Historically, branded SEO has been a neglected side of SEO. It was considered harder to track accountability, less profitable and a less interesting side of the growth story.

However, with the rise in marketplaces, reviews sites, influencers and competitors bidding on your own search listings, it has now become a crucial part of your digital marketing strategy.

Here at NOVOS, we have put our top recommended branded SEO techniques to ensure that you dominate your brands’ search result.

1. Branded Keyword Research

Before you dive into the deep end of your brand search, we recommend conducting some branded keyword analysis.

Research your own brand name, and create branded pages targeting the highest volume queries e.g. “side effects of X,” “best [brand name] products”, and prompts starting what, why, where and when.

Auto complete prompts are a great place to start:

Below are also some examples of branded keyword research for ASOS.

Remember to start tracking these keywords so that you can see the progress of your hard work.

2. Mark Up Your Site with Organisation & Website Schema

Mark up your homepage with organisation schema and website schema. These tell Google that you are the official website for this brand. 

Visit Schema.org to access the correct code setup for both website and organisation schema.

3. Optimise Your Reviews Page

Avoid being outranked by third party reviews softwares like TrustPilot and reviews.io.

Instead, create your own reviews page and add your brand name then ‘review’ to the H1.  We recommend the same practice for your title tag too. 

We are not against third party reviews sites, we just recommend having reviews on your own websites as well as on these sites to avoid users clicking off your site and getting distracted by external ones.

Ruggable's review page is a great example of a strong performing reviews page, as shown below, they are ranking above both Mashable and Trustpilot.

4. Build Links to Your Homepage & Well-Known Products

Use Digital PR to boost your website’s authority in Google, and land links in relevant publications.

 Tactics like gift guides, “how to”mailers, and TikToks trend roundups are all great places to start, if product gifting isn’t available to you at this time.

The more relevant links to your website, the more of an authority Google see’s you in Google. It also helps support brand exposure as you will be featured in multiple publications across the web.

5. Invest in a Brand PR Strategy

Brand PR is all about raising awareness, telling your story and strengthening your brand presence across multiple media outlets. This can come in the form of business profiles, award entries, product launches and store openings amongst other tactics.

By investing in brand PR you are by default investing in branded SEO, and can control your own narrative. You’ll hopefully get some additional backlinks back to your homepage, from relevant news outlets as well, which then will give you more leverage over marketplaces and competitors competing for the same terms.

Interested in hearing more about Brand PR? Explore our brand PR service here.

6. Optimise Your Offer & Discounts Page

Create a discount code page like student discounts, NHS discount etc. to beat any discount sites outranking you.

Taking ASOS again as an example, you can see there is often a large amount of search volume around these types of searches - particularly for brands that are popular on social media.

To make it rank more effectively, add your own brand name in the H1 then “discount codes & offers” to ensure it ranks higher than other well known voucher code sites.

Below is a great example of this technique from UKlash who rank number one for the branded search ‘Uklash discount codes.’

7. Optimised Size Guides for High-Volume Products

If you have a product that is particularly well known in your industry, we’d recommend creating and optimising a size guide specifically for it.

This helps strengthen the long-tail rankings for this product, provides an additional internal link and avoids wholesalers stealing traffic e.g. see an example from The Sole Supplier below ranking for “adidas Gazelle sizing” a term with an average search volume of 720 searches a month.

8. Give Your Title Tags a Competitive Edge

Add key USPs to your title tags like ‘fast delivery,’or ‘summer sale live now.’ These not only will help you rank more effectively, but they will also draw attention to search results that aren’t ranking in position 1 (yet).

9. Homepage H1 Optimisation

Optimise your homepage H1 to include what your company sells e.g. “engagement rings & diamond jewellery” or “premium ready made cocktails.” This will help strengthen your brand presence in the search results for your hero terms.

10. Create an “As Seen On” TikTok & Instagram Page

Create an “as seen on TikTok page” and an “as seen on Instagram” page, that links to your most popular and most promoted products on social media.

We recommend linking to it from your main menu like the example below.

11. Optimise Your FAQ’s

Ask your customer services team for their top 10 queries, and make FAQ pages for them. Then, mark these up with FAQ schema. These are a fantastic way of demonstrating E-E-A-T to Google (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust) as well as clearing up some resources for the Customer Services department.

12. Claim & Optimise Your Knowledge Panel

You can check for this by searching for your brand in incognito and if it has a prompt for ‘claim knowledge panel’ then we would recommend doing so.

Below is a great example of a claimed knowledge panel that with all the relevant information filled out for both Google (another example of ‘autoritativeness’ in Google’s E-E-A-T) and the user. 

13. Optimise All Images

You can optimise your images by adding keywords to your image file names and by providing descriptive alt text (this is also incredibly important for users relying on screen readers).

Avoid keyword stuffing, and focus more on describing the exact image to Google and the user with your brand name included (where relevant).

This includes optimising your logo and any awards logos on site.

You want your images to be as competitive as your pages. You want to avoid having your website ranking for branded terms, but your competitors images ranking for them at the same time.

To Summarise

We recommend following these steps to optimise your brand performance on your website.

1. Start the whole process off by conducting branded keyword research and benchmark where you are right now for these keywords.
2. Mark up your site with organisation & website schema
3. Optimise your reviews page
4. Build links to your homepage & well known products
5. Invest in a brand PR strategy
6. Optimise your offer and discounts page
7. Optimised size guides for high volume products
8. Give your title tags a competitive edge
9. Homepage H1 optimisation:
10. Create an “as seen on” TikTok and Instagram page
11. Optimise your FAQ’s
12. Claim & optimise your knowledge panel
13. Optimise all images

Interested in finding out more? Get in touch with our team to learn how branded SEO techniques can enhance your eCommerce site’s visibility to increase your sales and revenue.