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Lukasz
Lukasz 2012/09/18

Third Party Brand Keywords as Opportunities to improve organic traffic

Unwrapping the Secrets of SEO Time to read: 7 min

Let me give you a hypothetical situation. Let’s say you become an in-house Head of SEO in Facebook Inc. You need to increase traffic. Quick! With Searchmetrics your strategy could be quick, obvious and successful. You would firstly check on what keywords facebook.com does already rank.

Let’s check how Facebook.com performs in Google.co.uk:

http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/essentials?url=facebook.com&cc=GB

What can we see?

Two facts are crucial.

  • there is way over 2 million of keywords that facebook.com appear in top100 of google.co.uk SERP;
  • there is way over 900,000 keywords that facebook.com appear in top10 of google.co.uk SERP.

Filter your list using “details” view and specific criteria.

You need to know how to extract data which fits into your strategy. Above we told that strategy is to boost organic traffic asap. Because of that we have related filter criteria below:

  • keywords that ranks between 2-10;
  • Monthly exact Search Volume is between 1 million – 5 million queries;
  • keywords that are not pointed to homepage
  • keywords that aren’t / aren’t including a brand keywords (exclude facebook & face book)

Different strategy – different filtering.

Now sort your list by Search Volume column. And here is an obvious questions. Why Search Volume nor Traffic index column? An answer is simple. Thatis because we are looking for an easy and highly profitable opportunity. Instead of keywords which delivering traffic already we want keywords which will deliver traffic (but aren’t already too low in SERP). You may use Traffic Index column as a sort factor when you already rank, and as a next step you going to improve conversion rate or decrease bounced visits. In our strategy we want to improve Traffic index. And we will after on-page optimization.However You need to remember about monthly fluctuations in Search Volume (that will affect Traffic Index results).

HINT:
You may not be able to implement filter criteria in SearchMetric panel.  Because of that it may be necessary to export list to Excel.

Before you do this, please apply as many criteria as you can and export list partly (you don’t need more than 10,000 rows).

Finally you should see something similar to screenshot below:

Monthly Search Volume fluctuations:

 Just as an additional test I export August and June keywords using same filter criteria.

I received a bit different list of keywords. 12 of them were unique for each list. Rest appear on both list. That’s because search volume highly fluctuate for our keywords. A little dashboard table comparing two months should looks like that:

Dashboard

And now lets look closer to list of keywords for month August (part).  What you can clearly see is that all keywords match brand names of companies that created fan pages.

So is “autotrader” a relevant keyword for Facebook?  According to Google the answer is YES. Especially when Facebook ranks already at position #10 in AutoTrader.  Let’s pick up another keyword which is “river island”. Should Facebook rank for this keyword – answer is yes.

Keywords

You may tell that there is not much sense to rank higher for keywords like “autotrader” or “river island” because almost everyone who is using these keywords, trying to find relevant websites.

Most doesn’t mean everyone.
Even if there is 2% of people that are interested to find facebook fan page of autotrader and if these people use “autotrader” keyword – we have 115k queries related to autotrader fan page instead of their website. So lets take “river island” keyword. What websites are relevant to that keyword?

Here is an answer:

relevant-url

Another example:
For “mark and spencer” keyword Wikipedia is at second position. Third is taken by a corporate website of Mark and Spencer. Fourth is facebook.com/MarkandSpencer.Wouldn’t be great to become second? If Wikipedia can, Facebook can as well.

So as a conclusion, it is true that Twitter and Wikipediaare Facebook’s competitors for “river island” keyword even if this is brand keyword and belongs to third-party company. However Facebook is not a competitor to River Island brand itself and will never become above River Island. Can “fight” for additional traffic for that and other brand keywords, especially with websites like Wikipedia and Twitter.

And this is the power of organic results. You wouldn’t be able to get traffic from brand keywords via paid results. Our list contain about 40 keywords but imagine that your list contain 4000 keywords.

So here is one more little example.

Pinterest – receive traffic from keyword “google pl” in google.co.uk because of this URL: http://pinterest.com/source/google.pl/

Is this relevant? If Google created an account on Pinterest an answer is yes, it is relevant traffic.

Now, check in Search Metrics website(s) you working on. Filter, sort by Search Volume.  If you see lots of brand keywords try to start with an on page optimization. You may also apply this model to other group of keywords. For example celebrities, smartphone models, etc. And if link-building is not an option you can always keep focus on on-page optimization to be second, third or fourth. Or to be at least in top10. As long as keywords you using doesn’t miss-lead your users.

Written by +Lukasz Zelezny