Comment on Brand Marketing Strategy by SEO Dave.

Brand Marketing Strategy 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:

The act of smoking marijuana with close friends. Most preferably out of a Blunt.
Homie 1: What’s up fool?
Homie 2: Not much, you fin’ to yoast right now?
Homie 1: Nigga I’m always down to yoast a blunt

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