Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Note:
This shift hit not just consumer spaces but B2B as well.
The impact in ecommerce is harder to judge due to the dominance of free product listings.
In finance, major players like Nerdwallet lost a lot of visibility (there might be more going on).
To top it off, three exemplary, hypercompetitive keywords also show major SERP mix shifts over the last two years (non-brands highlighted in red):
Credit Cards: more brands
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Car insurance: more brands
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Watches: more brands
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Response
Here is how I work with companies that I don’t see as established brands:
We work on reputation by mining reviews on third-party review sites and developing a plan for improving them if necessary.
Google strongly cares about third-party reviews (and so do users), which you can see in the fact that it enriches the shopping graph with them or cites them in the SERPs.
We invest in brand marketing and monitor brand recall/NPS in relation to competitors. We aim always to be a little better, which is part of a larger product strategy.
In my experience, SEO and product are not separable. We monitor and invest in brand mentions and in what context they’re mentioned (co-occurrence).
We consider hard calls when it comes to exact match domains (EMDs). Even though you will find plenty of examples that they work and the cost of migration is very high, sometimes moving to a brand name is the best long-term option. How many EMDs do you know that are memorable?
We take a close look at the ratio of brand to non-brand traffic – are both growing? If you have a low number of branded searches compared to non-branded ones, you don’t have a brand.
We look at brand links and mentions. While generic anchor text links are valuable, people tend to underestimate the impact of brand links on the homepage.
The most effective things you typically do (in the white hat space) for more brand links are also things that get your brand “on the map,” so this also funnels into a larger brand marketing strategy.
Back in 2008, brand links were likely the deciding brand factor.
Today, it’s paired with brand name searches, as Tom Capper’s analysis on Moz shows: domains that lost during Helpful Content Updates had a high ratio of Domain Authority to Brand Authority, meaning lots of links but few brand links.
The Helpful Content Update Was Not What You Think
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal