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Category: Branding / Brand Awareness

Explore the topics of branding and brand awareness and why they’re important for any business.


  • If you are looking for just straight up "B2B Blogs" and not necessarily ones that focus on cleaning, check out these 10 at http://lrgmarketing.com/blog/10-b2b-blogs-we-like-to-read/. Not sure if this helps, but Igor's tip above is good and you can also search "top commercial cleaning blogs" or "best building maintenance blogs", etc.

    | NickW816
    0

  • Yes, you're right. The best way is to host website in China on a CN domain. Hong Kong counts as well. Taiwan doesn't. According to Search Engine Land: "Aside from preferring Chinese domains, Baidu also prefers websites to be hosted in China. This will also help improve page load speed."

    | benesmartin
    0

  • That's a tough one. If you want to DM me the url (or email it to me at marie at marie haynes dot com) I'd be happy to take a quick look.

    | MarieHaynes
    1

  • While I don't have any direct experience to offer, I can absolutely see the benefit of separating product and company - but only if the product is big enough to justify standing alone - it makes perfect sense when considering the example you give, but that's right at the top end of the scale. However, I see no issue whatsoever with "URL bloat". The URL hierarchy:  https://www.company.com/product/.... is very well understood and in common usage with good reason: Categories (and sub-categories) in your URL allows you to reference keywords in the URL as well as giving the visitor a better understanding of what they can expect. Typically, when you're offering thousands of products across hundreds of categories, you'd want your URL hierarchy to  something like domain/category/sub-category/product. This allows you to bring maintain logical order and demonstrate the value of the product/service/information you're presenting, by positioning it further up the hierarchy. Millions of stores perform famously using this structure. I can see you've already considered this, but I wouldn't have any concerns about losing visibility with a domain/category/product structure. So, if you were only doing this because you were concerned about losing visibility for your product due to this fear of the product being diluted at the end of the URL, the example you gave isn't going to cause it. If the product is as strong as you state and you want this to be the company's star performer, which justifies it's own space, then go for it -  but do it because it needs it rather than a fear of losing visibility. You could always follow this example: http://www.apple.com/iphone-7/ This works pretty well and you get the added benefit of  raising awareness of company brand (and) /product. If you do decide to relocate your product (elsewhere in the company site or to a new domain) with careful planning, you can roll it out using 301 redirects to guide searches to the new location (https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo)  and rel=canonical tags  - if you're using the same content across both sites (https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization). This, alongside your other marketing efforts should enable you to transition from company to product site without any real risk of losing visibility. Good Luck!

    | Hurf
    0

  • That is good advice, thank you. I would still want to hear from a few more people just so we have a variety of opinions. It's a big and expensive switch, so all advice is helpful.

    | David-Kley
    0

  • I can't say for sure, but my experience with Google recently would suggest that having it on the page will not matter. You could remove instances of it, but there are probably external signals that will let SEs understand that you used to go by name. Same how they understand that a vehicle, car, and auto are generally the same thing.

    | katemorris
    0

  • Our thought process is that binders.com limits us to binders and as we all know, looseleaf binders are slowly going away. What comes to your mind when you both think about binders.com? I assume ring/looseleaf binders. So our long term goal behind considering building a new website using vulcaninformationpackaing.com is to strengthen our position as a packaging company, not a binder company. So anyway, my question wasn't so much about if it's a good idea to build the new website but if Google and other search engines will have a problem with us having 2 websites representing the same company, which is Vulcan Information Packaging. binders.com will continue to promote binders and the new site vulcaninformationpackaging will promote packaging. But they will both represent Vulcan Information Packaging. thoughts???

    | dzaidan
    0

  • Ah, so you mean brand terms as in the brands that you carry, not your own? Those are fairly large brands that sell through a number of sites, so you have a large competitive base. You are seeing the number of different queries rise, but your traffic to the page in question is falling. I would take that to mean that the brand head terms are where you are losing the traffic. You're pulling in longer tail phrases but not enough to recover from the lose of traffic on head terms. I doubt display has anything to do with this, it sounds like a pure SEO problem. However, with so many brand focuses at such a high level of competition, it is going to be hard to pinpoint what is wrong without an in depth SEO review. I can't provide that to you, but you might look into engaging with someone to do some in depth reviews of the traffic to your brand pages over time to pinpoint the drop started to happen, what changes might have occurred on page to create a change in relevance of the page, if there are new entrants to the market pushing your results down, or if there are any penalties or algorithmic issues with your site that might be impacting the site overall. Those are good places to start. Best of luck, I know this industry well. Another Kate Morris runs Adore Beauty, so I've kept an eye on this field for a long time.

    | katemorris
    0

  • I think few people are in the circumstance of EGOL, so it would be best not to follow his lead. The internet changes so rapidly that you need to be predictive. What is the next big thing? What will Facebook do? In my crystal ball, I think that Facebook will take on Google and Yelp.  They are already trying, but I think they'll get better at it. So, if Facebook becomes Google, most businesses will want to be there, with a Facebook Page that has a good number of likes and a couple updates a month at least. No need to go overboard, but make sure the page doesn't look abandoned. Plus, Facebook and the other social sites rank really well on Google. Does a business want to give up that real estate? When someone looks up my company by name in Google they see Company website Company Yelp page - with 5 Star Rating Company LinkedIn Page Person LinkedIn Page Company Facebook Page - with 5 Star Rating Company Angie's List Page Some stinky competitor trying to rank for my biz name Personal Experts Page Company Groupon Page Thumbtack Consolidator Without social, people would see several of my competitors who try to optimize for my name "Get on the Map" and some dull profiles from websites like Manta.

    | julie-getonthemap
    2

  • Hi Chris, First, thank you for your response. We are builing links to that subpage and that's working fine. Probably I was not clear enough. My problem here is offline marketing and building brand awarenes. We'll have printing material, stickers, tshirts etc. and link www.domain.com/subpage on it is really going to look ugly. That's why I was thinking on buying a new domain so it can 301 to this subpage and we can use it offline and online for branding purposes. So if at one point number of links to that new domain surpasses number of links to subpage will that have any negative impact and will all the juice be transfered to subpage. Best regards, Ivan

    | mintmediadu
    0

  • Luckily, 301 redirecting from one site to another (when moving a site) and using the Google Change of Address Tool has taken out a lof of the risk that used to exist. if done properly, you should benefit from combining both sites and not lose any rankings. You're on the right track, I would outline the content and make sure that there's not any content that overlaps--every product/service and every page should be unique and not cause any duplicate content issues. Generally speaking, you'd want to do what you're planning, which is to use a directory off of your main domain and then 301 redirect the pages from the old site to the new pages on the new site. Use the Google Change of Address Tool to tell Google about the change. I would fully integrate the pages into your main navigation on the site rather than just provide a link--it's important that the new pages get all the internal links that they can.

    | becole
    0

  • Hi Dan,Bitly is a great URL shortener, but probably is not the best to customise your links.here are some of the limitations you may find in the free version:1) Changing the destination URL2) Connect more than one custom domain3) Keep your data for more than 30 days4) Make your links private5) Easily and automatically add UTM parametersRead more here: https://support.rebrandly.com/hc/en-us/articles/227131707-Alternatives-to-BitlyFull disclosure: I'm the founder of Rebrandly (https://www.rebrandly.com)

    | Rebrandly
    0

  • Hey Gianluca, Thanks for that very detailed response, I have a few extra questions: 1. You say using the canonical tag vs 301 redirects is risky: Is that to say, having this solution in place even for a few weeks whilst we plan and implement a better solution could have negative effects for us? If so, what sort of negative effects could we incur? Before the next question, I'd like to give you a little more background; our site is like an online shop, but refers you to other retailers to complete your purchase. We have department pages, a few content pages like "contact" and "terms", a search listing page, a homepage, and a brands page. Our department pages have links to related articles, brands and products and I expect these will be very different between the two sites. We have a search page, but the data changes daily and the data will be drastically different between the two sites at any one time since the products will be from retailers local to the US/UK Our brands page is mostly generated and so can change slightly per day but is likely to be very similar accross the two sites. Our static pages will likely start of identical and start to evolve independently (if at all) over a very long period. 2. Keeping all of this in mind, I am not sure if hreflang is still appropriate because it is not going to be the same content translated, but instead similar pages with uniquely tailored content based on its location. What are your thoughts on this? Am I misinterpreting or being to strict in my understanding of what hreflang should be used for? 3. in the above response, you wrote: "you should preview a dilution of PageRank because of the internal linking toward the new USA version" - Is this to say we will start to lose page rank on the UK site as people start to visit the USA site? I just wanted to be clear about what this means, because I am seeing words such as "preview", "dilution" and "internal-linking" which sound like they may or may not be SEO related terms. 4. Finally, I have read conflicting articles about the effectiveness of adding a cache expiry to 301 redirects. Could this be effective for our scenario? Will Google interpret it as a temporary redirect? Will user browsers really expire the 301 when we specify? Thanks for your advice, Dipun

    | dipunm
    0

  • Hi there! I have to agree with Jordan. I would tackle both the rebranding and the responsive website separately, that way if there are any issues with the redirects at any point in the transition process, it will be easier to pinpoint the problem and correct it in a time-efficient manner. Doing both at the same time could end up being extremely complicated/overwhelming.

    | BlueCorona
    0

  • That's great, many thanks Emanuele. Glad to hear that our suggeston of a 'folder' strategy is the best way forward, but as you say there are pros and cons for each solution. In my opinion, hosting a website 'locally' (i.e. German host for a .de site, US host for .us site) is better from a rankings perspective. I feel that this is not as important as it once was, but it still helps. Would you agree? Thanks again, much appreciated. Lee

    | Webpresence
    1

  • Roy, this is definitely a complex task--which should take careful planning and organization. The steps that are outlined in the link that you provided is a good start, but that's only a small part of what needs to be done .There are a lot of sub-tasks that need to be taken care of in between those larger tasks. When it comes to moving site A to B, there is no site C involved--so just think about it as if you're moving site A to C and then B to C. Or, you could also first think about combining both sites and rather than moving site A to B you can choose the best content on each and then just move them to site C. What's important, though, is to figure out which content and pages are duplicated on both sites and then choose the best page(s) and move those to site C. There will be content that's essentially not on both sites, so those can just be moved. The key is to spend plenty of time organizing the content and deciding which content can go away, which needs to be moved, which needs to be combined, and soforth. There is one major step that's missing in that other list, which is to use verify all sites (http and https, as well as http://www and https://www) in Google Search Console, set up those 301 redirects, and use the Google Change of Address tool to tell Google that the site's moved. There is also a mention of rel canonical, and since the sites are moving entirely, canonical tags won't be appropriate to use. You'll need to use 301 Permanend Redirects to move the content from one site to another, especially since site A and B won't exist anymore (they'll be redirected).

    | becole
    0

  • I was actually looking for articles, how-to-videos, resources, and suggestions.

    | BobGW
    1

  • Just a personal belief.... the strongest signal that Google can get is when people are asking for you by name - in the search box or in the address window of Chrome.

    | EGOL
    0

  • This is a new question for me! I actually hadn't considered Google+ pages for international expansion. I'd determine the best way to go about this by asking yourself if what you would post on separate Google+ pages would be different? Does the market require different material? Are they interested in different things? Are there different products and services for that market? Do you have a separate subsite (either ccTLD or a subfolder/subdomain of your main TLD) for that market? Is it different? If the answer to those questions is yes, then yes. If not, then stick with one.

    | katemorris
    0

  • Hi Max! Which will work the best? I think your second plan of action will be a better strategy in the beginning. Getting backlinks from guest bloggers (who have authoritative websites) is an easy way to get quality backlinks. Don't forget that your backlink profile should be about quality, not quantity. These blogs will naturally incorporate the most important keywords, which will help those pages to rank organically and drive more traffic to the website. Social media, email marketing, etc. are all great ways to get your brand in front of users quickly. The first strategy is great, and will have longer lasting results than the second strategy, but it will take more time to develop and more time to see the results. I would choose your plan of attack based on how quickly you want results. Do you want them now? Or are you willing to have slower results initially but have them be longer lasting? What changes should be made to the strategy? For whichever strategy you choose, I think you hit the nail on the head. Both plans of attack should help to increase website rankings. How to perform a perfect keyword research for product pages? Use Moz's keyword explorer tool. This will tell you the difficulty of certain keywords and whether or not you have a high opportunity to rank for these keywords. This will be your best tool for narrowing down which keywords you should be targeting up front, and which keywords are of secondary importance. Hope this helps!

    | BlueCorona
    0