Branding (German: branding) is a term from classic marketing and describes the promotion of a strategy when building a brand (e.g. through name, symbol or design). It is important that this brand stands out from the competition and differs from other brands.
Branding campaigns in marketing
Branding campaigns place particular value on using a company’s own brand in advertising. Advertising material, advertising texts or merchandising items are used in such a way that the brand name is in the foreground. Such marketing campaigns have “brand awareness” as their goal so that the brand is recognized by customers and differentiated from other brands.
In online advertising campaigns, advertising media are increasingly branded and mostly used to increase reach. This can be used in search marketing (e.g. as a Google AdWords branding campaign) as well as in other online marketing areas (e.g. display or e-mail marketing ). For example, the value of how often a person has come into contact with a selected advertising medium on average can be included in the analysis of the advertising success control. This is called Opportunity To See.
The problem with branding campaigns lies in measuring the branding effect since brand awareness and brand memory among users can only be measured to a limited extent.
Branding of a website
It can be assumed that Google does not manually check which names on the web are real brands. Accordingly, the brand owners can only try to set appropriate signals that indicate that their name is a real brand. There are a variety of criteria that Google could possibly use to identify a brand (Google does not reveal the exact functional principle):
- Use of a pure brand domain
- Registration of the brand name not only with the TLD .de or .com but also with other country domains or domain endings
- Operating one or more linked social media profiles with a large number of real fans or followers
- Activity on Google products such as YouTube or Google+
- High domain age paired with a consistent domain context (no change of website owner, no interim or previous use of the URL for a completely different purpose)
- first position in the SERPs for the brand
- Existence of a high search volume for the brand (indicates importance for users )
- Bookings on brand keywords in Google AdWords and registration of the word mark on Google
- Regular reporting in the press (e.g. also in Google News )
- Existence of a Wikipedia and DMOZ entry
- A high proportion of brand links in the link structure
- Legal protection of the brand by German or European trademark law
- brandable name (e.g. generic keywords or words with double meanings are not brandable)
- SSL encryption
- Existence of Google Sitelinks in the SERPs
- the TMG corresponding imprint
At the same time, all of these are adjustment screws that website operators can turn if they want to establish the name of their online shop or another site as a brand. However, this is not a guarantee. Since the exact Google algorithm is not known, no one can say with any certainty which criteria the search engine includes in the evaluation of brands.
This video (in English) shows very clearly what branding is all about .
Importance for SEO
Since the Vince Update, websites with a brand are listed better and more frequently in the search results. The websites of big brands generally enjoy wide popularity among users and are usually trustworthy. Google relies heavily on such signals when evaluating a website. It is therefore highly recommended to build a brand and increase the reputation of the website, as this can have a very positive effect on the ranking. In addition, empirical values show that websites that have been recognized by Google as a brand tend to be less likely to be penalized. Algorithm updates all too often go completely unnoticed by websites.