New brand? Don’t forget about this!
Helped a friend out recently with his new brand launch and thought I’d pass on some knowledge for anyone currently building a business or brand. One of the most important things to do when embarking on PR for your new brand is utilise structured data to help Google understand the relationship between your web pages and searches.
What I learned
- The importance of structured data
- Why you shouldn’t embark on PR without strong structured data
- Why structured data is your brand’s signpost
- The simple tool to test your page’s structured data
- Build the links between search volume and pages
Transcript
Hi, welcome back, Rankers. There have been a few changes this week. I’m not gonna get too much into reading the tea leaves or Google’s core algorithm change last week, but it’s still rolling out. So if you are seeing fluctuations in some of your traffic from Google, it could be that.
The change from it though, I’ve seen some odd things. But this could also be because it’s still rolling out. Certainly in Australia, not seeing a lot of change. But some of the searches that I keep an eye on in the US, I’ve seen some move-ative positions and some sites that were on the front page are no longer there. Those sorts of things.
Google Rewards
Google has said that this algorithm change is more about rewarding sites that were previously undervalued. So that’s great if you’re doing great content. Just quickly, I also helped a mate out during the week that was looking to launch a new brand and needed to rank for the exact match domain that he had. Now he is ranking for it, but one of the things that he could rank even better for, which he hasn’t done, is his structured data. And this so important.
If you are someone who is out there building a business and building a brand, whether it be personal or at a business level, you need to use structured data. So you signpost to the rest of the world, who you actually are and what you’re doing. And the phrase I’ve got searching for here is, ‘marketing speaker’. And those of you who have been following at home will know that it went to number one when we started to get more volume of search on my name, not on the phrase ‘marketing speaker’ and we went up.
The Importance of Structured Data
And our theory behind why those two things were correlated was because of the structured data attached to this page. And the structured data attached to this page says this page is about me, specifically. And we think that’s why this page ranked higher when spikes in my name search started to happen. And so, what this looks like. You can go to the Structured Data Testing Tool, put your URL in here, and this will tell you what structured data is on this page. So we’ve got the normal things like postal address and this is all just wrapped up in this code so Google and other machines know that this is actually an address.
And if we go back to the top level. And we can see here, this one is the one that says, “This is about me.” So I’ve said here, “Look, this person, this name, they’re also the same one on LinkedIn. This one of Google Plus. This one of Twitter. This one of Facebook.” I probably could have put a few more there, but they’re the only ones I could think of that regularly get used. So it helps to use things like structured data to tell the machine what this piece of content is about. And if you keep doing those sorts of things with a new brand and you’re also getting publicity on that new brand, when the search volume starts to increase for that brand, Google and other search engines will know that is the webpage that they’re talking about. So that whole site or that page starts to rank higher through the signposting, “This is the thing that people are searching for.”
So when you’re doing your PR, even your television advertising, radio advertising, it pays to use structured data, especially in the cases where it is a brand new brand. So that Google and other machines can make that link between the volume of search that’s happening, all the chatter, all the citations out there on social, and the actual page, if you like, that relates to the thing that people are searching for. Hopefully, that’s hopeful. And we will see you all next week. Thanks very much, everyone. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
