Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Using Brand value for SEO: Can we use keyword with brand name?
-
Hi Moz community,
I am curious to know this. Let's say there is a brand value for a company. It has it's own popularity that it's been mentioned across the internet and social media directly with brand name without their service or industry keyword. Now if the company started promoting themselves like keyword along with their brand name, will it help them to rank for that keyword. For example, Moz is already famous, now they want to rank for "SEO" and related keywords, so they started calling themselves on internet "Moz SEO"; will this fetch them in ranking for keyword SEO? My ultimate question is, using primary keyword along with brand name will work out in ranking for that primary keyword or not?
Thanks
-
I agree with Robert. So of course with the Clarks examples pages may be:
Clarks Boots
Clarks Sandals
Clarks Slippers
And each of those pages would be different. Filled with contextually rich content surrounding those terms.
"It won't put you on the 1st page" - I don't agree with this. I have many clients who have been hoiked up to page one by adding contextually relevant content to a key phrase (Brand + Category) constructed the page. If you _are _the brand and you construct pages like this (With 300+ words contextual content) you will be No. 1 or 2 in Google, never mind just on the front page.
Just search 'Carousel Projects SEO'
Regards Nigel
-
Hey vtmoz,
Short answer: It will probably help your rankings for that keyword/phrase.
Longer answer: It won't put you on the 1st page, but it will go some distance in helping your rankings along with other established factors.
Potential issue: If your brand features other products or services for which they wish to rank that are irrelevant to the keyword you wish to rank for, be careful that you do not gain rankings for your selected keyword at the expense of others on your site.
For example, say you want to rank for "keyword 1" so you target "Brand" "Keyword 1". If you also have "Keyword 2" and "Keyword 3" that are not relevant to "Keyword 1" you have just shot yourself in the foot for those keywords in order to gain ground with "Keyword 1".
This may not be a problem for you, but something to be aware of.
Personally, I'd be more inclined to make internal pages for keywords I am attempting to rank for, and introduce the brand and specific keyword to those pages to help Google with context. The last thing you want to do is switch up Google's understanding of your site by "traffic hunting" (i.e. putting keywords into your site content to increase traffic rather than to serve your visitors). In this way you might even lose traffic by making the change you have highlighted.
Let me know if you'd like clarification on the above - always happy to help!
Cheers,
Rob
-
Hi vtmoz
It's funny you should say "so they started calling themselves on the internet 'Moz SEO' " because Moz used to be called SEOMOZ and they changed to just MOZ so that they could concentrate on building the brand. There is evidence to suggest that if an article is written about a subject and your brand is linked from that article that Google will recognise the contextuality of the article and associate your brand name with that subject.
For example, one would expect that Nike and 'sports', 'sports clothing' etc would occupy the same space. In the same way - if your brand sold Tennis Rackets, for example, Google would begin to associate your brand name with that range of products.
In the same way, when we SEOs are optimising a page we will use Keyword Explorer. The tool would give us contextually relevant keywords to use alongside a brand name in order to strengthen the SEO of a page.
So if I were writing an article on Nike and I hadn't used the words 'sports', 'sports clothing', 'sports footwear' or even 'Phil Knight', then MOZ will suggest these as relevant keywords to use to strengthen the page's SEO.
I wouldn't include them in the brand name but I would use them on a page. In this way, they become kind of 'baby anchor text' in that they surround the brand.
In order to strengthen that further, you might write an article that is submitted to a blog with a specific anchor text backlink which is not your brand name but the most relevant keyword. So if Nike wanted (and it does of course) to be found for the term 'Sports Footwear' then it would link back to its own page with that anchor text.
Very often when I am constructing Meta titles and heading for a brand page then I would use the subject after the brand as that is often the way someone may search for it in Google.
Example: I would title a page 'Clarks Boots' as the opening two words of the title and as the H1 on the page if I wanted that page to rank for the brand and the category. I would then fill the page with boot products along with a good 300 word + description of the types of Clarks boots, the gender, heels, ankle, mid, high and any other contextually relevant keywords.
I hope that goes someway to answering your question,
Regards
Nigel
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Multiple sub-category of the same name ? does that effect SEO
Hello, If I have multiple sub-category of the same name ? does that affect SEO for example I have the following category structure? domain/bmw/series5/2006.html domain/bmw/series5/2007.html .. etc domain/bmw/series3/2007.html domain/bmw/series3/2006.html ..etc domain/Acura/cl/2006.html domain/Acura/cl/2007.html .. etc I do use canonical url because I may have the same product in multiple categories but my question does google penalize me because I have the same (year) url key for multiple categories even though I use canonical url ? do I have any advantage in masking them filters vs sub-category from SEO point of view ? specially my goal is to have different meta title and meta description for each sub category ?
Algorithm Updates | | LKCservicesINC0 -
GSC Performance completely dropped off, but Google Analytics is steady. Why can't GSC track my site anymore?
Hey everyone! I'm having a weird issue that I've never experienced before. For one of my clients, GSC has a complete drop-off in the Performance section. All of the data shows that everything fell flat, or almost completely flat. But in Google Analytics, we have steady results. No huge drop-off in traffic, etc. Do any of you know why GSC would all of a sudden be unable to crawl our site? Or track this data? Let me know what you think!
Algorithm Updates | | TaylorAtVelox
Thanks!2 -
On page vs Off page vs Technical SEO: Priority, easy to handle, easy to measure.
Hi community, I am just trying to figure out which can be priority in on page, off page and technical SEO. Which one you prefer to go first? Which one is easy to handle? Which one is easy to measure? Your opinions and suggestions please. Expecting more realistic answers rather than usual check list. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Can 'Jump link'/'Anchor tag' urls rank in Google for keywords?
E.g. www.website.com/page/#keyword-anchor-text Where the part after the # is a section of the page you can jump to, and the title of that section is a secondary keyword you want the page to rank for?
Algorithm Updates | | rwat0 -
Special Characters in Keywords
Do search engines consider keywords such as "1099 E-File Software" & "1099 "EFile Software" the same? Many of the keywords for my website will have a dash "-" when properly spelled out but there are many users who would simply omit it when spelling the word. Another example would be "W-2 Software" as opposed to "W2 Software".
Algorithm Updates | | Stew2220 -
Server Location & SEO
So I just read an interesting Tweet: #SEO Tip: #Google takes into account the location of the server (the IP) when projecting the search results #web This is something I had not thought of. I suppose my question then is HOW does it factor this information into it's results? For some reason, one of our sites is hosted on a Canadian server. We are a cloud hosting company and we serve all of NA with data centers in the US and Canada... For whatever reason we've used the Canadian server farm for our web server. Could this possibly be hurting our NA google SERPs? Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Algorithm Updates | | jesse-landry0 -
Confused About Addon Domains and SEO
I find addon domains really confusing. Everyone I've asked so far says that they don't affect SEO but I find that really hard to believe considering the same content is on both a subdomain and a subfolder and also has it's own unique domain. PLUS (in my case) completely different niche sites are sharing the same hosting. I really don't want to pay for hosting for all of my different sites but at the same time, if it's better/safer to do so for Panda/Penguin reasons I'm happy to do that. Thank you for your time. I look forward to your opinions/suggestions!
Algorithm Updates | | annasusmiles0 -
Does the use of an underscore in filenames adversely affect SEO
We have had a page which until recently was ranked first or second by Google UK and also worldwide for the term "Snowbee". It is now no longer in the top 50. I ran a page optimization report on the url and had a very good score. The only criticism was that I had used an atypical character in the url. The only unusual character was an underscore "_" We use the underscore in most file names without apparent problems with search engines. In fact they are automatically created in html files by our ecommerce software, and other pages do not seem to have been so adversely affected. Should we discontinue this practice? It will be difficult but I'm sure we can overcome this if this is the reason why Google has marked us down. I attach images of the SEO Report pages 8fDPi.jpg AdLIn.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | FFTCOUK0