Page One Domination: How To Protect Your Brand Search Results

Hi, my name is Tom Howlett, and I’m here today to talk about Page 1 Domination, what it is, and why it is important for your brand or website. So, if you imagine someone visits your website or they’ve heard about your brand, they might then go to the search engines to research your brand or research brand mentions, say, for example, “brand + reviews”. Because people are becoming much more savvy nowadays, people are doing this more and more, and what you find is that if the search results contain a lot of negative mentions, then this is highly likely to put off a potential customer, and they’re more likely to take their business elsewhere.

So that’s essentially what page 1 domination is about, building up those positive brand mentions and profiles, making them rank instead of the negative mentions, and then essentially you’re more likely to retain that customer.

So here is a seven step process I’ve put together, which I’m going to go through now. So, if you carry out all these steps, you’re much more likely to push any of these negative mentions out and then retain a lot more customers.

So, firstly, analyse results. You want to look at, ideally, the first five pages, if not more, depending on how popular or how many searches there are for your brand. So you want to check out searches for just purely your brand, searches for “brand + reviews”, or any other similar terms. You want to find positive mentions and negative mentions and highlight which one’s which. And then, all the positive mentions; review them to see if they’ve got the potential to rank. Would you like them to rank highly for your brand term? Would you like people visiting those sites? Do they show your brand how you would present it yourself on your website? Any negative mentions, you just want to highlight them. These could be the ones that you want to push down the search engines. So that’s the first step.

Now, the second step is positive mentions. I just mentioned some of the mentions that are positive, but you might have existing profiles which are positive and represent your brand online how you would like it represented. So, for example, if you have a Facebook profile, Google+ profile, Twitter profile, and you actively manage it, then these could be really good to just push up there. They’re also high in authority, so they’re quite likely to rank for your brand term. If people come across these profiles, you’re the face of that brand, you’re the face of that profile, so they’re much more likely to convert and see how you’re interacting with the web and your customers, and then you’re much more likely to retain this customer. Or they could end up following your brand, which is a bonus.

Thirdly, top platforms. So, what I mean by this is you’ve got your Facebook, your Twitter, your Google+, your YouTube (if relevant). I wouldn’t just create a profile for the sake of creating a profile. But if any of these profiles are actively managed, they could become really good quality resources that you can push up on a search engine. So I would recommend signing up for any of these if you haven’t and actively manage them. Treat Google+ like Facebook; interact with people, grow your followers, just as you would with any other social platform. These could be really powerful resources to get ranking.

So next is additional profiles. What I mean by this is, depending on what industry or area you might do business in, there might be a really good quality platform or directory that you can submit your business to or that you already have a business listing on. It might be something that sends quite a lot of customers through anyway. So it’s quite a good idea to review these or to sign up to any that you know to be of quite a good quality, and then these could be really good as well for ranking within the search engines.

Next is external content. So what I mean by this is press releases and videos. So if you’ve got a YouTube account, you could create videos related to your brand. These again rank really well within the search engines. Press releases as mentioned; If you’ve launched a new website, you could submit a press release to one of the high quality press release websites, and then this is a quality resource. It’s something about your brand. It’s something that you’ve created for your brand, and it’s again another resource and a positive mention that you can push up the search engines.

Domains. Now, some businesses might not have time to do this, but what I’m talking about is subdomains or external domains to domains that you’ve created. So, for example, if there’s scope for you to create an external blog, a blog which talks about some stuff that is relevant to your business, relevant to your site, but not necessarily something that you could include on the site, then you could create an external blog, keep this going, post really useful information, and any association with you could potentially rank within the search engines.

Subdomains as well, they’re treated as separate to the standard domain. So, if you have for example Blog.yourbrand.com, then that could potentially rank well within the search engines.

So the next step, the final step is to build link value to these resources. I’m talking about pointing links at these different profiles to build relevance. One really good way of doing this is linking social profiles to social profiles. So, if you think people on Facebook might be interested in your Google+ profile, might want to follow you, you can link to that. If people on Facebook might be interested in following you on Twitter, you could link to that. You could link to all of these from your website. So that’s something that’s done quite often. You link your website to your social profiles, and that creates the link between your website and these additional profiles. The good thing about this is it passes extra link value, which means the Page 1 Domination, what you’re trying to do will push these profiles up. They’ve got a much better chance of ranking highly if these connections are created.

So, after that, I just wanted to go over a couple points of what not to do. So, firstly, over the top link building. So, over the top link building, you don’t want to take one of these profiles and submit like thousands of directory links to it. You don’t want to be funny about this. You don’t want to create all these different links, all these spammy links to it just to try and get it ranking. Even though it’s not directly associated with your website on some occasions, it’s still good to just focus on creating relevance for your consumers, for people visiting your site. For people visiting these different platforms, what might they be interested in? If you’ve got a good quality YouTube account, then send visitors that way. Link to it so people know that you’re there, that you’re creating content there, and that’s something that they might be interested in. So that’s kind of what you want to think about with regards to creating links.

Review existing mentions. This is important because sometimes what may come across as a positive review can be negative. You might want to do a bit of digging, have a look around the profile, see if there’s any negative mentions there. If there’s any negative mentions, this still could put people off. So that’s something that you definitely need to take account of. But also review them for the potential to contain negative mentions. If you focus on a platform, you get it ranking highly for your brand, but then somehow, for whatever reason, there’s a lot of negative mentions about you, then that could take over the platform and that can be a negative impact on your brand overall. It’s impossible to stop every negative mention. Any review site is going to have positive and negative mentions, but overall if the platform is positive as a whole, then it’s a platform that you could continue with, that you could get ranking on the first few pages for your brand term.

Use of popular platforms. This was mentioned previously, so Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or any similar. You don’t want to just create these platforms and then try and get them ranking. You want to regularly publish content, use it regularly and interact within these profiles. If you imagine someone searches your brand, they see a Facebook profile, they click through to that Facebook profile, and if they see that this profile isn’t well utilised, you don’t really post anything, then that kind of has a negative influence on your brand. People are like, “Why aren’t they posting anything?” So you’ve got to make sure you post information. That works as a positive to you in a way, because you have complete control over that platform. You can make sure you come across how you want to online and make sure that it conveys your brand. So it’s really important to just make sure you consistently post and build up these profiles before you try and get them ranking.

Use of external websites. It’s the same thing really. You want to make sure you don’t create an external website or tool or resource for the sake of creating one. You want to make sure it creates value, there’s a reason for it, there’s no duplicate content from your main site, you haven’t just copied the content across and hoped to rank from it somehow. You want to create value in all these resources. As long as you create value that has the potential to gain links as well. It’s a win-win. You create value, it brings in links, you’re building links to it, and it’s much more likely to rank in the long run.

So, if you follow all those steps, then you’re likely to soon have a really good Page 1 domination. You’re likely to remove any negative influence and hopefully then retain customers or gain new customers. So I hope you found this video useful. For more social profiles, please see the end of this video. Thank you.