How To Protect Your Brand SERP

How To Protect Your Brand SERP

Sean: I guess one of my last questions would be, what is something that for you is super important aside from the website? So you mentioned you start with your website and when you want to protect your brand name or your PR name on the search engine results page, what other websites are important?

Because that’s just one to two listings and that’s it. Google doesn’t list your website for the next 10 or 20 links on the search engine results page. So, you get like the top one, maybe the top two results for your website and the rest is not your website. So what other websites would you say should people focus on if they want to secure the top ten?

Yeah.

Jason: Well, yeah brilliant question. I asked – I mean, I mentioned earlier on take baby steps. First is your own website. Next is the semi-control websites, your social media channels. They will tend to rank LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. So that’s semi-control, you can still control a great deal of the messages even though the site we’ll put you on LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook at the end of the title, but you still got a certain amount of control and you change, you update your social media profile description. It will update your brand set within a few days.

So you’ve already got quite a lot control there with Twitter and particularly in get those Twitter boxes, which are delightful, where it shows you like just tweets that make you; go makes your audience understand that you engage with your audience that you’ve got something to say.

That you’re open and willing to talk to them. That’s a very visible, and helpful, and positive message that you can send out to your audience. So all of these kinds of like, the baby steps of the social channels, the review platforms, baby steps to asking for reviews, getting reviews on the review platforms that currently rank.

Then you’ve got Twitter boxes, which involve social media strategy on Twitter. But if Google is showing the Twitter boxes it means that Google can see that your audience is engaging with you on Twitter, and that’s a very good sign to you. It’s a confirmation that your Twitter strategy is effective. And it’s true people and brands who have Twitter boxes on their brand SERP tend to have very great Twitter strategies that are effective and drive business for them.

And then you’ve got video boxes, which I love personally. You know, if you’re investing in a video on YouTube, on Facebook, wherever it might be, but the video boxes don’t appear on your brand SERP, so it means that you’re investing badly. It means that your audience isn’t engaging with your videos or they are, but you’re not communicating that to Google.

And it hasn’t been understood that these videos are valuable to your audience. So your video strategy is out of whack with where it should be. So the brand SERP as you improve it, you’ll see your entire digital strategy will improve whether you try to do that or not.

Sean: Very, very good stuff. Now, the last question would be what do you do when you did your best to secure the first page of Google, top 10 results, you got your website, fantastic stuff.

Get your social media platforms, edited it as best you could. And here comes a scandal that has your name on it. How do you get rid of that? Because we got people asking me that stuff. Well, not all the time, but there are those difficult questions that come by. What do you usually say to them?

Jason: Well, there are multiple aspects of this, some of it – in fact, looking after your brand SERP, I’ve just said not only is it a great business card, it’s helpful to your audience, it drives your digital marketing strategy, but it also protects you because if you’ve got control of the first two to three pages through content that you’ve worked on actively either you control your semi control.

It’s difficult for that negative content to then rank because it has to prove itself to be useful and valuable to your audience in Google’s eyes. And that’s very difficult to do from page five or page six. If you’ve done what I’ve just told you to do over the couple of two to three years. And you’ll probably get very, very stable and that’s the other thing is brand SERPs tend to be very stable once you’ve worked at them properly.

You will have protection against that kind of problem. Then you have the question once it does happen, I’ll tell you what not to do, and that’s trying to drown it. Traditionally, ORM will say, let’s create lots of articles and we will create so much content that we will do.

Now, if you think that through it doesn’t make sense and it simply doesn’t work. Because what you’re doing is creating brand new content that has no value in Google’s eyes and expecting Google to put it right in front of your audience front and center. It won’t do that. What you should do is what I call leapfrogging, is find the content underneath that is valuable to your audience that is helpful to your audience. And help Google to understand, that is better content for it to be showing your audience more representative of who you are more helpful to them than the negative content that’s currently ranking. And then leapfrog over itfor it.

Sean: Got it. I got an answer now. Thank you for that.

Jason: In fact, as the brand search guy, I’m going against traditional. ORM techniques, online reputation management techniques, and saying the best way to do it is to control your brand SERP, then you control the message. If you control the message, that negative stuff has trouble getting anywhere near it.

Sean: Got it. Do you advise people to post something about it to address it?

Jason: You can, certainly Google is very interested in hearing from the horse’s mouth.

So it’s interested in your point. You’ve got to be a little bit careful and I would say, you know, go quite carefully about that, but generally speaking, what Google is looking to do, and I built a platform, Kalicube pro, and it’s a SaaS platform that helps people do this. And brands do this. It basically says, we want Google to understand that this page on this site is the reference for this entity, this brand, this person, this podcast, this book, whatever it might be, this page is the specific representation and this is the horse’s mouth. The brand, the person, the podcast, the book saying itself about itself, what the brand message should be.

Then Google is, okay, I know what you want. Now I’m going to go around the web and see if the rest of the web agrees. If the rest of the web agrees, I will show that. So what you’re saying is potentially a good thing to do, but it’s a little bit dangerous because expressing yourself on something negative can make it worse, or you can create a firestorm so you’ve got to be really careful.

But certainly giving your point of view on what I call the entity home, which is what Google represents; sorry – recognizes as being the place of reference from the brand, the person, the podcast, the book itself is incredibly powerful. Google wants your opinion. It wants your point of view.

It doesn’t want to misrepresent you. It wants to represent you accurately to its audience, its users, because it wants to serve them as best it can. And if a negative point of view about you is relevant and helpful and valuable to its users, it’s going to show it. So the other thing about that negative result is if it’s a fair criticism, sort yourself out, make sure that you address that criticism and you change the way you’re working, especially with bad reviews.

That’s a very good example of something that a lot of brands will just need to get rid of it. I need to drain it. Saying or maybe you need to actually look at how you’re working with the clients.

Sean: Good stuff. Jason, we have learned a ton from you and you’ve had a very colorful journey from what you started in the band.

And it’s an amazing thing. And I’m really happy that you shared it with us. I am very full you know, as a listener from you right here, listening to your story. I wonder where can people find you when they want to get in touch?

Jason: Well, if you search my name, all the results were about me and not any other Jason Barnard.

So search my name, my site comes up top. You can contact me through my site, I’m on Twitter a lot. So I’ve got the Twitter boxes in the knowledge panel on the right-hand side. You’ll see all the different things I’ve done. You can LinkedIn. I hang out a lot. So Twitter, LinkedIn, my site search my name, come along to Kalicube pro, which is my SaaS platform, right to me from there, please.

Sean: There you go. Perfect. And we’re going to have that in the show notes, go to leadershipstack.com and search for it. Jason Barnard, B A R N A R D. Make sure to check it out. We’ll have his links there, but I’m sure we don’t have to link to him. Cause if you search his name, you’re going to find his website.

That’s what we’ve been talking about for the past 15 minutes. So Jason been a really, really brilliant pleasure of mine to have you on the show. I learned a lot and I’m sure that our listeners have learned a lot and we are better for it.

Jason: Yeah. Thank you very much for having me. I love the questions and it’s delightful to approach this from a point of view of all the companies I’ve set up and left behind in capable hands. Some of them are not in capable hands for others.

But it’s an interesting way of going through that kind of life process. Thinking about how I’ve built teams and how I want to build the current team at Kalicube pro. So far as we said, six people and they’re all delightful, they’re all doing great work and bottom line, we all get on and we trust each other.

Sean: That’s amazing. Amazing stuff right there. Well, thanks, Jason.

Jason: Thanks a lot man

Sean: And God bless.