Know when to let a brand go
Your company name is probably something that’s quite close to your heart. A lot of business owners spend a long time considering their company name options before deciding on something. It’s something that a lot of people sweat over, and it’s understandable that you become quite attached to it.
When it comes to search engine optimisation however, your company name is of relatively low importance. It comes way behind all of your industry keywords and every other possible search. So why is it that so many websites include their company name in all of the prime SEO tag places?
Brand keywords are important to your SEO campaign, but only for a certain level. For most companies, the most important thing will be the services they perform or the products they provide. Your company might be called ‘International Gift Services’ but your main keyword is probably going to be ‘online gift delivery’.
Weeding out branding
There are plenty of places where brand keywords don’t belong. Unfortunately, they are the areas where company names most commonly appear. Title tags, page headers and site mottos are all prime areas to optimise, yet are the areas where most businesses place their company name. You can discuss the implications of these areas with our consultants at www.seoconsult.co.uk.
*Title tag: It’s understandable that you want to include your company or site name in your title tag. If you can’t resist the temptation, at least put your main keywords first. For example, ‘online gift delivery – International Gift’ is far better than ‘International Gift Services for all kinds of online gift delivery.’
*Page header: Internet users tend to expect the business name in the page header area. It is also a good area to include keywords as the search engines give a fair amount of weight to the words in this section. Try to work your keywords into the page header or at least into your company motto underneath.
Don’t sweat company searches
Most businesses add their company or brand keywords to their search engine optimisation campaign because they want to build their online presence. What many companies don’t realise is that their general online presence pales in significance compared to the other aims of their SEO.
If someone is searching your company name, chances are they’re going to find you. Either your site will come up because of your company domain name, for example, www.bloggcompany.com, or it will come up because you’ve planted your name all over your pages. No matter what happens, it’s highly likely that yours is the only website on the net that has many instances of your company name, and yours is the most likely site to pop up.
Reputation management
Another reason to optimise for brand keywords, whether in your SEO blogs or elsewhere, is for reputation management. The same point applies here as above. You’re likely to rank for your own name. Reputation management efforts are better when focussed on gaining control of the other spots in the first page of the search engine results.