As part of our SEJ interview series, Ryan Jones at SapientNitro discusses how you can build your brand by emulating other brands.
As part of his day job Ryan manages SEO for several large, Fortune 500 brands. A common question that has come up from clients this year is whether or not Google has a brand bias. Ryan’s clients have been wanting to know if Google is interested in and/or rewarding brands.
Ryan says Google doesn’t have a brand bias, people have a brand bias. It’s not that Google prefers brands, it’s that people associate brands with quality, authority, and trust.
However, there’s no reason a site that’s not technically a brand can’t also establish the same trust, quality and authority.
In the video below Ryan explains how smaller websites can build trust with users by emulating big brands:
Here are some key takeaways from the video:
- Building a brand is not easy. You have to be prepared to put in the same kind of work that the big brands are doing.
- Do real company stuff. Engage customers and ramp up the overall quality of your business in order to build authority .
- A lot of businesses approach SEO by wanting to take a piece of content and making it rank for a specific keyword. The approach taken by brands is the exact opposite. Brands figure out what people are looking for and then cater to their customer’s needs by building content around that.
- If you’re a local business, take a local approach first. Start by building authority in your local community by becoming more involved.
- Ryan says in order to become a brand, start living by the acronym QUART, which stands for Quality, Uniqueness, Authority, Relevance and Trust. If you follow the QUART method you can’t go wrong.
Please visit SEJ’s YouTube page for more video interviews.
