Look up your Brand search – Take Control
Go to Google and look up your Brand search first… there are big things that you need to make sure you dominate – the first is the Box on the right-hand side. But then you need to check out the Ads people are running against your brand, the Videos, the FAQs, the Reviews, the Map Locations, basically, all the composite parts that make up a Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
This post is about making sure you appreciate the need to occasionally check your Brand on Google. There is no point in my listing all the different things that you may or may not need to do, these will be different for every client and also will change over time.
What you want to do is check them all and then see what you can do to improve things from your side.
Hot SEO Trends – Right Now
I’ll focus on a few things that are or have been ‘hot’ in the recent past
- Reviews
We’ve been on about getting Reviews for years and when Reviews were novel you could expect 3 out of four review requests to be answered. Google loved it because Reviews were supposedly from real people about the real purchase of a service or product.
Sadly today, you can expect a far lower rate of response from Review requests, but 5-10% is still good and still worth-while. Reviews Sell and they are great SEO. - FAQs
Questions are what we ask our Mobiles all the time, it’s figured 80-90% of everything we ‘speak’ to our voice-activated product is a question. And they can only be one answer. Alexa isn’t going to give you a list.
So now is the time to get Answers. FAQs are vital, the race is on, but looking at this properly, your products and services probably only have one answer – but there are probably dozens of ways to ask the question. You need lots of questions, even if the answer is frequently the same. - Video
It begs belief that so many organisations still ignore YouTube and the power of Video, you don’t even need quality these days. What you need is just a few snippets of 30 seconds here and there uploaded every few months.
Video builds over time and as YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world and bigger than all smaller search engines combined, it’s amazing more effort is not put into Video. - AMP Pages
With Mobile taking such dominance and over 50% of most websites now viewed on a Mobile, speed is everything and Accelerated Mobile Pages can be a godsend. Google SEO spots this and delivers this Tech.
On most websites these days this is quick and easy to set up. Install, configure and let WordPress or Shopify do the rest.
All of these simple facets of how Google displays your website are easy to achieve and require only a little work from your end and maybe a little work from our end. All are doable at a low cost.
The Brand Search Glue
But there is one more bit that is worth stressing – the Glue that holds all this together. The Glue that allows Google to extra all the information you need and want, this is called Schema.
Schema is code, it can be easily installed or add to your website, but essentially it describes each image, review, video, product, article and so on to Google for what it is.
And that is how Google creates all its little Boxes… put your Address into Schema and Google is likely to add you to their Map, put a Question in an FAQ and Google will show you under the ‘People also Asked’ section.