Search Engines and Brand Entities

Dobar den! Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. That’s my attempt at some Bulgarian. I think “dobar den” means hello/good day in Bulgarian. We’ll find out. I’m sure someone will comment on the blog.

Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. Good to be back in the States. Good to be back here in Seattle at SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday studios talking about an interesting topic that’s come up quite a bit — search engines and brand entities. There’s this concept that’s been talked about in the SEO world for a while, for a couple of years now, that Google sort of has this favoring of brands, of sites that have built up what you would call brand recognition and brand entities in the minds of consumers. It is sort of interesting because SEO folks have been asking some questions like, “Well, how do I know if I am a brand? What constitutes a brand and what doesn’t? Why would Google be going in this direction? What can or should I be doing?” We don’t have scientific great answers to all of these questions, but we can start to try and tackle some of them and at least get a lot of folks in the search marketing sphere thinking more about this branding stuff. I think that definitely the changes that Google’s been making around the Vince update, maybe some of the things around MayDays, certainly some of the things around showing more branded results in queries when, for example, someone types in a search plus SEOmoz, they might be showing a lot more than just two results from the SEOmoz.org website thinking that there is a brand intent to show things from just one site.

So, first let’s start by talking about why brands? Why does Google care so much about this? There’s that famous quote, of course, from Eric Schmidt, Google’s president, that Aaron Wall has brought up on SEO Book a number of times saying, you know, “Brands are how we sort out the cesspool.” So, there is this cesspool of content on the Web, a lot of it being stuff that users don’t want.

You can kind of imagine this if you put yourself in the mind and the shoes of a searcher. Shoes particularly, right. So, in this case, Google is kind of looking at these the way a human would. So maybe we’ve got our guy over here and he’s sort of looking at these different sites. He’s done a search for running shoes. He sees Adidas, which makes tons of sense; Adidas is a running shoe brand. Great, great thing to have in the result. Puma, sure. Vibram, okay, that’s kind of an emerging brand coming up. And then there is tennis-shoe-store. Yeah, I mean, maybe they’ve done a great job earning links and maybe they have a good website and that kind of thing, but consumers get kind of suspicious of this. Searchers get kind of suspicious of this. The non-brand results bring some dissatisfaction. You can see that in some of the search engine research and result testing that various organizations have conducted, including the search engines themselves. You can kind of feel it viscerally. When you look through the results yourself you kind of go, “Man, I don’t know about these. It’s a lot of hyphenated domains and sites I’ve never heard of. Can I trust them?” I go and visit them and they look sort of almost SEO heavy but not content or usability heavy. It’s so frustrating, right. I think Google is kind of saying, “Hey, we’ve got some ways to identify this. Maybe we’ll send some of the preferences over to brands.”

So, let’s try and tackle the question, what makes a brand? What is it that separates a brand from a non-brand in the minds of the search engines when it comes to domains, when it comes to websites and pages? You can think of a lot of different things. Certainly Google has put out some patent applications that suggest some of the things they might look at. They made an acquisition of a company called Metaweb that does a lot of these things, including a service called Freebase that kind of makes entity associations from context and text and word usage. These things can include stuff like appearance and repetition of text content. You can imagine that Adidas, Puma, and Vibram, these show up on the Web a lot more than tennis-shoe- store.info or whatever it is. There is kind of this idea, “Huh, maybe that’s a brand, maybe that’s not.” And then there is context of use and positioning of that text and content. You can see that those brands are all mentioned in news and they’re mentioned in blogs. They’re in stores. They’re in different stores both on and off the Web. They’re in eCommerce shops. They’re featured in traditional media outlets, online and offline. You see them in offline media as well. They show up in links. They show up in advertising. Certainly things like Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick and looking at tools like the DoubleClick Ad Planner could give you some insight into things that they view as brands and entities and how they associate those verus sites that they don’t really have an audience association or brand association with. The brands appear in things like patents. They appear in licenses. They appear in government and official documentation. There is all this sort of context and use of positioning.

Finally, brands have these user base kind of signals as well. Brands get talked about when people participate in social media. They get talked about when people perform search queries themselves. If Google sees that lots of people are searching for things like Adidas, Puma, and Vibram, but not searching for tennis-shoe-store, that could be a signal that this is a brand entity and these aren’t. There is language and communication which Google has been getting heavily into. They have their GOOG-411 service. They certainly power Gmail. They power a lot of other services where they are essentially looking at what’s being talked about, what’s being said, what’s being recorded, and written by humans all across not just the Internet but across our societies. All of these signals might help Google to make associations around what is a brand and what is not and then return results that are sort of this brand biasing.

A lot of this is sort of interesting theoretical stuff, but I know that many SEOs are going to be asking the question, “Well, what do I actually do with this data?” So, some good things to keep in mind is that we as SEOs sometimes ignore branding. We ignore the impact of let’s do broad-based advertising, let’s participate in display, let’s participate in media or in video or in offline advertising or in things like getting our brand name out there and events, those kinds of things. We become very obsessed and focused on just sort of the very basic elements of SEO — the on-page, getting links, those kinds of things. That might work. But if you’re seeing this brand biasing, you might think about some of these branding tactics as a way to move your site and your rankings forward.

Secondarily, don’t let your SEO get ahead of your organic momentum. What I mean by that is, I see and feel a lot of the times that many SEOs who get very aggressive with their domains, particularly in competitive spaces where there is brand preferences or where Google appears to be trying to do some of those things, we’ll see that they’ll do a great job earning links. They’ll get lots of good anchor text. They’ll earn those links to those pages. They might not always be from the best sources, and they don’t do a lot of these types of things. People are not saying things about them in social media. They’re not positioned in context. They are not mentioned in the news and in natural normal blogs, offline stuff, and advertising. They appear to be these sort of solely pseudo Internet brands. That could potentially be a negative signal, or at least it might not track as well as someone who’s got both signals going.

You know, as part of that, finally, I would say, try and work on making your site and your product and the naming conventions that you use as brand friendly, as branding friendly, as possible. All of those things are going to potentially impact the way your brand is perceived.

The great thing about all of this stuff, about these recommendations and about the concept of branding in general, is that there’s a lot of psychology, a lot of years, decades of marketing science and research going to the fact that, hey, brands get positively associated in consumers’ minds and they drive a lot more behavior. They drive sales, traffic, demand, and all these kinds of things. Certainly search engines can help with that, but remember that in one case when you’re doing brand building, you are sort of building and creating demand that might not have existed otherwise. When you’re doing SEO, all you can really do is serve existing demand, rank for the kinds of things that people already are searching for. This is a great thing to be thinking about not just from an SEO perspective, from a rankings perspective, but from a company building perspective and from a holistic marketing effort. It certainly feels like SEO is going in that direction.

All right, everyone. Take care. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.