TRAFFIC
WORKING ON TRUST
What users are saying about your business matters more than ever. Andrew Parker looks at how can you leverage reputation with Google’ s quality raters to help your brand climb the rankings
ORGANIC SEARCH HAS long been a place where small businesses can trump established brands for big keywords. Historically it was much easier than it is today because Google is increasingly able to understand what an established brand looks like online.
Offline brand activity might consider your company’ s mission, the benefits or your service, shaping perception of your product and the qualities you want people to associate with your brand. Online is about search volumes, brand and non-brand keyword mix, reviews and proving you are a real business in ways a machine can understand.
The most recent version of Google’ s Quality Rater’ s Guidelines tells you everything the search giant cares about when it comes to a website, including things it does not want to rank. You could do a lot worse than using the document as a box-ticking checklist to ensure your SEO strategy covers everything listed. You can also identify gaps you should work on to get the most from your brand online.
The reputation section of the document in sections 2.5 and 2.6 are key to making sure you have everything covered from a brand perspective.
Google specifically asks its quality raters to check that every site clearly shows who is responsible for it and who created the content on each page. This can be an individual, company, business or foundation. Contact information should be comprehensive and cover multiple ways of communicating to cater to the varied reasons users might get in touch.
Further, quality raters are encouraged to interrogate the claims you make on your site, including corroborating the information using third-party websites. Take care of your brand messaging on all your social channels and on review sites. Be sure you can back up your claims on your social channels and that industry sentiment on forums, blogs and news articles reflects them.
It is worth mentioning that quality raters are instructed that finding no reputation does not indicate a bad reputation and not to score pages as such. So only look to create a presence in an area where you can maintain it – having no presence can be better than having one that can’ t be maintained.
How Google understands your brand Google uses several elements to understand your brand, including SEO metrics from brand search volumes to data on your own and other websites. There is also a manual-review element by quality raters that is undoubtedly added to Google’ s algorithm at some point. The list below details tactics that, as well as having a direct output, will also drive brand awareness and trust within Google.
• TV Expensive, but the results can be excellent. I’ ve seen first-hand on multiple sites the impact a targeted TV campaign can have on organic performance. The result of wellexecuted TV, as far as organic search is concerned, is an increase in brand
32 iGB Affiliate Issue 71 OCT / NOV 2018