Branded keywords are almost always the easiest ways for a business to rank in Google because they are the most relevant and unique phrases related to the business. But what happens when the keywords related to your brand are similar to those of another business? Or what if someone starts using your branded keywords to market their own site in search? When this happens, it can be extremely frustrating.
Here are five strategies you can use to protect search real estate that should be reserved only for you.
Talk To Your Competitors
The simplest, most cost effective, fastest solution is to simply reach out and request that the person using your branded terms stop. It’s human nature to think the worst. When we see another company using our slogans or product names in its search marketing, we immediately think that the company is out to get us. Sometimes, it can just be the result of an honest mistake, a coincidence, or a case of an employee doing something outside the knowledge of his superior.
Get Trademark Protection
If speaking with a competitor doesn’t help, applying for trademark protection is a solid strategy for preventing other businesses from using your marketing phrases. As long as the competing business has not already secured rights to the phrase, an intellectual property attorney can help you apply for trademark protection.
“Before a trademark is ever used commercially, the first step is to do a trademark search to clear rights to be sure that the word or phrase is available for use,” said Joseph A. Mandour, a client of Rankings.io and managing partner at Mandour & Associates, a southern California intellectual property law firm. “If the search comes through as clear, then a federal trademark application should be filed immediately to secure rights to the trademark.”
Registering a trademark helps protect your marketing activities, but it also has many other benefits. It can protect your phrases from unauthorized use in other channels and help differentiate you from the competition.
Leverage The DMCA
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law enacted in 1998. Its primary purpose is to criminalize certain means intended to circumvent digital rights management. But, in the case of copyright infringement on the internet, it increases the penalties.
Google provides a mechanism for removing content from search if it violates the DMCA. If you already have trademark protection in place and you believe it’s being violated, you can provide all the necessary documentation to Google and request removal of the content.
Before you attempt a strategy like this, it’s always best to consult with an attorney. Securing trademark protection will also make things much easier for you. After all, if Google can't find that someone is breaking the law or infringing on another person’s legal rights, there isn’t much it can do.
Maintain Top Rankings
If trademark protection is not an option for you, there is no other choice than to outrank your competition. In many cases, it's possible to outrank your competition, except in rare instances when you’re up against an organization with far deeper pockets than yours.
Here is a broad overview of the tactics you can use to get more visibility in search:
• Make a page on your site (such as the home page) as relevant as possible to the branded phrase you want to rank for. This should be the page you want showing up in the search results pages.
• Analyze the number of inbound links the competing site has pointing at it, then build even more links than it has. If your competitor has thousands or hundreds of thousands of referring domains, just try to build as many as you can.
• Create as much content as you can and syndicate it on social networks.
• Do as much on-page optimization as possible. For example, make sure your pages load quickly and that all pages have substantial content. Also, point internal links at the page you want ranking for your branded terms.
• Use a consistent and steady approach. Many people fail with SEO because they tend to fizzle out their efforts after a short period of time. Remember that it can take months to get a page to rank well in search. Keep at it and don’t get discouraged.
Write Compelling Titles And Meta Descriptions
If you are still ranking for your branded or marketing phrases but you aren’t getting the clicks you need, pay attention to your title tags and meta descriptions.
One of the best ways to increase click-through rates on search results pages is to write compelling meta descriptions and titles. These are the pieces of information that people scan first in a list of search results. Even if a result is on the first page, if it lacks relevance or isn’t intriguing to searchers, they'll pass right over it.
If Google can see that your result is more popular than a competitor’s based on the interaction it receives in search, it's more likely to move your result up and push others down.
Branded phrases or marketing slogans are often at the core of a company’s identity, so it’s important that they are able to rank well for them in search. This is especially true because consumers use search as a navigation tool to find organizations that are already known to them. Not ranking for your brand or for the slogans used to promote your brand means that you're largely invisible online.
