Optimize your Brand site for Product Category, not your name
It’s easy to optimize brands for their name. Type Berkley Fishing into any search engine and you’ll see www.berkley-fishing.com at the top of your search results. Optimizing for a product category can be much more challenging, as you have to compete not only with other sites that mention your product, but sites who talk about the category in general as well as every other brand with a similar product.
To compete for product category positioning, you need to identify the most popular search terms people are using to search for products like yours. We’ll use the example of fishing line. There are many manufacturers of fishing line, and the fishing enthusiast community is massive. Someone wanting to optimize for “fishing line” will be competing with informational websites, enthusiast websites, retail chains and other brands. You have a slim chance for gaining the #1 position, but you can be first among competing manufacturers. This is helpful because sometimes people want to find out where they can get the best deal on fishing line, and sometimes they’re more interested in learning about different kinds of fishing line. This is where your brand can compete. If you provide great informational content and can effectively communicate your product’s advantages, you will create a strong and positive brand impression. You may not be #1 for the search term, but you can still be #1 for the people who are seeking brand information.
Fishing line is an obvious choice product category for fishing line manufacturers who want to rank high for their product category. But what about other possible terms? What about “best fishing line” or “bass fishing line”? Should these terms also be considered? And if yes, should they be given equal or more effort than “fishing line”? It’s worth finding out.
Evaluating search term popularity is an essential early step in your optimization effort. Simply put, you might think you know what people are searching for, but that may not always be the case. Using a keyword analysis tool, I determined that “bass fishing line” is more popular than “trout fishing line”, but “best fishing line” is more popular than both by a 2:1 margin. That is good information, but even more important is to recognize that our original term, “fishing line” is 40 times more popular than “best fishing line”. In this case, we want to focus on “fishing line” as our key term.
With our keyword properly identified, we now want to discover whom we’re competing against. Typically, you want to look at the top 20 positions in each of the major search engines, though if you are not ranked in the top 20, you may want to look further. Every gain that you make will directly influence the traffic your website generates from search results. The following results show how much traffic can be gained by advancing into the top 10 of Google’s rankings, and the impact of gaining even one position higher in the top 10.
Google’s Search Rankings
That’s a lot of information to digest for one post. Next, we’ll look at who the competitors are, and try to determine how they have earned a strong position in the search engines.
Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com
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