Brand SERPs Foundations Course: Improving the Results You Control

Role	Entity
Author	Jason Barnard
Instructor	Jason Barnard
Platform	Kalicube Academy
Producer	Kalicube SAS
Publisher	Kalicube SAS
Year Released	2019
Has Parts	Brand SERPs Foundations Course: Tactics to Avoid and Mistakes Not to Make Brand SERPs Foundations Course: Optimizing Google Ads Brand SERPs Foundations Course: SEO Tactics You’ll Need Brand SERPs Foundations Course: Improving the Results You Do Not Control Brand SERPs Foundations Course: Improving Other Results You Partially Control Brand SERPs Foundations Course: Improving Your Social Accounts Brand SERPs Foundations Course: Improving the Results You Control Brand SERPs Foundations Course: Triggering and Optimizing Rich Sitelinks Brand SERPs Foundations Course: Optimizing Your Homepage Brand SERPs Foundations Course: Introduction

Script from the lesson The Brand SERPs Foundations Course

Jason Barnard speaking: Improving the results you control. Here’s the situation. You’ve got your homepage perfect. The meta title and description appear as you want them on your brand SERP. The first thing people see now looks much better. You’ve got a big block you control, and it looks great. 

Jason Barnard speaking: Next steps are other sites that you control that appear on that page. This lesson is pretty short. And it also will be most useful to you if you have other sites that you control or if you’re an international brand. If not, then your homepage will probably be the only page you control that ranks on page one of your brand SERP. 

Jason Barnard speaking: Why? Because Google tries to avoid ranking multiple results from the same site on one page of its results. That’s true for all SERPs, but especially true on brand SERPs. It doesn’t want to give you too much of a voice about yourself, which is fair enough. But then this course is all about making that whole brand SERP your voice. 

Jason Barnard speaking: If another page from your site does rank on page one, then you should optimize it in the same manner you did your homepage. Make sure that the meta title and meta description send out a positive, clear and convincing message, but expect that page to disappear over time. Don’t work fervently to try to keep it ranking. Google will eventually demote it because it’s not likely to bring more value to Google’s users searching your brand name than a third-party result. 

Jason Barnard speaking: Also from your perspective, if you can have a great positive result that is not from your site, that is great. A third party saying nice things about you is much more authentic and much more convincing to your audience as validation of how great you are. So work on making sure that content you semi-control and content you do not control is top-notch so that when Google does demote that page, there are great replacements ready to take its place. 

Jason Barnard speaking: Now let’s look at content you control beyond your main site. Perhaps you have direct control over multiple sites. In this case, obviously, the one result per site per SERP rule no longer applies. So these may well appear in your SERP, and in that case, you need to optimize them. If they don’t appear but are on page two or three, then they’re great candidates to rank. They’re valuable and useful to your audience, and that’s what Google is looking for in brand SERPs. So optimize them even if they don’t rank page one. 

Jason Barnard speaking: There are three reasons you should do this. Number one, keep your brand message consistent across all sources you control. Number two, they may well rank sometime in the future. Number three, they serve as a cushion, keeping other less predictable results down. 

Jason Barnard speaking: Here are some examples of sites you own that are great candidates for ranking on your brand SERP: client support sites, product sites, outlet location sites, human resources sites, company department sites. You get the idea, and you know which ones apply to you. 

Jason Barnard speaking: A quick note about blogs. Having a low-quality, badly-kept blog or other site just to try to occupy a place on your brand SERP is not a good long-term strategy. 

Jason Barnard speaking: Even if it works short term, it won’t work long term. Google will understand what you are doing and it will drop that satellite site from the SERP. Plus, in the context of credibility, it looks unprofessional and spammy, which is bad for credibility and brand credibility is phenomenally important today for your overall SEO strategy, so don’t do things that might harm that. The term Google uses here is E-A-T. Expertise, authority, and trust. If you want to understand more about that, there’s a link to Google’s raters’ quality guidelines in the resource section of this lesson. That document is kind of a guide to what Google is looking for in the results, and it’s well worth the read. It focuses very heavily on E-A-T, which is credibility. 

Jason Barnard speaking: If you legitimately have a quality blog that uses another domain, then use it. It’s a great candidate for ranking on your brand SERP and will probably rank if you optimize it for that reason. Generally speaking, legitimate sites you own that are closely related to your core business will often rank on your brand SERP. So you need to optimize the pages from those that appear in the same way that you optimize your homepage with the additional task of making sure that taken as a group, they reflect a consistent brand message. 

Jason Barnard speaking: You might need to liaise with the people who run these sites and help them to optimize. If that’s the case, make their life easy by preparing the work for them as much as you possibly can and be super tactful. 

Jason Barnard speaking: Here’s an example. Disney has their main site with their lovely site links, but multiple other sites from multiple other departments also rank on their brand SERP. Here’s another example. A customer care site ranking number two. And here are some more examples. 

Jason Barnard speaking: From a brand SERP standpoint, it’s an amazing opportunity to control more of the brand SERP and better communicate with your audience. If you’re an international brand, you may have multiple sites across multiple countries, perhaps in multiple languages. It’s amazing how often this gets forgotten. If you’re an international company with language versions of your site, you need to make sure that the different language versions reflect the same brand image, the same brand message as the original version. That’s for multiple reasons.

Jason Barnard speaking: Firstly, your brand SERP. In some circumstances, multiple language versions can appear on your brand SERP. For example, if I’m searching in the UK using a browser set to French as the default language, I’ll almost certainly see the French site somewhere on that brand SERP. That might seem to be an edge case, but for an international brand, it isn’t. The world is increasingly international, and lines between languages and countries are not as clear as perhaps you imagine. So keep an eye on those exceptions. Check your analytics to see how much countries, languages, and browser preferences get mixed up and create these mixed results. 

Jason Barnard speaking: Secondly, your users or your potential clients need to have a consistent message across countries and across languages. 

Jason Barnard speaking: Thirdly, Google needs that consistent message too. A consistent message is vital to ensure that Google understands and is confident it has understood who you are and what you do. If your message in French is completely different from the one in English, you’re going to confuse Google about who you are and what it is you do. Obviously, you need to adapt to the localization. Different cultures require slightly different approaches, but don’t adapt too much and create a confused message to Google or lose focus on your brand message. It definitely isn’t good for Google, but probably isn’t good for your audience either. 

Jason Barnard speaking: So you need to optimize the pages from all your language versions and internationalized versions in the same way you optimize your homepage. Once again, you may need to liaise with the people who run these sites and help them to do it. Make their life easy by preparing the work for them as much as you possibly can. And once again, be super, super tactful, please. 

Jason Barnard speaking: Whatever additional sites you own and run, it’s vital to: 

Jason Barnard speaking: One, Optimize the meta title and description and make sure they’re consistent with those on your main site homepage. 

Jason Barnard speaking: Two, Add the favicon. Google shows them in the SERPs. 

Jason Barnard speaking: Number three, Add a featured image on each page. Google shows them in the SERPs. 

Jason Barnard speaking: Number four, Keep an eye on the bigger picture. Beyond the work you are doing on your brand SERP, these sites tend to send powerful signals to Google. It understands that they belong to you and it needs an accurate, clear, and consistent message from you in order to fully understand who you are and what you do. 

Jason Barnard speaking: Being accurate, clear, and consistent across all your sites and all the pages of all your sites is what creates the foundation of how Google perceives and understands your brand. This is essential for the knowledge graph and your credibility, which both play a vital role in the more advanced aspects of your brand SERP that you will see in our other courses in this series, but it’s also vital to your overall SEO and digital marketing strategy. 

Jason Barnard speaking: Thank you.