More branded search helps non-branded search
I stated my intention to measure the results of my .AU campaign early in the piece. Well some interesting results have started to come in, results that enforce my belief that brand is a powerful marketing motivator.
What I learned
• Use the tools at your disposal to measure marketing efforts
• Name and brand searches have increased with media attention
• Search Console accurately depicts page visits
• Non-branded search terms get ranking boosts
• Be first in mind of the consumer
Transcript
Welcome back, Rankers. How’re you doing? It’s been a heck of a week, and I can’t tell you terribly much about it just yet, but it’s all about the .AU stuff. Yes, I just wanna say, right now, a big, big thank you to all my awesome staff. I have gone through a lot this week, and thank you. I’ll be revealing more in the not too distant future, but if you haven’t signed the petition at change.org on stopping the .AU cash grab, please do. It would help us a lot. Just Google “stop AU cash grab” in Google and you will find the petition there. There’ll be more on that in the coming weeks, but for the moment, that’s all I can say.
Pleasant Side-Effects
Right. I wanna tell you about a side product or a side effect of doing this campaign. As I said from the start with the .AU campaign, I was gonna be measuring everything using the tools that we have out here at our disposal to get the message across and to get the message out and reach an audience and grow an audience. I’ve been very … I don’t suppose surprised. I guess pleasantly surprised, but if I go and have a look at the queries for just my name since we started this campaign, which was about 13th of January, four days of January, is when I went to the public forum, and then I started talking about it publicly.
We took a few ad campaigns out on Facebook, and you can see here, I’ve had a lot more interest in my name and our brand names throughout the media. Those two things have basically doubled a lot of the traffic, and I’ve been very interested, also then to say, “Well, what has it affected?” You can go into Search Console in the performance area and pick a query, and in this case I’ve just picked my name, and then I can go in and say, “Well, what pages have appeared with that?”
It gives you some amazing insights. It’s like it says that the blog has appeared when my name has been Googled, which sounds about right. Then, I went and Googled “SEO blog”. This is a search in Melbourne. You can see here, I’m on page one all of a sudden. Now, I haven’t been on page one for “SEO blog” in forever. I’m not too sure the last time I was there for “SEO blog”, and if I got back and have a look at search analytics, I can see that that hasn’t registered. It hasn’t ranked at all.
The Power of Brand
This is a side effect. We haven’t tried to rank for “SEO blog” but you see there, we’re sitting just above Search Engine Watch. Just below OpenVine we’ve got Blog Tyrant. We’ve got Moz up here. And there’s just the other ones like SERPs Check. You might say, “Ah, well, they’re not big phrases, without a lot of volume,” but here we are on page one of Google for SERPs Check and a whole range of those phrases. Not just that one but …
All of these different phrases are now starting to rank and live as more people are searching for me and our business. That makes sense from a brand perspective, because if more people are looking for you and your brand, if more people are trying to track down your brand in relationship to a keyword … It might be your brand and shoes, if you sell shoes, or your brand and fashion if you sell fashion.
The more that you can get that happening, the more that you can get people talking about you, the more you’re gonna see other content that you’ve created previously come up in the rankings. You’ve got to have everything else in place first as well. You’ve got to have great speed, you’ve got to have great user experience, and just have a good clean index and all those sorts of thing, but the thing that is going to help your rankings and help your traffic overall is if you can bring your brand to the forefront of people’s mind, and like any marketing it’s not all about being first to market, it’s about being first in the mind of the consumer.
That’s what we’re doing here with this .AU campaign. We’re seeing real evidence of that, and that makes me happy. Hopefully that’s helpful, and I’ll see you next week. Thanks so much. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
