Has Google recently turned up the visibility dial for “brands”?
Every consulting pitch deck has a “build a strong brand” slide. We all know “brand” is important for SEO.
We’ve all heard Eric Schmidt’s quote: “Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”
The impact of branding is not exclusive to SEO. The whole industry of brand marketing exists because consumers seek out brands they trust.
But Schmidt’s quote dropped in 2008 (when users were interestingly just as frustrated with web results as today). Back then, Google didn’t understand content as well as today and leaned much more on user and basic backlink signals.
Today, the organic search landscape looks very different:
So, have “brands” gained? The answer is yes, but only in some verticals. But what even defines a brand?
Definition
In the context of SEO, I define a “brand” as a domain that gets:
- Significant brand search volume.
- Higher than expected CTR.
- A knowledge card.
- High brand recall/NPS.
- Growing number of brand keywords.
- A meaningful number of relevant backlinks with brand anchor text.
The way it might materialize in Search: