Jumping to no.1 by being more popular!
In preparation for my appearance at Big Digital Adelaide from the 18th April, I’ve been putting together some information for attendees concerned about the implications of a possible .AU domain introduction and how site owners can mitigate the impact and what you should look out for.
What I learned
• What are the risks and outcomes of a .AU world?
• Brand and how it relates to SEO
• Non-branded search gets a boost from branded
• Branded search shouldn’t be left to the client
• Voice search will favour brand
• Discount code for Big Digital is: ImWithJim2018
Video Transcript
Hey, welcome back Rankers. Been trying to record this show. This is my fourth attempt this morning. Having technology breakdowns. Hope you’re having a good week. If you are a member of the auDA, please go on and sign this petition at grumpier.com.au. We have called a special general meeting, three of us, and we’re getting other people to sign it, and we’ve got about I think it’s up … over 30 people that have signed this petition now. Please go and have a look at it. There are the resolutions that we are proposing. If you agree with that, then sign away.
Big Digital Adelaide 2018
I will be in Adelaide on the 18th through to the 20th of April. Love to catch up with you. Love to see you there if you’re over that way at the Big Digital conference. I’ll be talking about not only .AU and some of the risks and the ways you can mitigate the risk if they implement it, but also if you are in the digital space, we’ll be looking at some of the things that you can do to help people who will mess this transition up for their own site and things you should be aware of.
Great conference. I think Gary Illyes from Google is going to be there. I think Olga from SEMrush might be there. There’s all sorts of workshops and boot camps. In addition to the .AU stuff, I’ll be talking about brand, specifically how it relates to SEO. To give you an idea of that, I went looking for Search Console this morning and I noticed that we rank number five. Let’s have a look. Search Console. I did it because I was lazy and I just wanted to … couldn’t be bothered typing the URL. We have a look here. Yeah, there we go. The first result after Google for Search Console. We haven’t tried to rank for that. That’s just one blog post that has come up. Presumably, I’m putting it down to the increase in brand awareness that we’ve had.
The other one that it happened to was marketing speaker. “Marketing speaker” at the beginning of the year was something I wanted to rank for because I needed to get more speaking gigs. I think I got to about six, and I thought I can’t really do anymore on that page, its ranking. I’ve done everything I possibly can. One of the things I did is I put structured data around my name so that Google would know that it was a person and that it was actually me. I think because I’ve had a spike in my own name searches because of the .AU stuff, Google has put this at the top for marketing speakers.
Non-branded search boost
This is all brand-related stuff, and this is some of the things I’ll be teaching at Adelaide as well. The question I always get asked is, “How do you do this without a massive budget? How do you, if you can’t use radio and television, how do you get brand awareness out there?” There’s a lot of ways to do it. It could just be focusing on building your audience. It may not be a PR exercise. You look at some of the bloggers that have worked in the past like Skinnymixers, Thermobliss, Keep Calm, ProBlogger, a whole bunch of them. They focus on their audience. They’re not focusing on getting backlinks or necessarily doing SEO. The work that they do is focused on their audience, meaning they are building a lot more brand search. As your brand search goes up, and this is a thing that SEOs have been guilty of, myself included, over the years is that we’ve worried too much about non-branded search because we thought that was our job. We thought our job was to lift non-branded search, and it was the client’s job to worry about branded search.
That’s not the way it should be.
The way it should be is what we should be working with our clients to lift branded search because if we can lift branded search, it will automatically lift non-branded search. The reason for that, and no, I have no proof except for my own experience because people come down hard on me saying that’s not a fact, and it’s not. It’s experience. The reason I think it’s happening is because it makes sense. If lots of people are searching for my name, and they’re searching for my name more so than any other page here that is in relationship to a marketing speaker, it probably makes sense for Google to lift that up because it’s a social proof. This is where you want to be, right? You want your brand to be first in the mind. You don’t want someone doing a voice search on Google Home or Alexa or Siri for, “Hey, buy me some more toilet paper.” You want the customer to be saying, “Hey, buy me some more particular brand of toilet paper.” You’ve got to be the brand. That’s how you’re going to cut through voice search. Voice search is coming, but you need to be above the fray. To do that, you need to build a brand.
Easier rankings
The consequence of that from a search perspective is that it becomes much, much easier to get you ranked for a lot of stuff. That site I showed you last week that the bots weren’t crawling properly, just in a week, they’ve had a 17 percent increase in revenue from those changes. It was about a 20 percent increase in impressions for organic, which is significant because we haven’t got all the pages crawled yet. It’s only been a few of them. As that crawls more, we get more of them ranked. The reason that one’s easier to get the traffic for is because we’re focusing now on all the technical stuff and trying to fix that. They’ve already done the hard work, though. This client’s already done the hard work on their brand. All we’re doing is basically streamlining, taking the handbrake off where we can, making sure everyone can see everything because Google knows that people love this brand. If they love this brand or if they love your brand over someone else’s product, Google’s going to show yours, providing you’ve got the user experience stuff right.
Hopefully that’s helpful. Love to see you at Adelaide. We have a discount code available to those that wish to save a bit of money at Big Digital. This code will save you $75 off any conference ticket price (excluding the 1-day workshop). The code is: ImWithJim2018. And please if you are an auDA member, sign the petition. Thanks very much. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
