Branding
Branding is a term from classic marketing and is the practice of creating a name, symbol or design that identifies and differentiates a product from other products. An effective brand strategy gives you a major edge in increasingly competitive markets.
Branding campaigns in marketing
In branding campaigns, particular emphasis is placed on the use of a company’s own brand name in advertising. Promotional material, advertising copy or merchandising products are designed in such a way that the brand name is the center of attention. Such marketing campaigns have “brand awareness” as an objective, to gain customer recognition of the brand and distinguish it from other brands.
In online campaigns, advertising media is increasingly branded and used to extend reach. This can be applied in search marketing (such as Google AdWords branding campaigns) as well as in other online marketing areas (such as display or email marketing). For analysis of advertising effectiveness, the number of times a person has come into contact with a specific advertising medium, can be considered as part of measuring the success of the campaign. This is called “opportunity to see.”
The problem with branding campaigns lies in the measurement of the branding effect since brand awareness and recognition of the brand is not precisely measurable.
Branding of a website
It is assumed that Google is not manually verifying which names used on the net are genuine brand names. Accordingly, the trademark owner can only try to establish appropriate signals which indicate that theirs is a real brand name. There are a variety of criteria that Google could use under certain circumstances to identify a brand (Google does not reveal the exact functional principle):
- Use a pure brand domain
- Registration of the brand name not only with the TLD.com, but also with the domains or TLDs of other countries
- Operation of one or more interrelated social media profiles with a large number of genuine fans or followers
- Activities in Google products such as YouTube or Google+
- High domain age combined with consistent domain context (no change of ownership of the site, no interim or earlier use of the URL for a completely different purpose)
- First position in the SERPs for the brand name
- High search volume for the brand (shows significance for users)
- Bookings of brand keywords in Google AdWords and registration of the word trademark with Google
- Regular coverage in the press (such as Google News)
- Existence of Wikipedia and DMOZ entry
- High percentage of brand links to the link structure
- Legal protection of the mark by local and international trademark law
- Brand-capable name (generic keywords or words with double meanings, for example, are not brand-capable)
- SSL encryption
- Existence of Google sitelinks in the SERPs
- Legal notice and contact information according to the TMG (Telemediengesetz = Telemedia Act)
These are all levers that website operators can adjust if they wish to establish the name of their online shop or another website as a brand. There is no guarantee, however. Since the exact Google algorithm is not known, no one can say with absolute certainty what criteria the search engine takes into account in the evaluation of a brand.
This video shows clearly what branding is comprised of.
Importance for SEO
Since the Vince Update websites with a brand name are better and more often listed in the search results. The websites of major brands enjoy great popularity among users and are generally trustworthy. Google relies heavily on such signals when evaluating a website. It is therefore quite recommendable to build a brand and to enhance the reputation of a website, as this can have a very positive impact on ranking. Moreover, experience shows that websites that have been recognized by Google as a brand, tend to be less frequently affected by penalties. They are all too often not affected by algorithm updates.