How to Get the Most Google Real Estate for Your Brand’s Keyword

For keywords other than your brand name, you have to focus on ad bidding and SEO ranking to get Google real estate. However, for your own brand keyword, you have many more options.

Google Real Estate Breakdown

For a brand keyword, Google will return a search page that looks like this:

Only half this page is devoted to ads and search engine rankings. The rest is devoted to data from Google+ and Google+ Local. This means that your logo, information, and posts on Google+ and Google+ Local are worth about as much as the SEO and ads for your brand keyword. Maximizing on this can increase your profits and make you less vulnerable to conquesting.

Google+ Page

Google+ is responsible for the box in the far top-right. It just shows a recent post made by your company on its Google+ page. Keep this content fresh and relevant, and you will attract not only new leads through Google+, but also more leads through Google searches.

Google+ Local

This is the meat of a brand-name SERP. It includes a logo, a map, an address, reviews, and recent posts.

• Logo: your company logo should be clean, attractive, and recognizable. If your logo is strong enough, it may not need to even include text. For example, McDonalds’ Google+ Local logo is just the iconic Golden Arches: clean, attractive, and recognizable.

• See Photos: Your logo will link to your Google+ Local photos. Choose photos that communicate your brand identity and your value proposition.

• Reviews:  The best way to get good reviews on your Google+ Local is to ask your most valued customers to write reviews for you. Place links to your Local profile and calls to action for customers to write up reviews. Be on guard against malicious reviews that may have been placed by your competitor. Google+ Local has little tolerance for malicious fake reviews and will take them down if asked.

• Recent posts: Publish different posts on your Local page as you do on your normal Google+ page. This will increase the variety of content offered to search engine users.

Ordinary Optimization

Once your Google+ profiles are optimized, you can also dominate the rest of the page.

• PPC. It might seem like a waste of money to advertise on your own brand keyword, but it’s not. It increases the real estate and directs potential customers directly to your site. It also will be pretty cheap, because landing pages on your own keywords usually receive very high Quality Scores.

• SERP SEO. Try to dominate the top six search results. If you do, the average user will only see links to your site in most browsers. To get the top rankings, publish different types of content, including videos and infographics. In addition, maintain an active presence on all social media. This should help push a few social media profiles into the top six.