Community Discussion: Do you agree that brand recognition has an empirical impact on organic search rankings?

[Christy-Correll]

And could hard metrics — such as search queries, citations, traffic, and click-through rates — influence organic search rankings? Tom Coad “StickyEyes” tackles both these questions in this post for YouMoz. Take a peek at his research, and let us know how it compares to your own findings.

If you haven't done any research yourself along these lines, I'd love to hear your answers to these same questions based on your more casual observations and analysis of the brands you monitor in the SERPs.

[RobertFisher]

Christy,

This is a very good discussion question. I think we have to look at the test Tom Coad did and ask is it more about Brand Awareness or more about a longer-term test of "pogo-sticking?" Tom is careful to explain the limits on any test like this and his data is certainly quite interesting. The fact Tom is looking in this direction says a lot about his thinking and I like it. For me, I just don't see it as a branding awareness experiment.

I would see that type of experiment as more where we take a branded product and see how their click through rate is for non-branded searches around their products. Once you had a baseline, you would do television and radio or print, etc. over a week in a given market. Then measure two or three weeks later to see if there is an increase in searches on the branded product or an increase in click through choices of the branded product (assuming the SERPs were the same as pre test). So, having been exposed to the brand over a limited amount of time, were people more likely to now choose that brand when it appeared in non-branded searches? Note: we are not even asking did they purchase it; simply, did they choose it in search more frequently than it was being chosen prior to the brand awareness campaign?

I think Google does take into account click-throughs to sites and if being a known brand on some level is possible, one should certainly work to that. I don’t want to get into an argument on CTR and ranking here as it is not the point, but if suddenly thousands of people are searching on a given subject and going to a specific site in that search, that site page does increase in the rankings for that search query. The ranking changes even if the increase happens in a day or period of hours in the case of news events, etc. IMO.

Working in a marketing firm that does branding work, etc. along with SEO and other digital marketing I am still amazed at how few companies understand or care about branding. For me this says a lot about how aware and forward-thinking Tom Coad's research is. It would be great if more SEO firms pushed companies beyond SEO or SEO and PPC. Many companies, if not most, would rather throw large sums at PPC, etc. and mechanisms that provide an immediately measurable return than to worry about tomorrow and what having a strong brand can provide. Coming from an area years ago that was all direct marketing, I fully understand why it is difficult to want to focus on branding. I have come full circle and we constantly push more and more of our clients to consider their brand and what it means in the marketplace.

For those who might be less about general marketing, when I say the client’s brand I mean more than name, tagline, and logo. What does Nike mean? What does Jaguar mean? What does Chase mean? What emotional connection does it create when people here it? Frankly, even if I am not a fan of Chase, (assuming I have no past experience with them) if I am in a new town and looking for a bank and the only familiar name I see is Chase, I have to believe I would be inclined to at least check them out (click on their result in the SERP).

To me, building brand awareness is not unlike SEO; it is longer term, but the dividends pay off over time and can be considerable. They are both a hedge against less active advertising times, etc.

This is certainly a great question and I look forward to other discussion on it.

Best

[EGOL]

I am a firm believer that domain queries, domains typed into the Chrome address window, "domain + keyword" typed into search, domain mentions, etc. are among the most potent drivers of rankings that you can find.... and if they don't drive rankings they certainly drive business.   What could be more potent than people asking for your website by name?

If Google isn't using this they need to have their heads examined.   It's a nobrainer.

And, those SEOs who say that this stuff isn't important, and even those googlers who say this stuff isn't important....  don't believe 'em.   You gotta be real careful who you listen to.

[RyanPurkey]

In addition to EGOL and Robert's insights, we also see Google behavior like this in a couple of other areas.

In search changes around News results when real-time feeds based appear in parallel with search query volume and page changes across the web we see news items gaining a boost.  If a new brand is gaining similar traction on both sides of search (both press and searcher interest) it's not a small leap to think that Google will respond with providing users more results around that brand.

Another good parallel comes from the Google patent for "Using concepts as contexts for query term substitutions" ( https://www.google.com/patents/US9104750 ). Being a patent around context and similar terminology, its Claim #1 is broken down as First Term + Second Term + Third Term = something different than any one of those terms used alone. Their example further on in the patent is especially telling...

During state (I), the substitution engine 206 analyzes the aggregated query term substitution data, and determines whether one or more substitution rules may be generated from the analysis. For one example, the substitution engine 206 may determine from the query term substitution data 231 that the term “Crossword” is frequently a substitute term for the term “Puzzle” in the context of the concept “New York Times,” as indicated by a positive indication 237. In some implementations, the indication 237 may be a quantitative score assigned to the query term substitution data 231 in the query log 209, and the quantitative score can be analyzed by one or more criteria in the substitution engine's evaluation of a potential substitute term. For another example, the substitution engine 206 may determine from the query term substitution data 233 that the term “Subscription” is not frequently a substitute term for the term “Puzzle” in the context of the concept “New York Times,” as indicated by a negative indication 238. Here, the substitution engine 206 determines that the term “Crossword” is frequently a substitute term for the term “Puzzle” in the context of “New York Times”, and sends an indication 239 to the collection 210 of substitution rules to add the substitution rule “Puzzle→Crossword (New York Times :)” to the collection 210. For subsequent user queries that contain original query terms “New York Times Puzzles”, the substitution engine 206 may then apply the substitution rule “Puzzle→Crossword (New York Times :)” and communicate with the query reviser engine 205 to include the substitute term “Crossword” in the revised query.

While the example above goes into the similarities between the terms "Puzzle" and "Crossword" the same machine learning can recognize and attribute values to the brand itself, "New York Times".

[RobertFisher]

Big showoff!

Just kidding, well done!

Robert