to manage your brand in this brave new world.
Search engine optimisation involves maximising the visibility of a website to draw-in relevant visitors. Consider it a spot on the high-street. If someone goes out wanting to buy some shoes, you want your shop to be the first shoe shop they see on the high street (or first on the Google search results page for the term ‘shoes’).
But grabbing the attention of the willing but brand neutral consumer is not the only reason to be visible. Some people go to the high-street with a specific brand in mind. They come intentionally to you, expecting a good brand experience, to reinforce their loyalty (or cement it if they have doubts about you).
A similar effect is seen online. Google’s search box has become fairly synonymous with the browser address bar. You want to visit a site, you want to experience its brand or products, but can’t remember the exact URL – “hmmm…was it ShoeLand.co.uk or .com? Google will know…I’ll just type in ‘ShoeLand’ and see what I get.”. 76% of UK searches are exactly this: navigational (source: Hitwise, April 2008). And how a website appears in the search space is the first message these potential consumers see.
The message shown below the title, called the page meta description, is a nice attractive, “beautiful, fresh flowers” all over the UK on Arena Flowers’ search result.
The ‘UK’s leading online florists shop’ makes a consumer feel confident.
This is a relatively simple tag to insert into a webpage – and although doesn’t affect the visibility or ranking of a site, it does play a role in click-through to a site, since it presents a message about your brand and the page being linked to.
For some brands, this message gives an opportunity to combat negative press reports that rank alongside the brand itself in a brand search (result 4):
A similar example of negative news ranking highly for a brand name famously happened in the flower business not so long ago (result 3):
Such unfortunate situations have lead to the emergence of a new theme in search engine optimisation, known as “brand reputation management SEO”. This involves careful consideration of the results pages for brand searches and attempts to ensure that as many as possible of the results in the first page are controlled by the brand and present a positive message.
Here, Nestlé has used a specially-created sub-domain which appears amongst negative content for the search term ‘nestle baby milk’ (result 3).
This is a clever tactic to make sure that Nestlé has a chance to get its message across about a particular issue.
For brands not facing controversy or negative results in the listings, it is still important to get the messaging right in the results listings. The search landscape is part of the brand experience and most sites get the lion’s share of their search traffic from brand terms. Whether on a conscious or subconscious level, research indicates that the meta description is part of the consideration set of a consumer when deciding which search result to click on and it is an easy opportunity to give consumers a good experience even before they walk through the virtual door. Savvy brands use this space to try and increase click-through to their site:
This space can also be used to complement any brand paid search copy to ensure that appropriate messaging is displayed to consumers with a variety of different search intents.
Where some sites fall down is by building multimedia ‘Flash‘ sites rather than plain HTML sites. Flash sites can offer a more dynamic experience but can’t be read nearly as easily by search engines. This often leads to unintelligible meta descriptions showing in the results:
Similarly, websites with a navigational splash or landing page need to think about their meta descriptions in order to send a more attractive message to the searchers:
Whether or not a site has an optimised, meta description may not currently impact the site’s brand traffic, especially if people are using search purely for navigation. Brand search, however, is going to get increasingly complicated for marketers since the landscape of this type of navigational search has just changed. Google lifted its trademark policy yesterday (5th May), allowing companies to display ads besides searches for competitors’ trademarked brands - eg you type Sainsbury’s into search and get paid ads from Tesco appearing. Having competitors visible for searches on your own brand increases the importance of making sure that a strong, confident brand message is being displayed in the natural search results to prevent these competitors getting any of your search traffic.
Filed under: Guest Posts, Marketing, Matters Webby on May 6th, 2008
Shows just how complex the whole SEO game is.
And it’s not just technical, but as you show, it’s social and behavioural as well.
Bit concerned about the trademark lifting, as it means those with money can essential muscle out smaller competition.
Although at the end of the day, how the search engines rank sites will continually change to (hopefully) reflect importance correctly. So hopefully money won’t be able to purely affect things.
Great article.