SEO Recap: Keywords, URLs and Branding

There’s yet another consideration when it comes to keywords, your domain name and your url – and that is branding.  A common oversight when researching, analyzing and selecting keywords is forgetting to include your brand name or company name as one of the keywords. Most extremely small business websites including home based businesses will have their website’s name or the domain name reflect the brand name. However, medium and large business websites may have the domain name as a keyword, and may or may not contain the business name in the URL.

Of course, if someone searches for your website using your brand name, you want your website to come up as one of the first featured in the search results. If you do not come up in the first 10 results then you have very little chances of impressing your customer who searched your services using your brand name.

While top 10 ranking for one of your service related keywords is very important, in fact more important than your company name until you have a well defined brand, that doesn’t mean you should neglect getting ranked for your brand name. Remember, you will automatically achieve listings in the search results just because your company owns your corporate website. The search engines should definitely pull your website when people search for your company name, however, so pay attention and start building reasons for them to recognize you early on.

You really need to concentrate on providing compelling reasons for search engines to identify your website with your company name. If you neglect this and others rank for your name, you will have a long and difficult journey in terms of creating brand name popularity. Of course, this won’t ‘kill’ your website – in many cases, if you search for the official site of even some of the most popular brands, the company’s official website is not what shows up in the top 10 or 20 results. Instead, the sites of affiliate marketers show up. You really don’t want this happen to your website because you cannot afford it like the big names can if you want to make profit out of your business.

So, implement your company name or your brand name as one of your major keywords. Optimize it carefully and include geographic qualifiers. When you have both your company name and geographical location as keywords, you have a much better chance of dominating local search. When people use the place name along with your business name, you take advantage of the trend to search by locale. When someone does a business search using Google Maps, you can enhance your ranking in this way and appear very prominently.

Also, ensure that all of your main pages are optimized for your company name as well so that the service or the major products that you are selling will be associated with your brand name in your visitors’ minds. This is the most basic and effective ways of promoting your brand name alongside the product or service that you offer. Use keywords to formulate your brand name if possible.