Branded SERP is the digital storefront of your brand. If another site is winning for your branded searches, they could be gaining traffic from your brand name, or worse, hurting your image.

Watch our webinar Branded SERP: The Secret to Ranking Higher to get a better understanding of branded search terms, related SERP features, and the tools you need to climb up the rankings. Join Jason Barnard, an industry expert in branded SERP, and Gerald Murphy, our SEO Senior Solution Business Manager, as they go through best practices that enhance your brand and increase visibility.

Learn more about:

• How to get your brand to rank for top SERP spots
• Reasons why building a strong branded SERP helps your SEO strategy
• When your company should prioritize branded SERP over non-branded
• Why beginner and advanced SEOs should focus on branded SERP

Published by: Similarweb. Presenters: Jason Barnard, Gerald Murphy. August 12, 2021.

Summary: Branded SERP: The Secret to Ranking Higher (Similarweb.com)

Event: Similarweb Webinar Date: 12 August 2021 Participants: Jason Barnard (guest expert), Gerald Murphy (host, Similarweb) Companion article: Jason Barnard, “3 Ways to Improve Brand SERP Visibility,” Similarweb Blog, 9 August 2021 - https://www.similarweb.com/blog/marketing/seo/brand-serp/ Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[ID]

Key Takeaways

Jason Barnard joined Gerald Murphy of Similarweb for a practical walkthrough of branded SERP analysis, using the Similarweb platform to examine real brands (Disney, Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Gymshark, HubSpot, Facebook). While primarily a platform demonstration, the webinar contains several important articulations of TKF concepts, particularly the child education metaphor, Brand SERP as digital strategy diagnostic, and insights from Bing’s algorithm team.

1. Entities = Proper Nouns = Brands

Jason Barnard explained that “brand” in the context of Brand SERPs means any entity: “Companies, people, events - you say entities, and that may be a word that some people don’t really know. It’s things. It’s anything you can identify as a thing. So proper nouns, if you think about it from a grammatical point of view, are entities. Proper nouns in this context are brands.”

2. Google’s Users, Not Yours

Jason Barnard reiterated a core principle: “Don’t ever forget - the people searching on Google are its users. They’re not yours. They might be your audience, but they’re Google’s users while they’re on Google. What Google is trying to do is give its user the answer to that question, the solution to their problem, as quickly and efficiently as possible.”

3. The Child Education Metaphor Applied to Brand SERPs

Jason Barnard stated: “You’re the responsible adult in the room. Google is the child you are educating, in terms of your brand at least.” He extended it: “I know who I am. I know what I represent. I know what I sell and who my audience is. All I need to do is explain it to Google - this child - and make sure that Google understands and is confident that it’s understood. Which is a very important point that people miss.” He then extended further: “If I can teach Google that I’m better than the competition for the same service, I would win the SEO game.”

4. Brand SERP Reveals Holes in Digital Strategy

Jason Barnard stated: “What I love about Brand SERPs is you can immediately see the holes in your digital marketing strategy. You can see where the content is missing, where you’re not producing the content, and where other people or other companies are taking these spots on your branded terms - or for the rich elements in particular - that you should be dominating.”

5. Build from the Brand SERP Outwards

Jason Barnard described a strategic approach: “If you start there - your exact-match brand name - you’re focusing on something relatively small. You make that right, and you build out with all the rest of the stuff.” He used the ski slopes analogy: “Your Brand SERP is the green slopes of SEO. It’s a controlled environment. Google’s looking for this content from you actively. Build from the Brand SERP outwards and you’ll be a happy puppy.” The companion article reinforces this: “Always start with your exact match brand name.”

6. Insights from Bing’s Algorithm Team

Jason Barnard referenced multiple conversations with Bing team members. He cited Nathan Chalmers explaining Brand SERPs are driven by user intent satisfaction. He cited Frédéric Dubut (core algorithm) confirming the average SERP will stabilise at seven to eight blue links with two to three rich elements. He noted Gary Illyes confirming that “all of these search engines work pretty much the same,” making Bing insights applicable to Google.

7. Twitter as Real-Time Brand SERP Control

Jason Barnard described Twitter’s unique position: “Twitter feeds directly into Google. They have a partnership - a hosepipe - which means that Google sees everything in Twitter in real time.” He described his “Twitter trick”: “If I tweet something, in 15 seconds that tweet appears on my Brand SERP.” Triggering Twitter boxes from a standing start takes approximately six months.

8. Rich Elements Are Easier to Win Than Blue Links

Jason Barnard explained that rich elements are relatively easier to earn than blue link positions. He described a dual strategy: “YouTube videos with great thumbnails - the thumbnails will trigger the images first, the videos will follow.” The companion article provides supporting data: only 15% of exact-match Brand SERPs have just blue links (Kalicube data), and 85% include at least one rich element.

9. Branded Search as Customer Experience

Gerald Murphy observed that “branded search queries are actually 100 percent about customer experience, because they already know who you are.” Jason Barnard agreed: “They know who you are. They’re searching for you. And you have, in my opinion as a marketer, as a brand manager, an obligation to make sure that what they see is your brand message in your voice.”

10. “Doing a Disney” - When You Own Every Blue Link

Jason Barnard coined the phrase “doing a Disney” to describe the scenario where every blue link on a Brand SERP belongs to the brand itself. He explained that Disney’s SERP appears less rich than expected because Google uses blue links from multiple Disney-owned domains (theme parks, stores, Disney Channel, jobs site) to let the user choose among ambiguous intents.

11. Kalicube Pro’s News Site Intelligence for PR

Jason Barnard described how Kalicube Pro identifies which news sites rank for specific brands, industries, and geo regions: “I had a client who, instead of contacting 20 different media outlets, contacted four and got two successes - because we were asking the right people, because they were ranking in our industry, for our entity type, in our geo region.”

Historical Significance

This webinar, recorded in August 2021, documents Jason Barnard’s articulation of the “build from the Brand SERP outwards” strategic approach, the child education metaphor applied specifically to brand management, insights from multiple Bing algorithm team members (Nathan Chalmers, Frédéric Dubut), and the practical methodology for analysing branded SERPs at scale. The companion article, authored by Jason Barnard on Similarweb’s blog, provides supporting data from the Kalicube database (70,000 brands, 12 countries, 7 years). These concepts form core elements of The Kalicube Framework (TKF) and The Kalicube Process™ (TKP).

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Full Transcript: Branded SERP: The Secret to Ranking Higher (Similarweb.com)

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Gerald Murphy: Hi everyone, and welcome to today’s webinar on Branded SERPs - The Secret to Ranking Higher. And we have an amazing guest with us: Jason Barnard, who is all about branded SERPs. My name is Gerald Murphy. I work in the solutions team here at Similarweb, and specifically within the Digital Marketing Intelligence solution. And I’m joined today by Jason. Hey, Jason.

Jason Barnard: Hi, Gerald. How you doing?

Gerald Murphy: Very well indeed. How are you doing?

Jason Barnard: I’m doing super-duper, thank you.

Gerald Murphy: Good stuff. And today we’re speaking about one of your favourite topics - branded SERPs.

Jason Barnard: It’s not one of my favourite topics, Gerald. It is my favourite topic. I love it.

Gerald Murphy: Let’s dive straight in. So the focus of today’s webinar is how to analyse branded SERPs using the Similarweb platform. So just before we deep-dive in - both branded and non-branded SERPs provide a massive opportunity for brands. As you can see on the left-hand side, we have done the query “Similarweb” - that would be classified as a brand keyword. And when people do searches for brand keywords, branded SERPs are triggered. So there is a difference between the two. You’ve got brand keywords, which are the individual keywords, and branded SERPs, which is the focus of today’s webinar - what information is presented on what’s called the search engine results page, the SERP.

On the right-hand side, we have a more generic term - in this case, it’s “web traffic.” That will be called a non-branded keyword, and that particular keyword triggers a non-branded SERP. People are also entities too, so when we speak of branded terms, we actually may be talking about what can often appear to be a non-branded term.

So let’s take, for example, Tom Daley. You can see on the left-hand side Tom Daley has loads of things going on. And I’m sure Jason’s gonna chip in here around some of the things that are on the SERP. In the UK, they’ve just recently come from the US - so I think it’s called “pills,” is it, on the top right-hand side?

Jason Barnard: Yeah. Well, the first thing - I mean, as you were saying, I talk about brand a lot. But in fact, when we talk about brand, I think if we look at it more globally, it’s companies, it’s people, it’s events. You say “entities,” and that may be a word that some people don’t really know. It’s things. It’s anything you can identify as a thing. So proper nouns, if you think about it from a grammatical point of view, are entities. Proper nouns in this context are brands.

So Tom Daley is, in this context, a brand. And what’s incredibly interesting is, in this particular example - I mean, we’re starting diving, as it were, in off the deep end in the swimming world - this is one of the richest SERPs I’ve ever seen. And what’s incredibly interesting here is five or six years ago, it would have been ten blue links with probably some quite old news about the Olympics. It would be out of date. It wouldn’t be terribly engaging. It wouldn’t have these images.

And there on the right-hand side, it’s actually an image gallery, and it goes through - you can’t see it here - about 10 photos of, I would assume, Tom Daley in his diving pursuits. But you’ve also got news stories. You’ve got information about the gold medals he’s won. All incredibly upstanding. Google has gone incredibly good at not only presenting these rich results that are very engaging, but also presenting very up-to-date information.

And you mentioned the “pills” at the top - lozenges, you could call them. It’s a new kind of aspect. It’s been tested a lot in the US, and this appears now to be moving over to other anglophone countries, and will then move into all the different countries in the world - which is how Google tends to experiment with these new features. It tries them out in the US, then moves them across to other anglophone countries like Australia, Ireland, and the UK, and then expands it out further.

And what’s really interesting there is Google uses these to identify the different aspects, the different verticals you can look at for Tom Daley the entity - videos, news. I can’t see what the other ones are because it’s too small and I’ve got very bad eyesight. But the idea being: I can actually specify which kind of information I want, and it will give me that specific vertical of information or content.

Gerald Murphy: Definitely. And I guess the thing here too - when we’re looking in this case at Google - search engines in essence are trying to present the most useful information to us. And in this case, if someone is doing a search for Tom Daley, it may be to find out more about him, it may be to find out what events he’s been part of, it may actually be about him personally - which explains why there’s photos and stuff on here. It’s a really, really rich experience and a fantastic example of what an ideal branded SERP looks like.

And again, you can see on the right-hand side we’ve got the keyword “Olympics” - very similar story here, Jason, in the sense of it’s so rich, there’s a lot of information on Google.

Jason Barnard: Yeah. And “the Olympics” is, as I said earlier on, a proper name, therefore an entity, therefore this is a Brand SERP. Because “the Olympics” - I think it’s even a registered trademark, probably, knowing the IOC organisation, I think they’re called. But yeah, I mean, once again we’re using these as examples because these are extremes. This is extremely up-to-date, extremely rich. And most Brand SERPs - most, I mean, if you’re a company or a normal person - you wouldn’t expect to see this amount of visual and interactive content and this amount of detail.

But you know, maybe this is where Google’s going. If you’ve got trending news, it wants to show it. And it’s definitely trying to get there, and it’s definitely doing a very good job in certain industries, in certain circumstances.

Gerald Murphy: Absolutely. And I think this is a really nice example too. When we’re looking at Tom Daley - an Olympian - and the branded term “Olympics,” I think it’s really good and crucial to get the point across that Google actually understands what’s going on not just in relation to that thing, but actually at this moment in time. It knows the Olympics are happening. It knows where it’s happening. What events are coming up. And that’s actually where Google is getting really clever - not just “what piece of content is this” and “what is this thing,” but actually “what can we present to the searcher that’s most relevant today.” And that’s really crucial.

What we want to do in today’s webinar is take you through a range of examples like this so that you guys can better understand, first of all, what is your branded SERP now - but crucially, what else can you do to improve your branded SERP tomorrow.

Jason Barnard: Right. And really quickly, before - just to finish off on that, because I think there’s a really important point to be made - Google is trying to give its user - and don’t ever forget, the people searching on Google are its users. They’re not yours. They might be your audience, but they’re Google’s users while they’re on Google. They might also be your users.

But what Google is trying to do is give its user the answer to that question, the solution to their problem, as quickly and efficiently as possible. And in branded terms, that usually means coming to your site or finding out more about you. So what it’s trying to do is present its user with the most helpful, valuable, and relevant information about that brand on that SERP, so that the user can choose how they want to interact with the brand.

Gerald Murphy: Absolutely. And again, in this example we’ve looked at a few things including some of the new features like the “pills,” as you can see in the top right of both of these screen grabs. But just in terms of what we’ll be looking at today: some of the Similarweb SERP feature opportunities.

So again, if you’re new to this space, in its simplest form, a SERP feature is a piece of information that’s on the search engine results page. But the more pieces of information you can get on there creates a really rich SERP feature experience. And crucially, what it’s doing is helping you to have a much better representation of your brand online. So if you have a brand, for example, and you have an app, there’s a way in which you can actually optimise your app so that it also appears on the SERP when someone does a search for your brand. And that’s even better, because what you’re doing is providing your customers - whether new or returning - the ability to see other things that you have online. And in essence, this is also helping you to optimise your various digital assets to become a better representation of your brand. Which is absolutely brilliant.

Jason Barnard: I mean, as you made the point, it actually improves your own content for your own users, even though your starting thought was “let’s make it look better on Google.” It spreads out very quickly and incredibly effectively across your entire digital ecosystem. I’m sorry I keep cutting in. I love it.

Gerald Murphy: No, bang on. You say the most amazing things, and very simply as well, which is what I love.

Now, again, one thing to note is that SERP features themselves change a lot. But crucially - and going to the point made around the Olympics - Google knows what’s going on today, and it actually gets keyword intent incredibly well. So what you can see in this chart is the percentage of keywords that have Google Maps on them for Google UK on desktop, across January 2020 to December 2020.

Now, of course, as the good old saying goes, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know COVID happened globally across many countries. But I think what’s really interesting about this is Google Maps was trending massively upwards towards the start of last year, but then it has completely gone the reverse - it’s decreased significantly. And what this is actually saying is that Google’s understood that people’s movements have been restricted, and as a result, it’s also associated that with the SERP feature of Local Pack or Google Maps.

So when we’re talking about SERP features, don’t always put your eggs in one basket, so to speak, where “I’m going to just do quick answers and that’s it.” That can change significantly. This is probably a very stark way to show that, but Google does get intent. And there may be things and changes in the market that we maybe don’t even see - they’re unforeseen - in which case you don’t want to over-rely on one SERP feature itself. Do you have any comments around Google Maps and COVID in general?

Jason Barnard: Yeah. I mean, the Google Maps example - we were digging into that, and that’s when we discovered this. And we looked at the data and thought, actually, it’s dropped off as soon as COVID happened. Especially on mobile - that’s the desktop version, but on mobile you could see this drop-off. And Google is saying, actually, people can’t go to these shops, so there’s no point in showing them a Google Map Pack.

And another example would be trending news. If there’s big news that comes out in an industry, all of a sudden news boxes are going to be appearing all over the place. And also, in fact, interestingly enough, with COVID in France - I’m based in France - we saw news boxes on a lot of traditionally commercial local terms, because people were looking for the news about “can I do this, can I do that, can I go here.” And so you ended up with these news boxes. I mean, I don’t have the exact data, but in France at least, for a few of my clients, instead of going to get your contrôle technique, it was showing news about what are the rules about actually going out to get your contrôle technique. And the answer was actually you can, most of the time - although there was a period last year when you absolutely couldn’t. And you probably would have been fined. In France, it was 150-euro fine.

Gerald Murphy: Very good. Very, very interesting. But again, definitely making sure that we are looking at various SERP features. So when we go through the platform shortly, it’s not just saying, “Oh, I want to have Twitter in my branded SERP.” It’s making sure that we’re thinking of other things to make it even richer. And as Jason mentioned previously, it’s actually providing better content and more relevant content to your users too.

Jason Barnard: Right. And there’s an interesting point as well - you can leave that screen, that’s absolutely fine. What I’ve noticed - I did an interview with the guys at Bing, the team leads at Bing, who are actually very open about how their algorithm works. And what was interesting is they told me lots of what I would consider to be industrial secrets. They were very, very generous with the information.

And Gary Illyes recently said on a Google podcast - Gary Illyes is the guy at Google who explains to us all how Google functions, and they’re very secretive - but he actually said all of these search engines work pretty much the same. And the implication of that is: what the people at Bing told me is applicable to Google most of the time. Obviously not in the details.

But one of the things they mentioned was: although these rich elements seem to be taking over our lives - and in the Olympic example it really is - the average number of blue links (which are the normal results that we’re used to, used to have just 10 boring items in a list that you could choose from) compared to rich elements is staying very stable, and has done for the last few years. And the people at Bing - Frédéric Dubut was saying, who’s the core algorithm guy - was saying this isn’t going to change. It’s always going to be about seven or eight blue links on average and two or three rich elements. So they will tend to swap the rich elements in and out.

That obviously is an average - so it’s an average across the entire world, all the industries, all the geos. But the guy who runs the whole-page algorithm - and that’s a whole rabbit hole we shouldn’t go down today - was pointing out to me that some can be very rich and some can be not so rich. And that can be to do with intent.

And we’ll get back to that when we look at Facebook, I hope, later on - which is a very interesting example about the branded search where the intent is incredibly obvious. And so what they do is they will adapt the page to suit the need of the user. Once again, to get that user to satisfaction as efficiently and effectively as possible. Once again, reminder: they’re Google’s users before they’re yours in this session.

Gerald Murphy: Absolutely. And yeah, what I want to do now is - actually, before we go and look at examples, I know you mentioned Facebook, 100 percent, let’s dive in.

For anyone that’s maybe new to Similarweb and isn’t really sure what the solution does, I want to just spend five to ten minutes taking you through roughly speaking how and what types of insights do we have around keywords. So the first one is a keyword research section. And what you’re able to do in here is have the ability to actually get keyword ideas - we call that “keyword generator.” And we actually have it across three engines, because actually our behaviour is massively different on Google versus Amazon versus YouTube.

I think I looked just a few weeks ago here in the UK when we had a heatwave, and our data was actually showing that a lot of people, yes, were on Google searching for air conditioning units. But actually on YouTube, it was around a lot more inspirational content - so, for example, “how to clean an air conditioner unit” or “how to actually hide an air conditioning unit.” So when we’re looking at these keywords, be mindful that it can be that they’re a core topic, but there’s other little sub-keywords off the back of them.

So in here, for example, if you wanted to get an idea - “I’ve got shoes, I sell shoes on my website, I want to rank better on Google” - what you can do in here is put in your core or head term, as it’s sometimes called, and what you’re also able to do is get keyword ideas based on this core term. By default, we always look at worldwide desktop. However, if you want, you can look at a particular country or market that you actually want to do keyword research for.

So in here, what this is going to do is help us to narrow down: where specifically do we want to sell shoes, or write content about shoes? So what we can do in the platform is, using the buttons on the top right-hand side, filter from worldwide to our country that we want to get information on, as well as switching from desktop to mobile.

And some of the key metrics in here will be keyword ideas relating to, in this case, “shoes.” But this can be against anything - we will of course do branded examples shortly. But it’s just to give you a flavour for what information we have. So when we present keywords, generally speaking, we’ll give you the search volume of them over 12 months, so you can get, on average, how many people are carrying out a search for this keyword. So in this case, we can see the term “shoes” itself is being searched for quite significantly. And actually, when we look at the yearly trend, there is overall - when we go from left to right - an increase in demand for that topic.

This is really, really useful to know, because what it’s allowing us to do is to identify topics that are actually growing. And as a result, we can maybe want to create more content on them.

We also have zero-click information. So we have four different data methodologies, one of which is actually real search behaviour. And as a result, we have zero clicks. This is basically what happens after the SERP experience - so what do people do once they do a search for that keyword? And in this case, what we can see is: for the keyword “shoes,” yes, there are a lot of searches, yes, it’s growing month over month over the calendar year, and actually in the last full calendar month it’s at its peak. But actually, a lot of those searches don’t actually click on anything. And that may be where that search term is actually too broad. So making sure that when we’re looking at our content strategies, we’re actually picking terms that actually matter - and zero clicks can help us do that.

And then what we can see to the right of that, just for a full comprehensive overview, is we have estimated cost per click, which we take directly from Google, and then we have the organic versus paid traffic split. So in other words, it may well be a good opportunity here for both SEO and PPC teams to work together to better optimise and improve budget efficiencies.

Now, one we’re going to use later on is this feature called “Analyse Keywords.” And this is where we can, on the fly, very quickly analyse what’s going on for a particular given keyword - which I’ll show you when we look at a branded keyword example. And actually, it’s really useful here to find out what are the SERP feature opportunities.

But before I go in and show you branded SERP information, I want to take you through another part of the platform that can also be really useful for SERP features specifically. It’s called Competitive Analysis. So in here, for example, what you’re able to do is punch in a website - so for example, let’s do HubSpot versus Moz versus Clicksy. So basically digital marketing, more specifically search-orientated websites.

And what you’ll find in here is the ability to go and find out: of all of these three websites combined, what keywords do they actually generate traffic from? And you can see that on the left-hand side we’re underneath the Search section - Keywords. And what you’ll see here now is a list of keywords that all of these websites collectively gain traffic from. When you come down, you’ll see the keywords there on the left, the amount of traffic they’re getting from that keyword, which competitor is winning for it - in this case, HubSpot is getting all of their traffic from “HubSpot,” no surprise. Then to the right of that, you’ve got the search volume, cost per click, organic versus paid. But crucially, in here you’ve also got SERP features. So what you’re able to go and find out very quickly are: what are the opportunities across all digital assets that we potentially can go and optimise our content for?

Jason Barnard: And then really quickly - interesting, what you’ve just shown is that HubSpot own the rich elements, the SERP features, for their own brand name. Which is phenomenally important.

Gerald Murphy: Absolutely. But again, there is also an opportunity here. For example, you can see it’s all colour-coded - so on this little pop-up underneath where it says “Featured,” you’ve got images, knowledge card, news, and so on. But the ones that aren’t coloured are Related Searches and Twitter feed. Jason, what’s your view on Twitter when it comes to branded SERPs?

Jason Barnard: I absolutely love it. I mean, it doesn’t suit every business. If you’re in a business that’s very slow-moving - or, I was gonna say “uptight” but that would be unfair. I was gonna say lawyers, for example. That might be difficult if you’re a family lawyer, because Twitter is based on this kind of real-time communication and engagement with your audience.

And Google will tend to show Twitter boxes on a Brand SERP when somebody searches for your brand name, if they see that your audience - a relevant audience - is engaging with your Twitter feed. So I love it.

Also, because one thing I think people don’t realise is that Twitter feeds directly into Google. They have a partnership - it’s a partnership whereby the Twitter feeds actually go straight into Google. It’s what we call a “hosepipe,” which means that Google sees everything in Twitter in real time.

So what then happens - I mean, I play what I call the “Twitter trick,” which is: if I tweet something, in 15 seconds that tweet appears on my Brand SERP when you search for my name. And that’s real-time control. And it also demonstrates, for users, “I think this brand is engaging with its audience.” So I think it’s a great trick to play if you can do it, and if it’s relevant to your industry and your audience.

Gerald Murphy: So would you guess, then, in this case, HubSpot - are they not either producing good tweets, enough tweets, or what sort of things would indicate that someone wouldn’t appear for a Twitter feed?

Jason Barnard: Right. And that brings us to an incredibly important point - it’s all interdependent. So what Google might be saying is: the Twitter feed is interesting and valuable, but this other stuff is more valuable. And I don’t want to kill the blue links, as it were, with too many rich elements. So the Twitter feed has been put to one side because it’s less valuable.

But if you don’t have a Twitter feed and you think you deserve one, and you think it really should be there, the trick is: original tweets. Retweets, replies, likes - doesn’t really count for much. Original tweets that your audience engages with that Google sees will trigger the Twitter boxes. I did an experiment - it takes six months from a standing start.

Gerald Murphy: Oh, very, very interesting. And again, it’s all endless - there’s loads of other opportunities there too. And actually, this brings us on quite nicely around: how do we go and find and see how our branded SERP is performing?

So let’s actually just switch this up a little bit and have a look at - I think we’ll go for Disney. I think it’s one of the interesting brands in the sense of: do they actually have a true competitor? Well, it’s certainly a brand competitor. And this is really interesting because they actually own quite a lot of space and you have a lot of uniqueness - so they’ve got theme parks across the world and some of the most popular places, including your town of Paris there, Jason.

And this can be really interesting just to see how these guys are performing for their own branded terms. Now, what we do is we automatically filter branded and non-branded terms. We have an automatic branded/non-branded filter. And essentially, there’s two steps taken in the account, roughly. The first is: which keywords are sending the most traffic to homepages? Then what we do is match those keywords to the domain structure, and that helps us very quickly identify what we call branded keywords.

So let’s go and have a look at Disney’s branded keywords and find out what sort of little insights and things they’re doing. And then we’ll actually go into particular keywords. So actually, what you can see here is: outside of the pure brand term “Disney,” there’s actually a lot of other opportunities here too. So Disney themselves aren’t actually doing incredibly well for branded SERPs. They’re only ranking here, in this case, for images and Related Questions. And Jason, any thoughts on this type of branded SERP?

Jason Barnard: Right. Once again, I mean, it looks strange at first sight until you remember what Nathan Chalmers from Bing was saying: we’re trying to satisfy what the user’s actually looking for, rather than what you think as a human being might appear for “Disney.”

And Disney’s a really interesting case, because the SERP is relatively not very rich - it’s relatively full of blue links compared to something like Microsoft or even Google. But they have a special-case scenario on the search term “Disney.” And I now call it “doing a Disney” - which is: every single blue link belongs to them. They’ve got loads of sites. They’ve got the theme parks, they’ve got the shops, they’ve got the main site, they’ve got Disney Channel, I can’t remember - oh, they’ve got a jobs site.

And what Google does is say: we’re not sure which of these intents the person is looking for. A job? A theme park near them? Are they looking for the Disney Store? Disney Channel? Old movies? New movies? Whatever it might be. And they give the user just a list of Disney-owned domains to give the user that choice. Which is one explanation of why that SERP is relatively less rich than one might initially expect with a major multimedia brand like Disney.

Gerald Murphy: And definitely, when it comes to your pure brand, you can see there’s a lot more potential experiments with different SERP features. So in the case of the exact phrase “Disney,” you can see there are actually other SERP features that are triggered and that you can potentially optimise for.

But actually, when you scroll down and you’ll see variations of those branded terms, Disney themselves - whilst they’re overall performing incredibly well - are actually potentially missing out on some really good keywords. For example, “Disney Plus” itself - they don’t have any SERP feature for the term “Disney Plus.” So what this allows you guys to do is, using that branded filter, go and actually see what branded keywords do you rank for in the first place, but also what SERP features are there that you potentially can go and optimise your content for.

So if we go back, actually, and let’s look at maybe a better competitor - and by better I mean it’s a really highly competitive market. So let’s maybe look at adidas.com. And what you can see is we have this feature and functionality called Similar Sites, and what it automatically does is actually help you to find out who else is in this space. Now, in the case of what we can see here, for the most part these would all be called brand competitors - so they’re ones that people would actually relate their brand to. Whereas you may actually have digital competitors, which is basically competitors that aren’t traditionally talked about within these companies, but actually they may rank for a lot of keywords relating to them.

So let’s add in a few. For example, if we do Adidas, Nike - in this case, Foot Locker, we’ll maybe consider it a digital competitor because it only sells one product of many that these two manufacturers sell. So let’s go for, for example, Reebok. And actually we can just stick in those three, click, and the screen refreshes. What we’re automatically doing in the background is getting all the information for all three of these sites.

For example, we’ve got Global Rank. So you can very quickly work out - if we work, for example, for Adidas - we can find out Nike is actually doing the best when it comes to web traffic and actually getting good traffic. By good I mean page views as well. We can tell you for any country what is the Global Rank. So you can see quite clearly here: nike.com is actually not only the best globally but very clearly within the United States much, much better than the other two brands. And then on the right-hand side, within the industry here of Lifestyle, Fashion, and Apparel, it’s the fourth traffic-generating website in the United States within that particular industry.

So let’s go and have a look at what these guys are actually doing from a branded search perspective. So again, on the left-hand side, we can come in, put in keywords, filter here by branded keywords, apply filter. And let’s just see what the data shows. Let’s let it load. And then what we can see here is all of the branded keywords in this case that are actually driving a lot of traffic to these websites.

Now, again, I am at the moment looking worldwide. However, you want to make sure that you’re looking at this from a country perspective. So let’s just narrow this down to the United States. And again, just note - in this example, these brands in particular have different domains. So for example, you’ll have adidas.co.uk, in which case you’d actually want to be looking at that domain if you’re looking at the UK market.

But again, in this case, you can see Nike as a brand is looking here and it’s optimised for images, knowledge card, local pack. Whereas actually Adidas is optimised and ranking for a much bigger range of SERP features - in this case it’s got news, product listing ads. What are your thoughts when it comes to paid search teams when we’re speaking about product listings and ads, Jason, when it comes to branded SERPs?

Jason Barnard: Yeah. I mean, there’s a big debate about should you bid on your own brand name, both in terms of Google Ads and also product listings. And it really does come down to your desire to control what’s going on around your brand and also the competition you have around your brand.

I mean, Adidas, I would imagine, have a lot of other people bidding on their brand name. But when it’s your own brand name, naturally, if you create a great campaign on Google Ads or Google Shopping around your own brand, you will pay significantly less than your competitors. So it can be relatively cheap, in inverted commas. And a lot of this is done to chase the competitors away, so it’s a defensive strategy. And some brands actually advertise whether there’s competition or not, simply because they want control. And when you pay, you get control.

Gerald Murphy: And then, of course, we have Reebok. In this example, of these three competitors, Reebok is actually doing by far the worst when it comes to their pure branded term. They only rank and appear for images. And in this case, they’re missing out on loads of opportunity and potential. Once again, images I guess are much - let’s say - “old school,” if I’m being true in saying that, Jason. But images have been around for as long as anything, really. Have you noticed any other changes? Like, have they been demoted, in the sense of they’re further down the page on branded SERPs? Or what’s your thoughts on images?

Jason Barnard: Right. Images - they can be considered to be old school, but they are actually very, very relevant for certain verticals. In the real estate vertical, that would tend to be something that’s useful for users. So you need to, once again, take a step back and say what’s actually going to be useful for a user.

In the case of Reebok, I would imagine that people are looking for the images and they’re looking for photos of the shoes. But technically they could also trigger videos, because I might want to watch the sports people wearing those shoes. And one thing that could be suggested is Reebok could take a step back and say, “Well, we are actually investing in video, but the video boxes don’t appear. We’re investing in the wrong places - or Google isn’t seeing that our audience is engaging with this content, and Google thinks that our audience engages more with images.”

What we need to do is prove Google wrong. Make videos of such great quality that engage our users, and put them on the platforms where Google sees that and understands that engagement. And then what tends to happen with video boxes and image boxes - obviously not a completely absolute rule - if you trigger image boxes, which as you said are relatively easy to trigger, you can then expect your videos to come in and take the place of the image boxes. Assuming there are other rich elements around, they seem to be not interchangeable, but if Google’s going to drop something to replace it with video boxes, it would tend to be the image boxes.

Gerald Murphy: And I think the other thing - really, definitely coming from a more general digital marketing perspective - is brands should never really be fearful of other brands as such, particularly with branded SERPs. And I think one point I think we kind of maybe made already, but I just want to recapture on, is: we’re looking here at three quite large brands - Adidas, Nike, and Reebok. But actually, overall, Nike gets a lot of traffic globally, and in probably their most important market, the United States - even actually the fourth best website within the fashion apparel space. When we dig in and look at what they’re doing from a SERP feature perspective for their branded terms, they’re actually sometimes missing out on some opportunities. So for example, “Nike student discount” - or even as you can see down here, “Nike shorts” - they’re just not appearing for any other brand types of terms.

So although big dominant brands can be seen initially as “oh, you can’t be better than them,” you actually can when you dig into the data.

Jason Barnard: And that’s a brilliant point on two fronts. Number one is: you’ve just identified, in the space of three seconds, two big holes in their content strategy and their communication strategy and their SEO strategy. And what I love about Brand SERPs is you can immediately see the holes in your digital marketing strategy. You can see where the content is missing, where you’re not producing the content, and where other people - or other companies - are taking these spots on your branded terms, or for the rich elements in particular, that you should be dominating.

So A, you’ve got a hole in your content. But secondly, those competitors - and for you as a smaller brand, it’s a great opportunity to get some visibility on a massive brand like Reebok. Create the images, create the videos, get yourself onto their branded search, and show off.

Gerald Murphy: Absolutely. And then also, when you scroll down here - so we’re at roughly like position 20 keywords. And again, this initially by default is ranked by the highest traffic-generating keywords that are sending traffic to these sites collectively. But you can see sometimes when you scroll down, it’s not always the case that people are actually featured for different branded terms, different SERP features. So there’s some keywords here that actually - there’s no SERP features. These would be what Jason referred to as the “ten blue links” earlier. So like “Nike Blazer” - you’ve got other terms in here as well that are basically just not triggering any SERP features.

Do you have any thoughts about - like, if I was a brand, I come in here and I can find keywords that actually have dashes (in other words, they’re 10 blue links) - is there actually any way for me to optimise certain digital assets to appear on that SERP?

Jason Barnard: Yeah. I mean, that’s a brilliant question and it’s a really important point. Because I think a lot of us look at these rich elements, the SERP features, and we think “I need to steal somebody else’s place.” That’s easier to do, I would argue, than the blue links. Because the blue links is this kind of long-standing system whereby anybody who’s ranking for a short-head term - for something very popular - in the blue links is going to have a big history, big backlink profile, loads of SEO advantages. Rich elements - relatively simpler.

But in fact, you don’t just need to look at replacing other people or other brands in these rich elements. You can also look at it and say: there’s a hole. The fact that there aren’t any rich elements means that Google hasn’t found the content that is of sufficient good quality, that brings sufficient value to trigger the rich element. And if you can produce the content that provides that value to Google’s user on the search they’ve made - in this case for “Nike Blazers” - you can get images. I would go for images right off the bat there. And I would start with images and start planning videos.

So one really nice trick there - and you basically hit both at the same time. YouTube videos with great thumbnails - the thumbnails will trigger the images first, the videos will follow. So you’ve got this brilliant short-mid-long-term strategy where one’s bouncing off the other. And you could potentially end up with both places. And I’ve seen it where you get the thumbnail and the video. And your visibility with a really good thumbnail on a SERP full of blue links - when you’ve got a colourful thumbnail - if you search for “Kalicube,” you’ll see lots of colourful thumbnails. That’s why we do it. Because it jumps out in people’s faces. They can’t miss your brand name.

Gerald Murphy: Absolutely. Really, really fantastic point. So again, I think for anyone watching this - either today or later on - it’s actually making the point here that what you see and also what’s triggered shouldn’t be your limit. You should always go above and beyond and have a little look and see: what other branded terms do I, first of all, even appear for? But actually, what other SERP features can I - as a human, because Google is actually thinking as a human more and more constantly - and when you look at some core parts of their algorithm, like for example Hummingbird, which is all around context too (so turning queries into strings, and that’s evolved into entities, and so on) - but actually looking at all of your branded keywords together and thinking about what SERP features, what in essence digital assets, would be most appropriate for that particular term.

So for example, actually you can see again our little friends here at Nike: the query “Nike return policy” - there’s again nothing on the SERP. The incredible experience here - they actually could have things like videos, quick answers, all of those good things - just so that someone can actually further relate to the brand and actually make arguably a much easier process. What is the policy, in a short summary? What do I need to do? Can I post it back? Do I need to drop it into a local place? Do I need to go in store? All of that information can be really nicely structured so that Nike can actually appear on the SERP directly, to better improve the customer experience online.

Jason Barnard: And yeah, that’s a really good point as well. I mean, customer service is a great example - a lot of brands completely miss out on. And it’s got a hidden benefit, which is: if people find the answer on Google that you have provided, and they know that you’ve provided it, and that it is the correct answer, they don’t call your client support line. Which is wonderful. And they’re happy because they’ve got the answer without actually having to wait with that awful message as you press lots of buttons.

But also, your support staff are saving time. They don’t need to actually deal with these repetitive, boring questions. Exactly. So you’re saving money. Your support staff are happier because they’re not repeating themselves incessantly all day. And the person is happier because they got the answer right off the bat, really quickly, from you, through Google.

Gerald Murphy: Completely. And that actually was bringing me on to another point, especially when it comes to return policies - like having a good clear idea of the phone numbers in all of the different countries the brand operates in is really, really crucial. But Google also understands that - from the country codes of the phone numbers to actually you and the content specifying the country, dash, then the phone number. It takes all of that into account and actually has a good idea of, in this case, what is the phone number within the country that the searcher is searching from.

Jason Barnard: Right. Absolutely brilliant. And Google’s getting much, much better at - I mean, that’s a good example - the phone numbers. I look a lot at Knowledge Panels, and what a lot of brands don’t realise - international brands especially - is Google will show the customer care number or the customer support number in the Knowledge Panel as fact now. So making sure that it understands which number corresponds to which country seems like an incredibly obvious point. But you’d be very surprised at how many brands get that wrong.

And when they say, “Google’s getting it wrong, Google’s stupid, Google’s misunderstood” - because you’ve explained it badly. So you need to take a step back once again and say: why is Google getting this wrong? I need to correct the information on my website that’s made Google misunderstand. So it’s your responsibility. You’re the responsible adult in the room. Google is the child you are educating - in terms of your brand, at least.

Gerald Murphy: Really nice way of putting it. Because I think we often think, “Can I rank on Google? Is it possible to do that?” If you teach it and do it well, it is possible.

Jason Barnard: Completely. And teaching - I mean, the teaching analogy starts with Brand SERPs, and it’s a perfect analogy for Brand SERPs. I know who I am. I know what I represent. And I know what I sell and who my audience is. All I need to do is explain it to Google - this child - make sure that Google understands and is confident that it’s understood. Which is a very important point that people miss. But then, I think you make the point: you can take that analogy further and say, if I can teach Google that I’m better than the competition for the same service, I would win the SEO game.

Gerald Murphy: Absolutely. And then, of course, it’s also important here to try and think about what is the user intent or keyword intent behind searches, including branded keywords themselves. So what I’m in now is - I’ve gone back to Keyword Research, I’m underneath the Analyse Keyword section, and in this case we’re looking at Overview. And I’ve typed in one of Jason’s favourites, actually - Facebook. Because it’s actually a really, really unique branded SERP, I would argue.

Because actually, what you can see in here is another new metric that we didn’t see in the previous screens, and it’s a thing called “zero click.” And so this is actually looking at the percentage of search queries where users did not click on any of the results. And you can see that that actual number is really, really low for Facebook. In other words, the majority of people in this case in the United States always click on Facebook. So in other words, they’re actually using the pure brand term “Facebook” to actually navigate and find the Facebook website - either because they haven’t bookmarked it, or they just do this as a way of life, a behaviour that they have online.

Jason Barnard: Yeah. And you can see that facebook.com at the top there gets 98 percent of the 85 percent. And so it really truly is a navigational term. People are just navigating to Facebook, using Google as a stepping stone.

And once again - Nathan Chalmers from Bing, that was the example he told me about. He said: when people type in “Facebook,” we know exactly what they’re trying to do, and that’s get to Facebook’s site. And what I love about this is this is just confirmation that what Nathan was explaining to me about Brand SERPs and how they function - how Bing deals with this, and how they’re trying to bring the best solution, the most efficient solution, to their user’s problem. In this case, just getting to the Facebook site because I’m too lazy to bookmark it.

Gerald Murphy: And that’s exactly it. And I guess because, in particular, Facebook - and in this example here even Nike - I guess they’re such established brands, they’ve been around for years. I guess that’s almost like a behaviour, an online behaviour, that the users just generally do.

Jason Barnard: Yeah. And that’s a really good point. The really established brands - I think we would tend to see, and I would love to do a webinar just about this, about where people are going and what the behaviour is on these different Brand SERPs. And the smaller brands, I would argue, there is navigational intent, but let’s say less so. And a lot of research intent - “I’m not sure about this brand, I’m not convinced by this brand, I’m thinking of doing business with it, but I would like to know more.”

And the SERP can serve both the purpose of navigating - especially for existing clients, which would be massively the case for Facebook - but also, I would argue, the 15 percent who don’t click are probably thinking, “What can I find out about Facebook? Is there any dirty news - not dirty news, nasty news about them?”

But for a smaller brand, it would be at least some research into who they are, what they do, and “can I trust them?” And we trust Google to give us - how can we say it - an unbiased view. So that Brand SERP becomes this unbiased view of Google, who instinctively we trust, whether we like it or not. I think a lot of people say, “I don’t like Google.” But in fact, instinctively, we now tend to trust it, I believe.

Gerald Murphy: Absolutely. And then, just to pick up on a point you mentioned earlier, Jason, which is around - you know, generally speaking from a paid search perspective, it’s cheaper for a brand to bid on their own brand terms. But actually, there are cases when competitors can. And this Analyse Keyword section allows you to pick up on those.

Because in this case, I’ve just switched the keywords to “Gymshark.” And when you come down, you’ll actually see that actually there are other potentially competitors that can be up here for your own brand when you’re viewing it. But actually, you can find out and analyse that - just to see who are my paid competitors versus organic.

Jason Barnard: And a really quick point on Google Ads and bidding on your own brand name: what I see is a lot of companies wasting a lot of money. They get the quality score of 10 out of 10. And if you’ve done any Google Ads, you think, “10 out of 10, job done.” But remember, quality score 10 out of 10 - you should get that off the bat if you set up a reasonably good campaign. But that 10 out of 10 isn’t a ceiling. It’s not granular. And you can keep improving, keep improving, and pushing the cost per click down. And the more you push the cost per click for yourself down, the more it’s pushing it up for your competitors. And the more you will chase them away.

And I’ve actually had clients where we’ve managed to get from 10 out of 10 - we’ve actually managed to get an additional 30 percent savings, pulling that cost per click down 30 percent even after hitting 10 out of 10 for the first time.

Gerald Murphy: And definitely, I think another really important point here too is: definitely, collaboration’s key. But it’s also collaboration with those who create videos - and as Jason mentioned, someone who sits in the paid search team too. Just showing them these little insights and trying to really start those conversations. But equally, making sure that when you’re doing this, you’re also analysing your core markets.

So in the case here of Gymshark - when you scroll down the screen, you’ll actually see the SERP features that are actually triggered for this particular keyword. And in this case, for the pure brand term “Gymshark” in the United States, they have images, knowledge card, Twitter feed, and related searches. But actually, this doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to have those in all markets.

So if we switch to the UK - which, to Gymshark, may be again one of their priority markets - when you come down, they’re actually doing a bit better here. So again, this is also about trying to make sure that we’re analysing what’s going on in each country individually, as well as trying to create those little conversations around what else can we do, how can we create more content around a particular term - like, for example, returns policies and so on - so that you can, in essence, improve your customer experience online through your branded search queries.

And actually, I would argue that your branded search queries are actually 100 percent about customer experience, because they already know who you are.

Jason Barnard: Yeah. And it is - sorry, I was almost interrupting you, but you just made an even better point than the one I was going to make, so I’ll just follow you.

But they know who you are. They’re searching for you. And you have, in my opinion - as a marketer, as a brand manager - an obligation to make sure that what they see is your brand message, in your voice. And there is no reason for Google not to show that. It’s trying to represent your brand to your audience, who are a subset of their users - honestly, helpfully, with valuable content. All you need to do is provide it and explain to this child what you’re trying to communicate to your audience. And as long as you’re honest about it, Google will mostly show what you want it to show.

Gerald Murphy: Perfect. And then, when you scroll down in this particular feature - if you’re unsure of which country should I be looking at - scroll down towards the bottom and you’ll see your top countries. So in this case, for Gymshark, definitely be reviewing your branded SERPs for United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Netherlands - because that’s actually where you’re generating most of your traffic from. Those are the ones to get right in terms of “where do I start with branded SERPs?” Do them in this order.

And actually, to find other branded SERP names and opportunities, scroll up to where it says “Phrase Match,” click on this, and this will basically show you all of your other branded terms - and actually help you to better understand what other SERP features can I optimise for, all of those good things, so that you can then further expand your branded SERPs’ visibility. Not perhaps like Tom Daley and the Olympics, but hopefully you’re starting to increase your visibility online.

Jason Barnard: Brilliant point. And I would say - I mean, one of the things I notice about SEO in general, and this kind of - once you start digging, you say, “Oh, I should be doing that, I should be doing this, I should be doing that.” And your list gets longer and longer. And then at the end of the day, you’ve got this list which is as long as my two arms that you can’t see, and you’re completely overwhelmed.

Now, what I love about exact-match brand - your Brand SERP, sorry, your brand name - is: if you start there, you’re focusing on something relatively small. You make that right, and you build out with all the rest of the stuff. And I guarantee you, if you do it that way, the overwhelming big long list will slowly come down. And at no point, when I’ve been doing it this way - starting to build my digital strategy from the exact-match Brand SERP outwards - at no point have I got incredibly frustrated, as I have in the past when I’ve tried to build it from the outside in.

Gerald Murphy: Absolutely. And then, just to kind of - maybe sort of - in terms of functionality, one of the ones we’d like to end on today is one of our newer ones. It’s called Ranking Distribution. So essentially, what this allows you to do is find out how well you’re performing on Google in terms of the number of keywords and the rank positions they appear. So in this case, we’ve got Adidas, Nike, and Reebok. You can see here we’ve got position bands - so positions 1, 2, 3, 4 to 10, and so on.

But what we also have here is the ability to actually see SERP features. So what you can do in here is find what all of the branded keywords you actually rank for on Google over time - and it’s updated on a monthly basis. But what you can also do here, from a branded search perspective, is go and find out: well, do I rank, and has my rank trended, for particular SERP features? So if you’re specifically wanting to find out - do any of these brands have Twitter feeds? Are they in the news? Do they have any instant answers? - simply just select the ones you’re interested in, click on “See Trend,” and it will very clearly show you that actually, sometimes, SERP features are low at a keyword level. But brands are doing incredibly well overall when it comes to the volume of keywords that actually rank really, really high. This actually can uncover what they’re performing like over time, which can be really interesting too.

Jason Barnard: Right. And that actually brings me to the point I was going to make earlier on, which is about news. I mean, if we found a really great example - but we’re not going to do it off the cuff here - but if you look at news over time on these branded searches, you would actually see a pattern of presumably product releases. In the case of Adidas, Reebok, and so on and so forth - Olympic success, World Cup success - they would tend to come and go with the news around the brand. So you can actually track the news PR activity around your brand over time, using Google as this kind of measuring stick - which is A, free, and B, incredibly representative. Because nobody in the world has as much data about all this stuff as Google.

Gerald Murphy: And that’s actually a fantastic point when it comes to the platform. So we’ll wrap up on slides here shortly. But you make a fantastic point about news. So when we look at the Olympics at a keyword level, under Analyse Keywords, under worldwide, you can actually see that news has the most types of content, as regards SERP features, for the brand term “Olympics.” In this case, you can see 62 different websites are regularly shown for news.

Jason Barnard: Wow. And that’s great. And also, looking into news - what we’re doing at Kalicube Pro, I mean, we specialise in brand search specifically - and what we’re doing at Kalicube Pro is pulling out which news sites are ranking for which kinds of brands, in which industries, and which geo regions. Because that can help you with your outreach to journalists and your PR work. And it saves you boatloads of time.

I had a client who said, “Well, actually, instead of contacting 20 different media outlets, we contacted four and we got two successes. And we used to have to contact 20 to get two successes.” Because we were asking the right people - because they were ranking in our industry, for our entity type, in our geo region.

Gerald Murphy: Absolutely. Definitely, guys, the main takeaway is to look at both your branded and non-branded keywords. Definitely don’t have a keyword strategy that’s just swayed towards one. For sure, look at both.

But again, today, in terms of the reason why we looked at branded, is: first of all, it’s a much easier way to get into the SERP feature space, to understand the different features that are triggered. And actually, it’s easier to rank and optimise for SERP features using branded terms. So making sure you’re analysing the search features for both your branded and non-branded keywords.

But again, if you have never done this before - and as we’ve seen, Nike clearly hasn’t done a lot with their branded SERPs - definitely have a little look and see what branded keywords they rank for, what SERP features do you think will be applicable to some of the ones that actually have a lot of searches. Like, for example, return policies and so on.

Other big top tip and takeaway: there are many benefits of optimising for branded SERPs alone, outside of non-branded. First of all, it’s less competitive - you know, you’re not going for a really super-broad generic name. So I think you mentioned there, Jason, like - there’s sometimes some branded names where actually they’re classified, strictly speaking, as a brand, but actually they’re more generic in that sense.

Jason Barnard: Yeah. I mean, when you have a brand name that’s actually a generic term - if you’ve called your company “Yellow Door” or “Red Shoe” - you’ve got a big problem in terms of your Brand SERP. It’s very difficult for Google to disambiguate, because you might actually be looking for red shoes - or “Red Shoe” the company. Which creates enormous problems for that.

But as a general rule, if you’ve picked a relatively unambiguous name within your geo region, you will be able to control that Brand SERP relatively easily. And what I do like - it’s like the ski slopes. I don’t know what they’re all called, but I know one of them is black and that’s the worst one, then it’s red, then orange, then yellow, then green. Let’s say your Brand SERP is the green slopes of SEO. It’s the easy, controlled environment. And you can actually - Google’s looking for this content from you actively. It’s looking for the content from you actively. So you’re really on the green slopes, and it’s a nice easy way into SEO.

Once again: build from the Brand SERP outwards, and you’ll be a happy puppy.

Gerald Murphy: I love the analogies, Jason. And also, of course, branded SERPs and keywords are a representation of your brand itself. Make it a brilliant representation. Like, that’s exactly what it’s all about.

And of course, the competitive intelligence of branded keywords also adds to your competitive intelligence. So that’s to say: knowing what branded terms you actually generate traffic from - like even knowing those. As Jason mentioned earlier, it’s making sure you’re reducing things like people needing to find the phone number, so they’re not emailing and actually wasting more resources asking these FAQs. Actually optimise your content for all of those branded keywords to properly succeed online.

Jason, a really, really massive thank you from everyone here at Similarweb. Thank you very much for your time.

Jason Barnard: Well, thank you for inviting me. That was absolutely delightful. We’ve been talking the last couple of months about all this, and I was really keen to do it. You’re incredibly smart. Great insights from the Similarweb team. I’ve enjoyed it greatly, and I’ve learned a lot from talking to you and the rest of the team at Similarweb.

Gerald Murphy: We have just a few questions, Jason, if you don’t mind. So John is asking: when looking at a specific niche, is there an advised way to hit several countries in a fast way, without losing a lot of time? For example, on an education article for a product or service.

Jason Barnard: Well, I mean, from a content perspective, if you’re aiming to hit multiple countries at the same time, make sure that the content you’re creating isn’t going to be geo-specific. But then you’ve got to balance that as well, with the fact that in the UK maybe the educational needs are slightly different, or the rules are different to in Ireland or the US. So you’ve got to balance that out. From a content perspective, at least, make sure - if you’re trying to reduce the effort that it takes - that you are creating content that will suit all those different markets.

Gerald Murphy: Fantastic. And literally, like perfection, we’re right at the hour - which is amazing. Jason, pleasure as always. Look forward to speaking to you soon. And thank you very much, everyone. Thanks a lot. See you soon. Bye.