Brand Citations In Search
Back from an enjoyable couple of sessions at the Digitalks events in Sydney and Melbourne where I was talking about brand. Fielded a lot of questions about brand citations and brand mentions so thought I’d explain more here.
What I learned
- The Google definition of a “brand citation”
- Get people talking about and searching your brand
- Why brand searches improve rankings
- Backlinks are not required
- Traffic campaigns should be the focus
Transcript
Welcome back, Rankers! Hello to everyone from Digitalks. Had a great time at the Melbourne event last week and the week before at Sydney. Talked a lot about brand mentions, citations, those sorts of things. I just want to point out, because we had a couple of questions about that, and when we talk about citations, here’s the way that Gary Illyes explains it at The State of Search last year.
What is a brand citation?
He said, “If you publish high-quality content that is cited on the Internet, and I’m not talking about just links, but also mentions on social networks and people talking about your branding, crap like that, then you are doing great.” Well, people talking about your branding. That to me is the interesting one.
I would say people talking about your brand, I would say people searching for your brand is a citation, and that’s what you need to be doing. So we need to be focusing on getting people talking about us. And this is true; again, I’ve shown you through the auDA campaign how all of our rankings have gone up because our search volumes have also gone up for our brand.
Double organic traffic
Well, it’s happened again, so the past Sydney and Melbourne event for Digitalks is depicted here. So let me just move this across to other side of the screen, so you can see what I’m talking about. So what I’m looking at here is this point and this point. This is Sydney and this is Melbourne, and this is people actually searching for our brand. So that isn’t any other search. This is where the auDA campaign starts. So you can see our traffic pretty much doubles. And this is organic traffic, right? No filters, just organic traffic over the last six months. So our traffic doubles once we start the auDA campaign because more people are looking for us and talking about us. And then we go and do Digitalks, and we grow again in traffic.
Now, I haven’t asked anyone to search for us, I haven’t asked for any backlinks, I don’t even know if we’ve got any backlinks, and I don’t really care, because let’s face it, most businesses don’t need backlinks, they need traffic, they need humans. This article that I’m reading here goes on to say, “Hey, this allows you to make the most out of your backlinking campaigns.س No, forget about backlinking campaigns. Think about traffic campaigns, okay? So if it makes sense, like it was for me for bloggersSEO to get a backlink from ProBlogger, because I did a guest post there, because I wanted his audience to know about the product, that makes sense. Do that. That’s not getting a backlink, even though you end up with one, it’s about getting people knowing about the brand, alright?
Retail Global
Sometimes that involves backlinks, right? But don’t let that be the first thought in your head. This week I will be off to Queensland, as of tomorrow. Because of course I’ve got Retail Global, and it’s going to be big. I’ve got the workshop on Wednesday, so if you want to know more about this, and you can get to Queensland or the Gold Coast on Wednesday, doing a half-day workshop, couple of seats available still, but it’s all about going in depth into your brand and how it affects SEO, and the sorts of things that you can be doing to grow your brand. I’m on about another five different panels and sessions across those three or four days, so if you’re going to be there, it’s the best eCommerce conference in the country, bar none, and I’ve been going to it for over 10 years, so if you haven’t got a ticket, try to get one. I know they’re pretty scarce, but hope to see you there and hope to have more chats about all this. And thanks very much. We’ll see you next week. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
