The 'Buzz' on the SEO wires at the moment is sudden awareness by many so called Guru's that Brand is the all important factor in securing a top rank spot. A lot of so called 'thin affiliates' are running scared because their spammy content free sites are targetted for extinction.
They have been for a while actually!
Where have they been?
If like us you follow the ups and downs for the most important keywords in your chosen sector, in our case financial services and insurance, you couldn't have failed to notice that the strong offline brands were floating to the top for all the most competitive keywords.
For the last two years SEO without a strong brand has proved to be pretty ineffective for the top keywords while retaining good results for the long tail keywords.
A large percentage of the conversion is in the long tail so the emergence of brand as the most dominant factor in obtaining high page rank for key words such as car insurance, has left the back door open for the more niche and long tail seo merchants.
So is it still possible to compete with the massive brands and get top rankings for holy grails such as 'car insurance'
We believe it is POSSIBLE and if anything it will probably become easier for a lot of good Seoers once they understand the forces in play that allow you to attack keywords with modern google loving links, create buzz, brand enhancement and authority building - as opposed to those methods that have led to the old established brands floating to the top.
There is the one caveat of - you do need resources that cost, but the payback is tenfold!
You have many advantages and yes - the Internet has never been a level playing field!
Megaliths are slow to respond like dinosaurs, there is usually nobody at the helm, the marketing department doesn't talk to or communicate ideas to the IT department enough.
You need to take advantage of their inability, unwillingless, inertia or large scale arrrogance that stops them being leaders in 'creating buzz' and being market drivers.In the time it takes you to write say ten articles for blogs, article distribution, squidoo lenses , etc,
hypermoneycomparer.com will have to have meetings upon meetings to implement some small change - move swiftly to exploit this weakness and keep abreast and ahead in creating social media buzz and links from the most Gooogly loved places.
These megaliths don't usually know how to create buzz or conciuosly even try to using social media, although many of them have always engaged in dubious SEO practices, they are often so big it that when they commit misdemenours, it usually doesn't hurt them. (There are a couple of famous cases of where companies such as BMW and GoCompare got penalised - it made Googly rethink its algo)
This is what you are up against:
Megaliths will create buzz naturally through their size and established affiliate programs and link network.
These brands are often household names through their TV advertising.
These brands are good generic domain names, for example
Money Supermarket - Noun / Noun
Compare the Market - Verb / Noun
Go Compare - Verb / Verb
Which combination do you think has been the most successful?
Steps to take to compete on the old terms:
Here's how not to do it :Buy links especially from as many blogs as you can - most of your hypermoneycomparer.com sites do this consistently!
Create a large affiliate program promtoting brand
Spend lots of money on Google Adwords
Alternatively stay lean and mean and ahead of the game - follow the advice in
The System and it is possible to establish yourself as a leading brand in a very short period of time.
Remember these brands were small once, I personally know a lot of the guys that founded these monsters - every one of them was built on Brand promotion - concentrating on the old skool offline way and it has worked!
At no time were any of them leaders or possessed any particular special quality in the deliverance of financial and insurance comparison products - many of them were just plagarism well executed or not - but they all managed to deliver the brand message and like in the real world - thats the only thing that wins out big time in the end!
Apparently Google now reflects This
Does Adwords spend play are role? - Yes in exposure and brand deliverence to a large audience whether they click or not.
Some of these megalith brands now spend millions every week in Adwords.
It now appears that whatever misdemenours they may commit on the SEO front, they tend not to get punished in the SERPS any more, mostly because of the power and size of their adwords spend and the relationships that are built up when account managers communicate with Google over hundreds of keywords across the board.
DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY and time trying to increase visibility using these PPC schemes. there are other more effective ways to spend your budget.
Brand does not equal quality. Just because its a big name it does not by definiton equal quality, unless quality is the thing it markets. Major brands can be attacked by specialised niche offerings with punch, that deliver exactly what is says on the label!
Labels: Authority Sites, Brand, Generic Domain Names, Google, SEO, SERPS, the system
