Brand SERPs Foundations Course: Improving Your Social Accounts
Script from the lesson The Brand SERPs Foundations Course
Jason Barnard speaking: Improving the results you partially control: social media. Now, what’s the situation? Here we have part of the first page of results for Ben and Jerry’s. Looking at the domains, you might imagine that they have no control at all, but that’s not true. In fact, they have partial control over every single one of these results. There are many examples of results that the brand like this has partial control over.
Jason Barnard speaking: Examples of partially-controlled results you can optimize very simply are Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, industry sites, Wikipedia, Amazon, review platforms, job platforms, the list goes on. But in this lesson, I’ll focus on social media sites. There’s another lesson for the other sites I just mentioned. Social media sites are great candidates for ranking on your brand SERP because they are very relevant to people’s Googling your brand name.
Jason Barnard speaking: Importantly for your brand SERP, you control part of the title and the description that appears. On your brand SERP that’s a big win. It’s a great opportunity for you and definitely one not to be missed. Remember too that you also have a good amount of control over what appears in the page when someone clicks on the blue link in the SERP and visits your social media account homepage.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, for all social media accounts, the key factor Google is looking for is engagement. A social account is always a fairly good candidate for ranking on your brand SERP, but a social account with lots of engagement from a relevant audience is a really great candidate. Google loves them. Ongoing activity from you and genuine engagement from your audience via comments, links, and shares, and so on indicates to Google that the social media account is a valuable resource for people searching your brand name.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you want a particular social media account to rank on your brand SERP, then you really need to make that account relevant and valuable to your audience and get them involved. That said, your first job is to work on those that currently rank on the first two pages. Those on page number one at top priority. Since everyone Googling your brand name will see them on your SERP. Those on page two are less urgent since few people click through to the second page on Google these days. But do them anyway.
Jason Barnard speaking: They might well push up into the rankings and if they do, it’s better to be ready. And also look at this from the wider perspective of your social media strategy. That social media strategy is a vital part of your wider SEO strategy and your global marketing strategy. You really want to be looking after your social presence. And the immediate needs of your brand SERP is a great place to start building that strategy. Social media is a great platform that allows you to interact with existing clients, build a wider audience who are truly interested in what you have to offer and push your message out to the wider world.
Jason Barnard speaking: In the context of improving your brand SERP, we’re just looking at those that rank page one and two. Now a quick word about Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If you have a profile, it will tend to rank, even if there is little activity. In the context of the brand SERP, you need to deal with at least what shows on Google. Beyond that, if they really aren’t useful to you, then delete the account so that your more valuable social media accounts have a better chance of ranking.
Jason Barnard speaking: You might also want to think about pushing any less than truly valuable social platforms off page one using the techniques described in the “Dealing with unwanted content” course. What Google shows in the SERP, what title and description appearing Google depends on the way the platform deals with the meta titles and meta descriptions. Most social platforms use your brand name plus their brand name as the meta title, and that’s what appears as a blue link in your brand SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: It varies between platforms, but there’s always a system. It might be your handle plus a standard text or your handle and the social media name. Or the title of your account plus their name. Check on your brand search what appears. Look where they’re pulling the text from and adapt accordingly. Many social platforms also give you an opportunity to add a description to your account. Always take that opportunity. They’ll sometimes use that as the meta description, and that’s usually what Google will use.
Jason Barnard speaking: But even if it doesn’t appear on your brand SERP on Google, it’s still an opportunity to communicate an attractive message on your profile page of that platform to people who see it. So add a description whenever you have the opportunity and make sure it’s positive, informative, and attractive. Some platforms don’t give you a description field. And some give you one, but don’t push it to Google. The actual description that Google uses in your brand SERP varies from platform to platform.
Jason Barnard speaking: So check on your SERP to see if that is what appears, then optimize accordingly. Make it look as good as you possibly can in Google’s SERP. Now I’m going to go into some specifics about major platforms: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram. These are just the platforms I’ve seen most often on brand SERPs. If the social platform that ranks on your SERP isn’t in this list, then use the approach I just explained to figure out what you need to change to make the results optimal for your brand SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: Firstly, Twitter. Twitter has a special place in brand SERPs since Twitter feeds directly into Google. As such, it’s the best social platform to have up there on your brand SERP. Whatever you post there goes straight onto Google. Importantly, Twitter also offers a rich element, all of its own: Twitter boxes. These look great and they’re really sexy on mobile, and they provide you with a high level of control of what appears on your brand SERP, so they’re well worth having. In the rich elements course, there’s a lesson on how to trigger and optimize these.
Jason Barnard speaking: But in the context of optimizing this result that you semi-control, the first thing to do is to get the title right. Google shows what you enter in the name field, then your Twitter handle, and then their brand name, so make sure your name and Twitter handle make sense. The description Google shows is most often the latest tweets from, and then your Twitter handle, then the description from your Twitter account. Make sure you have a description on that and that it’s positive, attractive, and looks good on the SERP. Sometimes Google will show one of your recent tweets, most often, the one with the most engagement. So make sure you write great tweets all the time.
Jason Barnard speaking: Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other social platforms. Unlike Twitter, there’s no direct feed and no extra rich result to be triggered, but they rank easily and naturally on brand SERPs so making sure the title and description represent your brand is very, very important. Facebook shows a title with the name of your brand, then the type of Facebook page, and then their brand name. Then the description they show contains some data about your account at the start, and this changes. It can be likes, friends, reviews, and many of the other datas that they collect. So check out which data shows on yours and improve that.
Jason Barnard speaking: After a number or two, Google shows the start of your description, the description you gave Facebook, so make sure that you put the best bits right at the start of the description, because all of it will not appear. Facebook is the platform with the most bells and whistles, and that means there are many parts to your Facebook profile that your audience might want to access directly from the SERP. So with Facebook, you can sometimes get site links. If you have multiple elements within your Facebook page and they’re active and attract engagement, Google might just show them as site links in the Facebook result on your brand SERP. And it looks pretty good when it does.
Jason Barnard speaking: So you want to use all the Facebook options that are relevant to your brand. But bear in mind “relevant”. It can be tempting to add every option and functionality that Facebook offers, but if it isn’t relevant, your audience won’t engage, and it won’t improve either your brand SERP or your Facebook strategy. You’ll be wasting your time.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you have multiple Facebook pages and profiles, perhaps for different countries, languages, products, or departments, make sure that they all link to each other logically within Facebook, since they may well turn up as site links. Furthermore, if you have reviews on Facebook, the rating and review stars will sometimes show in the SERPs. Reviews will encourage Google to rank your Facebook profile higher, and they look great when the rating is four stars or more. Anything less looks bad.
Jason Barnard speaking: So make sure you get four stars or more and make sure you maintain that great score.
Jason Barnard speaking: Importantly, Facebook ranks very easily whether you’re active on Facebook or not. So once you have a Facebook profile, it’s really important to maintain, manage, and optimize it over time. Also, keep an eye out for Facebook local business listings. They don’t dominate like Google My Business, but they do sometimes rank, and most of the time they’re incomplete, dull and not very positive for your brand. If you have one appearing on your brand SERP, make the most of it in the short term and optimize it, but in the long term, you’ll probably want to delete it or drown it.
Jason Barnard speaking: LinkedIn. In the blue link title Google will show just your brand name and the LinkedIn brand name. There’s nothing much you can do there. But you can make the result look better by providing a tagline. If you provide a tagline, Google will sometimes show that as the description. If you don’t, Google will always show the default LinkedIn description, which is really boring, so make sure you provide a tagline and make the most of LinkedIn because LinkedIn ranks really well, even more easily than Facebook for brands.
Jason Barnard speaking: YouTube. Google shows the channel title and the YouTube brand name as the blue link in the SERP, so make sure you get the channel name right. The description Google shows will be your channel description if you add one to YouTube. If not, it will show the title of your latest video.
Jason Barnard speaking: Instagram. It rarely ranks, and this one is pretty dull and not optimizable, just your account name, handle, then Instagram photos and videos. The description is just facts and figures about your accounts so the best bet for a great description here is getting posting more, getting more followers, and more likes.
Jason Barnard speaking: Pinterest. As with Instagram, this rarely ranks, but it’s a lot more controllable. The title is your account name, then your handle, and then on Pinterest, the description is the description that you give on your Pinterest account, so make sure that it’s really attractive and convincing.
Jason Barnard speaking: For other social media platforms I’m not going to go into details since each platform is going to be very specific. You need to find which social channels rank in your brand SERP and do what you can with those. Also, if a smaller platform is ranking, it’s an indication that that platform is relevant to your brand and to your audience and therefore worth working on in your wider social strategy.
Jason Barnard speaking: In the context of this course, optimize what appears on your brand SERP. The amount of control you’ll have will vary, but once again, make the most of the opportunities that they present you with. Whatever social accounts you’re using, optimize what’s visible on your brand SERP, but ideally take it further and also take the time to optimize the landing page. Optimize every piece of information the platform allows you to provide. Remember, people actually click on these results sometimes. You want to make sure that they see something that’s engaging and that’s positive, accurate for your brand and will get them on board.
Jason Barnard speaking: And more than that, Google takes all this information into account when evaluating the credibility of your brand. This is really important, short and long term. In the short term, optimize the social channels that currently rank, but longer term, you want to build a solid social media strategy, and that means focusing on social channels that are truly relevant and valuable to your audience. If they’re truly relevant and you can keep your account fresh, active, and valuable to them, and you can get genuine engagement from an audience that is truly interested in your business, then they will rank over time, and your brand SERP will look all the more relevant and attractive to your target audience.
Jason Barnard speaking: Thank you.
