Brand SERPs Foundations Course: SEO Tactics You’ll Need
Script from the lesson The Brand SERPs Foundations Course
Jason Barnard speaking: SEO tactics for your brand SERPs. If you’re an SEO professional, you might feel tempted to skip this video, but then again, a 15-minute refresher course on SEO won’t do you any harm, so perhaps you should stick around. Now, what’s the situation? In order to influence your brand SERPs, you need to know some pretty snazzy SEO tactics. I’m going to teach you the techniques you will need to optimize your Brand SERP. And luckily for you, these tactics are also very useful for any non-brand SEO you’re working on.
Jason Barnard speaking: In this lesson, I’ll take you through the major factors you need to look at in SEO and also the major levers that you have at your disposal. It’s designed simply to give you an overview of SEO in the context of Brand SERPs that will help you throughout the courses. It isn’t a definitive guide to SEO. As you go through the lessons and courses, I will explain the theory and specific techniques in much more detail as and when needed with explicit examples and actionable advice.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, a quick explanation of SEO pre-2013. Here we have a SERP. “SERP” stands for search engine results page. There are 10 blue links, and the aim of the game is to push your blue link right to the top. At that time, before 2013, the whole game was about counting. Google would count the number and ratio of words. It would count the inbound links, and then it would calculate a ranking according to the words and the inbound links. That’s a hyper-simplified explanation that serves the purpose of setting the scene for Hummingbird.
Jason Barnard speaking: In 2013 Google released Hummingbird and Hummingbird changed the game. Instead of looking at strings, they’re looking at things. Now. What does that mean? It means that Google understands. Instead of just counting words and counting links, it understands who you are and what you do. When a user searches Google, it evaluates the match between the intent of the user and its understanding of the solution you can provide. And the quality of that solution.
Jason Barnard speaking: In the case of brand SERPs, the intent has always been fairly obvious. The person is researching you or navigating to your site. In that sense, nothing changes. For brand SERPs, what does change the game in brand SERPs is the introduction of rich elements. We don’t just have the 10 blue links like we used to. We have more multimedia. Google wants to become multimedia. It has always wanted to provide the best possible experience for its users. And today that means multimedia, multimedia on the SERP, and that changes the SEO game for brand SERPs.
Jason Barnard speaking: This is a wonderful change of the game. Brand SERPs look much, much better than they used to, and there are much better ways, a much more effective way to communicate with your audience. Plus, those rich elements bring a wide variety of additional opportunities that need additional techniques and it makes optimizing them much more fun. They also mean that your brand SERP on Google looks more and more like a fully-fledged landing page for your brand. Here’s some examples of these rich elements that we can apply SEO tactics to. Three things. This list is not complete.
Jason Barnard speaking: This list of elements gets longer all the time, and not all of them appear on brand SERPs. Here we go. The featured snippet, video boxes, Twitter boxes, people also ask related searches, google my business. Google maps, the knowledge panel, top stories, image blocks, events, people also search for, similar places, stock prices, search box, podcasts. These rich elements are killing off blue links. Not only are there fewer traditional blue links like this on the SERP, but the ones that remain are less visible because they are overpowered by the sexy new siblings.
Jason Barnard speaking: The key here is that if we want to be present in this situation, we need to provide suitable, relevant content for those rich elements. A balanced multimedia content strategy on multiple platforms that contains content in many formats is the key. There is a course in this series that covers these rich elements and another that covers content strategy. Although both focus on brand SERPs, they’re both very useful for your wider digital marketing strategy. Now, onto the meat of this lesson. What are the important SEO tactics for brand SERPs. Let’s start with technical. On the technical side. The content you’re pushing on your brand certainly needs to be crawlable, indexable, fast, mobile-friendly, organized in blocks, and use structured data. Those are the foundations. Without those, the content you were working to push up onto your brand set will not perform.
Jason Barnard speaking: There are other technical aspects that affect SEO, but they’re not so very important for brand SERPs. Okay, so in practical terms, what do we need to do? Crawlability simply means making sure Google is allowed to crawl the pages, so not blocked in robots.txt. Crawlability also means that there is a clear and simple path to each page from the homepage by the internal linking on your site. Indexability, make sure that Google can actually add the content to its index. That means the pages you are pushing into their brand SERP do not have the noindex tag and that the HTML is sufficiently clean for Google to be able to extract the content reliably. Fast. Ideally, the pages you’re trying to rank should load in under two seconds on a 3G connection. That’s how Google judges your speed.
Jason Barnard speaking: If that isn’t feasible, it isn’t a show stopper in the context of brand SERPs, but a page that takes over two seconds is a bad user experience, and Google will not give that page favorable treatment. Google has an online tool to check the speed.
Jason Barnard speaking: Mobile-friendly simply means that the page delivers a good user experience on mobile devices. Great design, images, and videos of the correct size, easy-to-use interface, easy to navigate… You get the idea. Google crawls and indexes using mobile, and it renders the page, meaning it can see the page, and so it can easily understand where the page isn’t mobile-friendly. Google also has an online tool that allows you to see how it perceives your page.
Jason Barnard speaking: Blocks are very, very, very important. Google analyzes the web at the block level, so you need to organize your content in blocks. Cindy Krum talks about Fraggles. Fraggles are fragments of content, each with a handle. The handle is a div or a semantic HTML5 element. The idea is that Google identifies a block of content that answers its user’s query, then reaches into the content and uses the handle to pull that segment out and place it in the SERP. Organizing your content in Fraggles makes Google’s life much easier.
Jason Barnard speaking: Schema markup and structured data are incredibly important. Schema markup indicates to Google which parts of the content it should use for which use cases. A good example is FAQ markup that helps Google identify questions and answers and that facilitates their delivery onto the SERP in the form of featured snippets and People Also Ask. Google also uses schema markup to make sure it’s understood your content. So add schema markup to your content as much as you possibly can to make your content as clear as possible to Google. Google has an online tool to check your schema markup too.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, beyond the technical aspects. There’s an enormous amount you can do beyond technical SEO. In fact, SEO in general and brand SERPs in particular today rely much, much more on nontechnical than on technical, which wasn’t the case in the noughties. Your major levers here are internal linking, multimedia content, digestible copywriting, communicating entities and relationships, freshness, corroboration, inbound links, mentions credibility, and user-generated content.
Jason Barnard speaking: These aspects are covered in the lessons, in different courses as and when they’re necessary.
Jason Barnard speaking: For the moment.
Jason Barnard speaking: A quick overview of each.
Jason Barnard speaking: Internal linking. Make sure your internal linking is logical and clear. You need to use internal linking to signpost the content you think is important and relevant to users who are searching your brand.
Jason Barnard speaking: Multimedia content. Add quality content, focus on images, audio, and video, because that’s what Google’s users and therefore Google are looking for. Make sure that your content is on-topic content that your audience will find relevant and interesting. You need to optimize your images and your videos, so make sure you’ve got the descriptive ALT tags on your images, and that the file name also describes the images. That goes for video too. For both, use the “figure” HTML tag. Using the figure tag, you have explicitly identified a Fraggle, a fragment of content with a handle. So Google can easily reach in, grab the fragment by its handle, and put the image or the video in the SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: Next, simplify your writing style. Make sure your writing is clear and concise so that it’s easy for Google to understand. But a simpler writing style is also very often better for people. So with clear and concise writing, you’re winning on two fronts.
Jason Barnard speaking: Whatever the content format, whether writing, podcasting, images, or videos, make sure that the content makes sense out of context. Imagine the content is a block in the SERP. Does it make sense as standalone content? Does it make sense to someone who doesn’t know your brand as well as you do?
Jason Barnard speaking: A lot of brands write content with an inside view. They forget that people consuming this content are looking at the brand from the outside and imagine that the audience knows more about the brand than they do in reality. That makes the content difficult to digest for the audience, especially on the SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: So when creating content, be empathetic and create content that addresses the topic from the user’s point of view, less “I, me mine” and more “you and we”, as it were.
Jason Barnard speaking: Entities and relationships. With hummingbird. Google moved from strings to things, meaning it attempts to understand the world in a manner similar to the human brain. It analyzes entities and understands them through their relationships to other entities.
Jason Barnard speaking: So for Google to understand your content, it’s very important to include entities and relationships. You can do that by using semantic triples. Semantic triples sound very complicated, but it’s actually very simple. Subject -> verb -> object. The subject is an entity. The verb is the relationship, and the object is another entity. Keep the subject, verb, and object as close together in your sentences as possible and make sure that the verb you use describes the relationship clearly and unambiguously.
Jason Barnard speaking: Adidas makes shoes.
Jason Barnard speaking: Subject -> verb -> object … Is easier for Google to understand than “Adidas, the German shoe manufacturer” or “Adidas the German company, has a long history in shoemaking”.
Jason Barnard speaking: With accurate semantic triples in your content writing, you’re making things much clearer for Google and giving yourself a big helping hand.
Jason Barnard speaking: As a slight aside here, schema markup supports this, so look at the schema markup. To make sure that Google really understands your content.
Jason Barnard speaking: Next, your content needs to be fresh. Add new content regularly, not necessarily every day or even every week, but whatever rhythm you choose, stick to it. Not only does this encourage Google, but it looks better to your audience – on your site, on social platforms, and on your brand SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: Some content you create will be evergreen. Even in that case, updating it from time to time is a good idea. Keep it up to date for users and fresh for Google. Once again, schema markup is very helpful here. It includes a last modified tag that indicates explicitly to Google when you last updated the content, and that makes it easy for Google to see you’re on the ball.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now corroboration. Any information you give about your brand that you want to push up onto your brand SERP needs corroboration from multiple third parties. That corroboration can be from any relevant, trustworthy source – a relevant industry organization, a local association, a government organization, a social media platform, a client, a supplier, a journalist, a blogger, or in the knowledge base such as Wikipedia or Crunchbase. Wikipedia is obviously the pinnacle, but it’s not necessary for most brands. So don’t get hung up on Wikipedia.
Jason Barnard speaking: Next, links and mentions. Getting a relevant link to a piece of content is a big, big win. One quality link can boost a piece of content right up onto your brand SERP from nowhere. So keep getting those links. Encourage others to link to the content you want to rank on your brand SERP. Since a link from a relevant source is a very strong indication that your content is relevant and important to people who are searching for your brand. But also get mentions. With or without the link, mentions of your brand in a relevant context helps Google understand who you are and what you do.
Jason Barnard speaking: And it also sends a strong signal to Google that your brand is noteworthy within your industry.
Jason Barnard speaking: Links and mentions play into credibility… And credibility is incredibly important to your SEO, and absolutely essential for your brand SERPs. Google refers to credibility as “E A T” – expertise authority and trust. I’ll explain those.
Jason Barnard speaking: Expertise. Is the information accurate? Is the writer or brand credible writing about this topic.
Jason Barnard speaking: Authoritativeness. Is the author well-respected in their field? Is the brand widely recognized in the industry? Is the content referred to elsewhere on the web by other authoritative websites, brands, and people?
Jason Barnard speaking: Trustworthiness. Do the brand and the writer have a good reputation and is the content reliable?
Jason Barnard speaking: Importantly, they are judging credibility or E-A-T at three levels. The content, the author, and the website.
Jason Barnard speaking: Next, encourage and include user-generated content as much as you possibly can. Reviews and user comments are very powerful. Both reviews and user comments add context, provide additional information around the content, and give a strong indication that the content is valuable and relevant to your audience. Reviews have the added advantage that they actually send an explicit quality signal.
Jason Barnard speaking: Social media. Make sure you have a solid presence on social. Choose the platforms that are most popular with your audience and join them there. Bring value to your audience on each platform and get engagement. Sharing on social platforms and the general social buzz around your content is a signal to Google that the content is useful and appreciated.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now a quick word on relevancy and value. These are both phenomenally important for brand SERPs. Google aims to fill your brand SERP with the content that is the most relevant and most valuable to your audience. The content you should focus on for your SEO strategy is content that is relevant and valuable to your users. This is vital, particularly in your brand SERP, where those are the single most important criteria Google is using to rank.
Jason Barnard speaking: Importantly, stay on topic. Don’t be tempted to spread the net and try and hit every topic on earth. Stick to your brand, your product, the solutions you provide… And topics your audience is truly interested in. Be relevant, provide valuable content and stay on topic.
Jason Barnard speaking: The conclusion, gone are the days when you could succeed in SEO with just one tactic. In the past, low-quality content could rank by having boatloads of backlinks, and well-optimized content could rank with very few backlinks. It was a tactics-based game.
Jason Barnard speaking: As you’ve probably realized by now, SEO is not standalone. It’s necessarily part of one overall marketing strategy. In brand SERPs. This is especially true. Google uses content from many sources in your brand SERP – your site, social media, media sites, its knowledge graph, and many, many more. To evaluate the value that any given piece of content brings to your audience, and therefore to choose which content to show, Google depends on signals from across your entire digital ecosystem.
Jason Barnard speaking: What is your digital ecosystem? Your site, social platforms, mentions of your brand, the content you create, the content you distribute, the behavior of your audience, third-party statements about you, trust signals, and so on. In short, everything you do online affects your digital ecosystem and Google is watching that very, very, very closely.
Jason Barnard speaking: Google is looking at the quality, the quantity, and the scope of your digital ecosystem. Today, and especially in the context of brand SERPs, you need a well-balanced strategy that includes a solid technical foundation, content that is valuable to your audience, engagement from that audience and the demonstrable reputation in the form of expertise, authority, and trust.
Jason Barnard speaking: Your brand SERP reflects Google’s view of your digital ecosystem and highlights the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing strategy, including your SEO. Look at what Google shows for your brand, and you will better understand your digital ecosystem and where you are with your SEO and your overall marketing strategy. There will be much more about that, and in fact, everything I’ve talked about here, in other lessons.
Jason Barnard speaking: Thank you.
