Having an interesting SEM discussion about brand specific traffic vs generic SEO traffic on the Moz LinkedIn group http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Please-help-I-wonder-if-2976409.S.5847209123174690819 and Mike Escott an SEO Manager at NetBooster UK is arguing branding traffic is important, basically a backup for if Google downgrades a sites main competitive SERPs.
Branding is a bit of a chicken and egg situation, until you have a popular brand there’s no Google brand traffic to target.
NetBooster UK Brand Marketing Strategy
Brand traffic = someone specifically searching for your brand name or your brand name + keyword. So it’s the difference between someone searching for “T-Shirts” and “Your Brands T-Shirts”. The branded search means that you’ll appear at the top, get a huge CTR and convert higher as people are already searching for your brand. I have no idea what ERP software is or does but the challenge is how to position yourself as the go to authority for people needing advice on that software so they add your brand to their search query.
Mike Escott SEO Manager NetBooster UK
Why Brand Marketing Wastes SEO Resources
This brand SEM strategy is wrong for the vast majority (not all) of small and even medium sized businesses, there’s not enough brand specific traffic for most businesses to warrant spending valuable SEO real estate to target brand SERPs.
To do full on brand aware SEO you need to include your brand name within the title elements (title tags) of the pages targeting a product or service (SEO wise title tags are very important).
On this site I’m trying to sell a WordPress SEM theme called Stallion Responsive (which is relatively new), so that’s my ‘brand’ (sort of). Not many online search engine users even know Stallion Responsive exists, no one is searching for “Stallion Responsive WordPress SEM” or “Stallion Responsive SEM” or “anything Stallion Responsive”, not in great numbers anyway. Even if Stallion Responsive becomes the go to WordPress SEM Theme there will only be a small number of brand specific SERPs worth spending valuable SEO resources on and those can be target directly with pages like Stallion Responsive Theme.
A long tail keyword SERP this site currently has a top 3 Google result for is Whitehat PR Sculpting, this is not a high traffic SERP, the page that’s ranked is a comment I made to a visitors comment asking about conserving PageRank on a WordPress site. The title tag for the comment is “WhiteHat SEO PR Sculpting : WordPress SEO of Categories Siloing” it has the potential for several long tail keyword SERPs. If I took branding into account on this site the easiest way is to append the brand name to the end of all title tags (lots of WordPress sites do this), so the new title would be “WhiteHat SEO PR Sculpting : WordPress SEO of Categories Siloing – Stallion Responsive”.
No one is going to search for “Whitehat PR Sculpting Stallion Responsive” or anything similar, so adding the brand to the title tag of that page is a waste of title tag SEO benefit.
Branding SEO Cost
The article you are reading now for example could have a pure SEO title tag like:
Brand Marketing Strategy
or a brand aware SEO title tag like:
Brand Marketing Strategy - Stallion Responsive
But again no one is searching for Brand Stallion Responsive SERPs.
Why Title Tags Should NOT Include Branding
The title tag SEO benefit is spread over all the keywords, in our pure SEO title “Brand Marketing Strategy” each keyword receives 1/3rd of the SEO benefit in our brand aware title tag “Brand Marketing Strategy – Stallion Responsive” each keyword receives 1/5th of the SEO benefit. Since no one searches for Stallion Responsive SERPs and certainly not SERPs related to brand marketing why would I waste 2/5th of the SEO benefit on those two keywords?
The original poster for the question on the LinkedIn Moz group has a site with brand name ERP Var (I like Mike originally made the error of thinking the brand was just ERP, but it’s ERP Var or ERPVar, still not sure :-)).
Google AdWords Keyword Research Tool
One way to check competition for a SERP is the Google AdWords keyword research tool which provides monthly traffic data and will provide a better idea of what a keyword or phrase is worth traffic wise.
ERP Var or ERPVar – combined monthly traffic 50
SEO Gold (my old SEO services domain) – monthly traffic 70
Netbooster – monthly traffic 4,400
Moz or SEOMoz – combined monthly traffic 150,000
Amazon Prime – monthly traffic 1,500,000
The above will give an idea of what Google search engine users are searching for brand wise.
Targeting Stallion Responsive SERPs, ERP Var/ERPVar SERPs and SEO Gold SERPs are not going to generate any serious Google traffic**. Targeting Netbooster SERPs will generate a little Google traffic, but not much. Moz/SEOMoz are worthwhile SERPs to target. And Amazon Prime the big money SERPs.
** Note however for SEO Gold one of the words (SEO) is a very important keyword for that site, so 50% of the brand name SEO Gold does help with SEO SERPs. ERP Var (not ERPVar) is similar, the site is targeted at SERPs like ERP Software, ERP Consultant etc… (I’ve no idea what ERP is BTW :-)), so again using the brand ERP Var could help with SERPs sitewide. ERPVar wouldn’t help at all. However, if a page is about SEO or ERP it should be optimized for those two keywords anyway, by adding the brand name it adds little extra SEO benefit and what about pages not targeted at SEO or ERP?
Targeting Brand Traffic
Pretty obvious from the above only the last two examples (NetBooster and Moz/SEOMoz) are brands worth targeting. The NetBooster ones OK, but the parent NetBooster company has a turnover of almost 65 million Euros, so profits from 4,400 visitors a month isn’t going to make a dent in their paper clips bill let alone keep a medium size company in business.
I’m a one man band (self employed) and could probably make a nice chunk of change on 4,400 visitors a month if Stallion Responsive specific SERPs generated that amount of traffic, would be highly targeted and more likely to convert, but no site can survive on less than 100 visitors a month (see the ERP Var monthly traffic) just for brand traffic.
What level of brand traffic are you expecting?
Unless a business has a recognizable brand there isn’t any search engine traffic to target. Before Amazon existed no one searched for Amazon Prime, it would have cost Amazon millions in advertising revenue to develop a brand that makes a search like Amazon Prime worth targeting.
When I offered SEO services I traded under the name SEO Gold, the domain ranks number 1 for that SERP (not a competitive SERP), but it doesn’t generate any real traffic, it’s not a recognized brand name: I’d guess few reading this ever heard of SEO Gold, but if you do a lot of SEO research you’ve probably been on one of my SEO sites over the past 10 years or so (maybe my SEO Gold site for the SEO Tutorial series) since they’ve ranked well for search engine optimization relevant SERPs on and off.
The business site NetBooster UK, I’d not heard of until the LinkedIn MOZ thread, never found the site for an SEO relevant search and I do a LOT of SEO research and yet the main company has a turnover of almost 65 million Euros for 2013, some of which must go into marketing the NetBooster/NetBooster UK brand. They offer “Online Brand & Reputation Management” so must spend some serious cash on branding their own business.
According to Google AdWords Keyword Research Tool these are the relevant SERPs that make up the 4,400 visitors:
NetBooster Asia
Reliance NetBooster
NetBooster download
NetBooster reliance
NetBooster media
Download NetBooster
I’d like to see them run a successful business on that one set of brand SERPs if they lost their main organic traffic sources (Google downgraded them for competitive SERPs).
These are not SERPs you rely on. I doubt anyone in bulk is searching for NetBooster SEM or NetBooster SEO or NetBooster Brand Marketing. Visitors are searching for SEM, SEO and Brand Marketing.
Moz Brand Aware SEO
Moz is a recognizable SEO industry brand name, 110,000 searches a month. SEOMoz adds a further 40,000. I don’t know how much traffic Moz gets a month, would guess they’d struggle if they only relied on Moz relevant SERPs, but that’s a healthy chunk of traffic, so branding is important to Moz.
According to Google AdWords Keyword Research Tool these are the relevant SERPs that make up the 110,00 Moz visitors:
seo moz, moz rank, moz.com, www.moz, moz designs, the moz, moz seo, seo moz blog, www.moz.com, seo moz tools, seo moz toolbar, moz bar, moz design, moz metal, moz metals, moz tools, mike moz, the moz blog, moz directory, d moz
I’m familiar with some of these, Moz Rank for example. The AdWords keywords tool says Moz Rank has 720 visitors and MozRank 2,900 searches a month (not a lot of traffic), even with an industry recognized brand the brand traffic isn’t always high (no where near as high as general SERPs like SEO, search engine marketing etc…). The Moz sites page that ranks number one for MozRank has a title tag: “MozRank – Learn SEO – Moz” which is a brand aware SEO title tag.
Does it really need the Moz at the end to be number one in Google for the above SERP? Probably not, but with 140,000 searches related to Moz I can understand why they have a brand aware SEO title tag.
For me, NetBooster UK and the OP of the LinkedIn Moz group question (the ERPVar site) it’s not that important because we don’t have brands that search engine visitors are searching for.
David Law
Website - SEO Gold
WordPress SEO vs Domain Branding?
How does these templates work if I want to use for my branding site? I do not want ads on my branding site so how would the SEO optimization work?
What would you consider the best template for using as my main branding site where I will drive traffic to in order to review and purchase my products
Search Engine Optimized WordPress Themes
The AdSense ads can be turned off really easily, you edit one page and change a 1 to a 0.
Been asked this before so explained it in other comments.
Basically change a 1 to a 0 and remove the Advert widget through the widget editor interface (using widgets is the easiest way to do it).
If you remove the AdSense ads you’ll have a fully SEO optimized WordPress site without ads, this makes no difference to how search engines treat the site, so you’ll get the same rankings either way.
The code of my themes are as optimized pretty much to the max, so as long as you use your keywords when creating posts etc… you should get much more traffic than if you used a standard WordPress theme.
Put another way if you name your posts like this-
What Happen to me Today, Life Sucks!
When the post is really about how your car insurance company screwed you out of an insurance claim on your car that was wrote of by no fault of your own. Then you are not going to get a lot of search engine traffic.
A post about the above should be named accordingly like-
Car Insurance Company Will Not Pay My Claim!
This covers many relevant keywords. Then you use the above keywords and related phrases to enforce those SERPs within the content.
You can see a post of mine
Currently the page is number 5 for the “Direct Line Car Insurance” search in Google.
My SEO optimized themes help well constructed content in gaining better SERPs, but without a little thought into that content and the themes have nothing to work with.
All my themes are optimized so from an SEO point of view they all work the same way (they all use the same code). which to choose is up to you, which themes look most closely matches your sites content? That’s the one to choose.
The Talian theme is one of my favorites, works well with many sites. I use it on a lot of my own sites. Funny really as didn’t like Talian at first :-)
David
Search Engine Optimized WordPress Themes
Generate Traffic With YouTube?
I am curious, do you think there is any potential with Youtube?
This would be to create a video or two a month with a link to your sites? I think many people generate income with Youtube, but I do not know if it is worth it.
I have created only a couple videos and they drive a trickle of traffic. What is I did once a week for example.
However, I guess my question is do you think Youtube is less efficient than blogging? Or just something you have not thought about to tapped into?
Generate Traffic With YouTube?
NetBooster Brand Marketing Agency
Another reason why you do not waste valuable SEO resources on brand name marketing is unless you have a well known brand name the brand specific SERPs are not competitive, they tend to be relatively easy SERPs.
Case in point a few days after creating the Brand Marketing Strategy article this site is ranking well for some of the brands mentioned when searching for brand specific SERPs.
For example “NetBooster Brand Marketing”, currently (March 15th 2014) this site is ranked number 3: number 1 is a LinkedIn NetBooster Company page and number 2 is the netbooster.com NetBooster Agencies page.
When my site became number 3 in Google I didn’t have a page targeting the NetBooster Brand Marketing SERP, closest is a header within the main article: NetBooster UK Brand Marketing Strategy which I was hoping would be enough to get on page 1 for relevant NetBooster SERPs so I could make a comment like this one to prove an SEO point: I love it when a plan comes together :-).
So the article is targeting Brand Marketing Strategy relevant SERPs and by discussing the brand NetBooster the article is ranked number 3.
That’s a really, really easy SERP, it does’n’t need masses of SEO resources to target and this tends to be true for most small brand names.
To put that into perspective the article is no where for Brand Marketing Strategy or UK Brand Marketing Strategy which are SERPs with traffic: didn’t check how competitive or how much traffic, I assume Google users search for those.
Also no where for Moz Brand Marketing or Moz Brand Marketing Strategy because the Moz brand SERPs are more competitive, if I wanted those SERPs it might require an article targeting Moz specific keyword phrases, BUT there’s not going to any traffic in even being number 1 for Moz Brand Marketing Strategy so I wouldn’t spend my valuable time creating a new unique article.
David Law
NetBooster Brand Marketing Agency
Moz Brand Awareness SEO
Spoke too soon on my last comment regarding the Moz Brand Marketing and Moz Brand Marketing Strategy SERPs, under 24 hours later was in the top 10.
Don’t you just love it when Google does that, you check your SERPS for a new page and they are in so much flux for days you’ll get repetitive strain injury from retyping a SERP :-)
So looks like the Moz Brand Awareness relevant SERPs are also not competitive SERPs.
If I can get top 10 rankings for Moz brand traffic SERPs with just a mention or two in an article targeting the main SERPs (Brand Market/Brand Marketing) these are not SERPs to spend valuable SEO resources on.
David Law
Moz Brand Awareness SEO
How to Build a Brand and Increase Traffic
Hi David, I think you completely misunderstood what I was saying. Brand has little to do with SEO, which should be focused on growing non-brand traffic.
If you reread my comment the key part is “…the challenge is how to position yourself as the go to authority for people needing advice on that software so they add your brand to their search query.”
This is not an SEO focused task but an ongoing commitment throughout both online and offline channels. I don’t think it’s a chicken/egg scenario but rather more like planting an acorn, it’ll take time and attention but once it gets going it’ll grow into a really strong asset.
SEO has its part to play in getting people introduced to a brand via an initial non-brand search and this is where a smart content strategy could be of benefit but the context of my advice is that anyone, including the OP of the post in question, whom relies solely on non-brand traffic is at the mercy of an algorithm and those SERP results fluctuate dramatically over time. I see this a lot in year on year comparisons of share of voice. Technical issues or penalties that harm organic visibility are felt the hardest by those smaller businesses who rely on 99%+ non-brand search traffic.
Growing brand traffic helps mitigate this impact and also benefits direct traffic, email open rates and the good old fashioned phone ringing rate too. But this is not a quick in and certainly can’t be achieved in an SEO silo.
So many focus on pouring all their resources into quick results, whether that’s through social, paid or organic, but in my opinion it’s worth taking a longer view and dedicating some marketing resources to growing the brand.
So as a relevant example to you I’ll look at Yoast as he is one of your direct competitors and I know that you believe that your plugin is superior. So looking at Google trends http://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=yoast we can see that consistent searches for Yoast took off in the second half of 2005.
For 5 years branded searches remained fairly flat but in 2010 they started to rise, this trend has been continuing ever since and the 2014 partial data shows a steep trajectory that suggests that this is going to be is biggest year.
Yoast has become a brand and he invests time and resources into growing this. In a market that faces a lot of competition he has remained consistently successful and has overtaken All in One SEO as the ‘go to’ plugin for wordpress users as we can see here http://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=yoast%2C%20all%20in%20one%20seo&cmpt=q
So Yoast is now enjoying about 10K branded searches worldwide a month plus the domination of the top 4 results for the non-branded search of SEO plugin which yields a further 14k+ searches per month. The top result is the wordpress hosted plugin and the next 3 are for his domain. His brand has allowed him to do this, he is seen as an authority for wordpress SEO and gets rewarded as such by Google.
If we then consider his longtail multiplier and traffic from other search engines, social, email and direct then I would say that even if Google dropped him from the top 4 he’d still be enjoying a great deal of success.
I haven’t taken the time to compare your plugin and theme to Yoast or All in One to see which is best but lets assume yours beats them both hands down. This alone is not enough to break through the competition, the only way you can do that is to market your brand and take share of voice away from the top players.
I don’t know what your conversion rates are but I’m sure you’d be very happy with the levels of traffic that Yoast enjoys.
So I hope this makes sense and that I have explained my reasoning behind my initial advice on Linkedin.
All the best,
Mike
How to Build a Brand and Increase Traffic
WordPress SEO Plugins Brand Marketing
I’m very familiar with the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin by Joost de Valk, see Yoast WordPress SEO Tutorial :-)
The Yoast brand is a good example of how to cover brand marketing and SEO at the same time (if that’s your goal).
Yoast is a made up keyword, though it does have other meanings, but I think they are obscure enough to ignore:
If you check the Google Yoast SERP you’ll see a Wikipedia entry to someone called William “Bill” Yoast (American high school football coach).
You’ll also find an Urban dictionary entry for Yoast:
With a made up or obscure keyword you start with no competition for the brand name.
It’s a single keyword so the SEO cost of adding brand marketing is limited, but it is still an SEO cost if you brand a site SEO wise and I don’t think it makes sense to pay the cost for no gain.
The brands main product/services are named in a way where users are ‘forced’ to use the brand name to distinguish the product/service from competitors (other WordPress SEO plugins) when discussing the product/services on websites, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn etc….
The main product is called “WordPress SEO” which is a very generic SEO term, for users to distinguish the WordPress SEO product from other products they will tend to call it:
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin
Yoast WordPress SEO
Yoast SEO Plugin
WordPress SEO by Yoast
etc…
This promotes the Yoast brand with no on site SEO cost (the Yoast domain doesn’t NEED Yoast branding). Had the plugin been called SEObZinger which is a made up word (no results in Google on March 22nd 2014), includes SEO (partially describes it’s something to do with SEO) it could be described as:
SEObZinger
SEObZinger WordPress SEO
SEObZinger Plugin
SEObZinger SEO
etc…
And this takes away from the built in optimization the Yoast plugin has: Yoast will naturally generate backlinks with anchor text including WordPress SEO. Users will say “I use Yoast WordPress SEO” rather than “I use Yoast”: though as the brand becomes really popular the latter could become the norm, Google is a case in point, we use Google, not Google Search Engine when describing our Google usage. Whilst a plugin called SEObZinger could be easily discussed online without using WordPress or SEO. SEOPressor (another WordPress SEO plugin) is equivalent to my made up SEObZinger plugin name. Users are less likely to describe SEOPressor as SEOPressor WordPress SEO, so it looses some of the built in optimization Yoast has achieved.
I used to be number one for SEOPressor Review and it had no traffic.
However this is a chicken and an egg scenario, without a popular free product the Yoast brand wouldn’t have generated much interest. Yoast offered a plugin with more features than the All in One SEO Pack and users switched to it in their thousands for the additional features.
There’s loads of SEO plugins with various names, below are how the plugin authors have named them:
WordPress SEO by Yoast
All in One SEO Pack
Squirrly SEO
SEO Ultimate
Greg’s High Performance SEO
SEOPressor
Scribe
Platinum SEO Pack
Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin
Only two of the ones listed above cover the general SERP WordPress SEO, Yoast and Stallion (that plugins mine). For the record the Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin will never compete with Yoast or All In One because Stallion has just one SEO feature that’s quite technical (you need to really understand SEO to get it). The Stallion PLUGIN isn’t important to my marketing activities, it only covers a very small SEO issue and has had just two updates: first was fixing a small bug, second was adding a couple of features.
To compete I’d need to create a plugin that at least matches what Yoast and All In One SEO offer and I have no intentions of creating a free SEO plugin when I’m trying to promote a premium WordPress SEO theme that’s much better than Yoast and All In One SEO.
My entire effort on the SEO plugin is measured in hours not days, yet the Stallion WordPress SEO article is ranked number 11 in Google for the WordPress SEO Plugin search and 15 for the WordPress SEO search. It’s even in the top 30 for Yoast WordPress SEO even though it’s no optimized for Yoast relevant SERPs**.
** Just edited the article to target Yoast and All In One SEO SERPs as well, so with a little luck we’ll see in a week or two if it makes much difference.
In comparison my time spent on the Stallion Responsive Theme is measured in years!
Yoast WordPress SEO Brand Traffic
All that being said the Yoast SERPs only generate 10,000 monthly visitors with around 2/3rd of those visitors for the Yoast WordPress SEO SERPs despite getting all what I described above right.
Let’s look at plugin SERPs traffic figures related to WordPress SEO using the Google AdWords keyword research tool:
yoast wordpress seo – 2,900
wordpress seo by yoast – 2,900
yoast wordpress seo plugin – 800
wordpress all in one seo pack – 320
I gave up looking below the 100 visitors a month mark and still hadn’t found a SERP related to the other plugins.
Compare this to just SEO looking for a relevant brand (any brand).
seo quake – 8,100
seo powersuite – 4,400
seo analyzer – 4,400
seo spyglass – 2,400
seo doctor – 1,900
None of the brand SERPs are particularly amazing and the brand owners should be ranking top 3 in Google for those SERPs without having to spend much SEO effort.
I’m sure you can read how little SEO effort I put into brand awareness, yet check the SERPs
Stallion Responsive
Stallion Theme
Stallion SEO
Stallion Plugin
All number 1s, BUT they have practically no traffic.
And these had far more competition on the day I decided to use the word Stallion as the product name. I very much doubt I’m in the top 100 for the one word Stallion SERP, though that could develop naturally IF a product/service I developed became a better known brand. But I wouldn’t have to do anything to achieve that, the users would do it for me when linking into my site, so why spend the SEO resources today (2014) for a SERP (Stallion) that has zero relevance to what product/services I’m offering?
If a couple of years from now Stallion is considered an authority in SEO then it might make sense to consider branding, but today the SEO real estate should be spent on generic SERPs.
BTW Not saying no effort should be put into branding. Really all depends on the product/service and the businesses goals, I know my time is better spent on generating organic search engine traffic for non-brand SERPs than trying to target a non existent Stallion brand. If you don’t really have a brand don’t waste valuable SEO real estate on promoting it, it will loose you rankings on the non brand traffic.
BTW2 If a site gets hit with a Google penalty it’s brand SERPs won’t be protected, so doing what you suggest to mitigate future Google penalties doesn’t make sense. On the other hand developing brand relevant traffic from other sources, like YouTube videos, Twitter, direct traffic from other sites, TV/radio/newspaper advertising could.
David Law
WordPress SEO Plugins Brand Marketing
Brand Development SEO Benefits
Hi David,
In my experience penalties are usually much more granular and don’t affect brand searches. For brand to be penalised you’d be looking at a very severe penalty which has resulted in the site being deindexed, these are reserved for those sites who are using extreme blackhat methods, sites that continue to spam links after receiving manual penalties or for when Google wants to send a strong message by making an example of someone such as we’ve seen recently with MBG to scare people away from guest blogging and previously with Interflora to send a message about followed links in advertorials.
In general when you have a keyword level penalty you will still rank for the branded version of that search, it’s only the generic that suffers. The same is true for broader algorithmic penalties that affect generics across the board.
Also it’s worth noting that loss of organic visibility is often nothing to do with penalty but instead related to technical on-site issues, so long as the site isn’t blocking bots then it should still rank for brand terms even when generics suffer.
From reading your last sentence I think we are on the same page here but the difference is perhaps in our outlook. You still seem to think that I was suggesting that SEO should be a vehicle for brand and that SEO resources should be diverted into brand. What I’m actually saying is that growing the brand benefits SEO but that brand growth can only be achieved in a wider marketing mix across all channels.
How you go about that mix is really down to the type of business that you are.
I understand that you have adsense revenue trickling in from a large network of blogs that you own and that all these trickles will add up to decent stream of income for you so perhaps brand is not so important to you as you have this income to rely on and you need to spend time and resources on maintaining these blogs.
However my advice was not originally aimed at you or your situation, the OP on Linkedin was concerned about her business and as far as I’m aware she is in a very different situation as she relies on generic traffic for one site. So loss of visibility is pretty damaging for her business if she relies solely on organic non brand traffic.
On a side note I can’t see your preferred landing page for your theme ranking for your target keywords but instead your plugin page is ranking for these terms.
Anyway I think we’re going round in circles here so maybe we just have to agree to disagree on this one.
All the best,
Mike
Brand Development SEO Benefits