Focus on increasing branded traffic
Back from Big Digital Adelaide where I was spreading the word on the relationship between brand and SEO. Our campaign results against auDA have only strengthened my belief that this is the future direction for SEO.
What I learned
• Our auDA campaign has doubled our traffic
• Brand and SEO share a symbiotic relationship
• Learn your brand strength using Search Analytics
• Your branded search terms should align with searched phrases
• Get people talking about your brand – no matter the budget
Transcript
Hey, welcome back, Rankers! You having a good week? I’m having an awesome one! Sorry the voice is a bit scratchy. Was at the football yesterday.
Minor .AU Victory
Now, just quickly on the whole direct .au registrations, auDA, and all that sort of stuff. Well done everyone. We have successfully delayed the introduction of .AU for at least 12 months, probably longer, and hopefully indefinitely. So, it was announced last week after the government announced new reforms for auDA … because the government had been doing a report, an investigation into the domain administrator. Came out with a whole bunch of recommended reforms. And auDA and their response is that they have said, “Okay we’re going to put direct .au on hold now.” Now that would not have happened except that we made a noise. So how much did we a make a noise, and how can you measure that? Now, just incidentally, where it’s heading now is auDA has now threatened the members who signed for a special general meeting to take the whole thing to court. Anyway, we’ll keep you updated on that front. But what I want to show you was the effect … so we managed to get 45 articles, and that’s them there, in various publications, including TV, radio, print, and lots and lots of websites.
The subsequent effect of doing that, just that activity increased our traffic, well, by 100%. It doubled our traffic. Even today, I’m seeing new phrases popping up that we should not be ranking for. And a big hello to everyone at Big Digital Adelaide, where I was last Thursday and Friday. I delivered this presentation on brand and SEO and how they relate. This is just another area where I’ve been convinced that this is what works. Now Gary from Google was sitting there in the audience watching me, taking notes, or maybe he was playing Pokémon, I don’t know. But to me, this is the only way that we’ll certainly be doing SEO now.
What is Your Brand Strength?
And one of the big things that we are now looking at is … one of the things that we’ve learned over the last couple years is what is the brand strength? So what you need to be looking at, get into Search Analytics, and what you want to see is branded search terms. You want to see them as a higher percentage of your entire traffic as possible, providing you’ve got an okay amount of traffic at the moment. I mean if you’ve only five or ten clicks a month, then this is not for you. But, you know, if you’ve got over 1,500, 2,000, 3,000, you can probably start to see some data. What you want to see is your brand getting more searched … searched more along with the phrases that people are looking for. ‘Cause that is how you win the game, right? And that’s what’s happened with us. My rankings have all gone up. We haven’t done anything on the site. We have not been working on the site for SEO. Yeah, we’ve updated a couple of landing pages for AdWords and things, but we haven’t done anything else. So it’s just been this activity.
Oh, incidentally, if you want to have a chance at winning an awesome package, go and check out our Digital Growth Package. Now this is only open until Friday, this Friday, which would be the end of the week. Go and have a look at Digital Growth Package. That’s digital-growth- package, and you could win. And we might see you on the Gold Coast for Retail Global, which is at the end of May. I’ll be bringing you more about that, but go and check that out if you want to learn more about this and get a chance to win that. ‘Cause we’d love to work with you.
Get Your Audience Talking
So the thing to remember here is, look for ways that you can get people talking about your brand. So it doesn’t have to be a national campaign like we’ve just done. It can be just within a Facebook group. It could just be within the niche that your audience is. It might be an industrial group on LinkedIn. It might be a tech group or a forum or somewhere else. It doesn’t have to be a big national campaign. However, if you are doing TV and radio, you probably should make sure that your brand is spiking at the times that you are doing that television and radio. If your brand is not spiking at the times in Google Trends like we’ve shown before when those things are going to air, you probably want to question their worth or their benefit. Because using something like Google Trends to measure brand awareness growth and then looking in Search Analytics and seeing what phrases are growing around your brand, or brand-related phrases, is going to give you some idea of whether that TV and radio is worth it. I think it would be if it’s done in the right way. So go and have a look at that, but really, thank you to everyone who helped us with this campaign, who signed the petitions, and everything else. There’s more going on. We’ll bring you more about that in the coming weeks. Week after next, I’ll see you at Digitalks in Sydney and Melbourne. So make sure you check those out. And I’m going to be presenting the brand and SEO presentation that I did last week at Big Digital Adelaide. And I’ve learned a lot more over the last few weeks just by doing campaigns. I’ll be sharing that as well. Hopefully that’s helpful, and we will see you next week. Thanks very much everybody. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
