How to Better Control Your Brand-Driven SERPs
Branded search: One of the most important assets no brand can fully control. Here's how to better optimize your branded SERPs!
Google search results are under no one’s control, and that is understandable.
But Google’s brand-driven search results are also under no one’s control and that is something brands have to deal with.
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It is almost like having a business card while being unable to control what it says.
What Are Brand-Driven SERPs and Why Care?
Brand-driven search results are those you see when searching for your brand name.
Brand-driven search is important because it can influence your buyers’ decisions as it often becomes part of buying journeys:
More than half of the surveyed buyers research a product before making a purchase, and obviously web search is usually part of that research
The address/URL bar (i.e. where you type a domain to navigate to the site) often acts like a search box which results in a lot of direct/type-in traffic going through Google search. For example, in both Google Chrome (mobile and desktop) and Safari (mobile), you can type part of the domain and tap “Go” (or click “Enter” on your keyboard) to instantly perform a Google search:
As a result, people often get to your site through Google search, and hence Google search is one of the biggest factors in buying decision making.
What Do Branded Search Results Include and How to Go About Each Section?
1. Google Ads
This is not part of SEO but if you are not bidding on your business name in Google Ads, you may want to reconsider. Holding both the top organic position and the ad section will ensure more people will never scroll further and move on to a third-party site.
2. Knowledge Panel
Only bigger brands usually trigger Knowledge Panels when being searched in Google but you can increase your chances by:
Being rewarded or nominated in some sort of niche rewards that trigger knowledge panel of their own (i.e. Google considers them an entity)
Having a dedicated page in Wikipedia
Being a book author and marketing your book through Amazon (for personal brands)
I have listed many more steps on how to become a brand for Google to show your branded knowledge panel. We also have a separate service aiming at helping you build your topical authority.
2. Home Page + Sitelinks
For unique brand-driven searches out there, Google will always try to rank the official home page and show sitelinks below it.
The only exceptions are that your name is generic (It will take a considerable amount of time and budget for Google to recognize you as an entity for a generic term) or if there are several businesses sharing the same name (Check that prior to registering your domain).
Sitelinks show up within the top search snippet for a branded search. You cannot control what Google chooses to show as a sitelink. If you don’t like a link here, you’ll have to remove the page from the site or noindex it to ensure it is removed. In both cases, that means that the page will be removed from Google’s index:
4. Twitter, Video, and/or Image Carousel
You don’t have to be a huge brand for Google to show these carousels for your brand name. All you need is to have some brand presence on Youtube and Twitter (with your brand name as the name of each channel) and have at least some images published online with your brand name as an anchor text.
These carousels are good if you want to control more of your branded search results but they will drive some of your customers away from your site to these third-party platforms (which is, of course, inevitable since you cannot rank your site for all top 10 branded positions).
5. Reddit / Quora threads
For most branded searches Google now shows related discussions, and those often have a negative sentiment. I have listed some ways to manage your reputation on Reddit here.
6. Related Searches and People Also Ask
Google shows up a few “query extension” sections for branded searches (i.e. those that will helpfully allow users to search more):
Branded People Also Ask showing related questions, often related to the brand or even its competitors
Branded Related Searches showing what people tend to search for in close proximity with your brand name
You cannot get rid of these sections but keep an eye on them. They will give you some clues as to what people tend to struggle with when considering your brand.
7. AI Overviews
Some branded searches may include AI Overviews summarizing search results showing up on top of organic results. These are dynamic (they may show up for some people but not for others), but try to keep a close eye on them:
I have explained how to better optimize your branded AI Overviews here.
How to Monitor Your Brand-Driven Search Results?
Google keeps changing its SERPs, and there’s no easy solution to monitor those changes. The two I found particularly useful are Sitechecker because it visualizes SERP movement over time (so you can see exactly what has changed and how):
Visualping alerts you of just about any change on a page. Simply set up your tracking for your brand-driven search URL and let it alert you when Google removes or adds a section. Here’s the tool alerting me that there’s a new Twitter carousel moved on top of my brand-driven search results:
The purpose of this strategy is to control more of your brand-driven search results for more of your customers to get driven back to your site, convinced that you can be trusted. If you need help better control your branded search, get in touch!