Branded keywords are an often overlooked aspect in SEO marketing. As SEO continues to evolve, it is crucial that businesses thoroughly understand and begin to adapt to the ever changing landscape. This includes incorporating branding activities into online marketing.
While some website owners may question as to why they should have their sites optimized for branding keywords, below are some points to consider.
1. Randomly placed branding keywords are no guarantee of targeted traffic. The goal of SEO is to produce more targeted web traffic. In order for that to happen, the branding message needs to actively direct that traffic. This is more easily accomplished when the most essential branding keywords are used deliberately in SEO.
2. Branded keywords provide a way to get web visitors to the most relevant pages in connection with their search. When a user is searching for a particular kind of information, they will appreciate the much better result of landing directly on the page they are looking for. The best keywords provide that capability.
3. Better user experiences equals more chance at conversion. When your site is most obviously a logical destination, the user will have a much better experience when they can arrive directly from the search engine results page to the one they were looking for in the first place.
4. Web visitors are impatient. It is a given that web users often might give up on a web site if it is too much of a hassle to find what they are looking for. That’s SEO 101 and why you want to be at the top of the search engine results. Using branding keywords can eliminate the chance that an extra click may distract or deter a visitor, since they won’t have to deal with that.
5. Branded keyword optimization is critical for e-commerce. Each page on an e-commerce site should be designed for the convenience of the visitor. Again, its SEO 101 that to ignore the fact that sloppy pages will be annoying and abandoned is suicide for e-commerce. Each item product page should be optimized by model and other identifying numbers and brands, so that consumers have no trouble finding what they are searching for.
6. Search engine results pages are more easily dominated with branding keywords. Each time a search is conducted for your brand, as much as possible, the content in the search results should be controlled or owned by you. The company website comes first and then internal pages. Properly optimized pages that include quality links and are promoted well, will produce the best results.
7. Brand keywords will bolster web traffic through external sources. This will include social and local profiles, blogs, articles, press releases, videos and interviews. The result will be much higher search engine rankings.
8. Protect you online reputation. Branding keywords are sometimes easy to highjack with piggyback content. Take action to incorporate keywords into as much of your content as possible. When your pages dominate the search pages, there is less chance that any negative press will surface.
Traditionally, many online companies have heavily relied upon the usual SEO strategies to market their websites. However, as brand authority continues to rise in search engine results, it is well worth the time for all businesses and marketers to leverage branded keywords for the best marketing results.
About The Author: John Zwissler from AddMe.com – AddMe is a resource for free search engine submission and online marketing tools. Try our free search engine submission and subscribe to our bi monthly newsletter.
An e-commerce site MUST have branded keywords in order to be found easily in the SERPs. I’ve tested this both ways, and there really is no reason to not use the brand in the SEO backlinks.
Thanks for the great post!
Showing the right product to the right person at the right time is one of the most important factors in a successful e-commerce website.
Yes, It’s important that you have the best keywords for the visitors to find a appropriate goods or services they need.
For example a common branded keyword used for ‘cotton swab’ is the company name ‘Q-tip’. Your using a company’s name or product that has been branded.
Looking at your site’s aggregate organic search traffic is a bit like docking a boat without a depth sounder: Sure, you can gauge where you need to go, but you’d be wise to have more details before you head in.
on that same tack, we should have more detail about our overall search traffic before we use it to make decisions. First and foremost, this bucket of attention can be divided into two groups that we need to watch differently: branded and non-branded traffic.