Has Google recently turned up the visibility dial for “brands”?
Every consulting pitch deck has a “build a strong brand” slide. We all know “brand” is important for SEO.
We’ve all heard Eric Schmidt’s quote: “Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”
The impact of branding is not exclusive to SEO. The whole industry of brand marketing exists because consumers seek out brands they trust.
But Schmidt’s quote dropped in 2008 (when users were interestingly just as frustrated with web results as today). Back then, Google didn’t understand content as well as today and leaned much more on user and basic backlink signals.
Today, the organic search landscape looks very different:
So, have “brands” gained? The answer is yes, but only in some verticals. But what even defines a brand?
Definition
In the context of SEO, I define a “brand” as a domain that gets:
Significant brand search volume.
Higher than expected CTR.
A knowledge card.
High brand recall/NPS.
Growing number of brand keywords.
A meaningful number of relevant backlinks with brand anchor text.
The way it might materialize in Search:
Brands see higher than average conversion rates because users trust brands more.
Users search for brand combination keywords, like “shopify brand name generator”
It’s likely that brand signals outweigh other signals as big brands get away with more.
Google gives brands preferential treatment because:
Users want them. Schmidt said in the same interview about the cesspool: “Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.”
Aggregators can be intermediaries, which is less helpful for searchers (think meta-search engines).
Google competes with more aggregators head-on (think Amazon/retailers).
The consequences for SEO Aggregators can be severe.
In David vs. Goliath, I analyzed the top 1,000 winner and loser sites over the last 12 months and found that “bigger sites indeed grow faster than smaller sites, but likely not because they’re big but because they’ve found growth levers they can pull over a long time period.”
Important: “ecommerce retailers and publishers have lost the most,” while brands like Lenovo, Sigma, Coleman, or Hanes gained visibility, as I called out in the follow-up article.
Digging deeper into a set of almost 10,000 keywords I track in the Semrush Enterprise Suite, we can see a shift in some verticals over the last 12 months.
Travel: more brands
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Fashion: mixed picture
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Beds: mixed picture
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Finance: more brands
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Health: mixed picture
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
SaaS: more brands