Three SERP Signs of a Trusted Brand
Make this part of your any (competitive) SEO analysis 👇
Google’s search algorithm uses lots of layers and signals when trying to identify the most helpful pages in response to a searcher’s query.
“Trustworthiness” of a page is not a single, easily definable metric Google uses, but it includes a lot of signals that Google uses to identify if a page is trustworthy enough to rank high in search results.
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Google’s SEO documentation mentions “trust” more than 1,500 times. This topic has been discussed for years.
Back in 2011, Matt Cutts discussed “trust” and explained that it as a contributing factor to treating a page as a high-quality one.
Obviously, without well-defined metrics to monitor or measure trustworthiness, SEOs have a hard time including it in their strategies.
Google’s SERPs do give some clues on how “trustworthy” each ranking page is. While we cannot put any numbers to these signals (e.g. to compare the trustworthiness of two given pages), seeing those signs helps identify why a web page may be ranking higher despite lower measurable signals (like on-page keyword usage or links).
Let’s see how Google’s search result pages can help you distinguish higher-trusted websites or brands:
1. Knowledge Panels
The presence of a Knowledge Box for a brand-driven search means that Google things a site is a “known entity”, i.e. a brand.
Knowledge Panels are not easy to control or earn: Your site needs to be included in Google’s Knowledge Graph.
Google’s Knowledge Graph is essentially a map of known entities (people, organizations, or locations).
To become an entity, your brand needs to be connected/related to existing known entities, and not just through links. You or your site needs to be featured as a known entity’s partner or an award winner. It takes a lot of mentions from Wikipedia and known publishers for a site to become an entity.
If you see a competitor’s name trigger a knowledge graph, it means Goole trusts this site a lot.
Knowledge Panel includes information on an entity and related entities
Google Autocomplete is another good tool to tell if Google considers a site, a person, or a product an entity (even if knowledge panels are not triggered for those searches). Google Autocomplete also makes it easy to identify how exactly Google classifies each entity as it lists a category, as in the example below:
2. Brand Names within Search Snippets
Another clue of a well-established site is sitelinks triggered for a brand search but this is not such a strong signal as the Knowledge Panel.
Sitelinks are not created equal. One-line “mini” sitelinks tend to appear for sites that are not as trusted as regular sitelinks. These are brand-driven mini-sitelinks:
These are regular sitelinks that signal a stronger brand:
3. Rich Snippets
Enriched search results were pretty easy to earn. All you needed was to add structured data.
It looks like Google is changing how rich snippets work to only show them for trusted sources. For example, FAQ snippets are now being shown only for well-known and trusted sources.
This is a solid sign that rich snippets in general are going to be harder to earn going forward, so keep an eye on your and your competitors’ rich snippets when revisiting your target SERPs.
To sum up, in-SERP trust signals should be included in any SERP analysis or competitive report because these can influence rankings beyond measurable signals, like backlinks or on-page optimization.