Branding Versus SEO
by:
Kevin Kantola
Branding versus search engine optimisation is a marketing quandary that larger companies wish need to move to grips with on the Internet. Often companies wish need to decide whether to promote their own brand name as their main keyword phrase or optimize for a much generic keyword phrase.
For instance, one search engine report states that 1.3 million visitors per month search for the term "Best Buy." This same report states that the term "electronics" is searched for by 1.1 visitors per month. The obvious select in this scenario is for Better Buy to optimize for their own brand name 1st and the word "electronics" second.
But, take a rival such as Fry's Electronics. About 95,000 visitors search for the term "Fry's" every month, far short of those who search for "electronics". Makes this mean Fry's Physics (a partner with Outpost.com) should optimize for "electronics" 1st and Fry's (and/or Outpost.com) second?
At this writing (August 2004), a search on Google for "electronics" wish show that Better Buy makes not show up in the 1st two pages. Fry's (Outpost.com) is on the third page. But let's take a further look to see who is in the number 1 position: Sony. And Samsung is a close second.
Sony, with 450,000 searches per month for the word "sony", has managed to grab the number one spot for its brand name and the generic word "electronics". A search of the Sony homepage source code wish reveal that this page is optimized for some
words, "Sony" and "electronics." By optimizing for some
words Sony has grabbed a lot of traffic neglected by Better Buy and possibly even as exceeds Better Buys traffic in doing this.
Another issue in stigmatization is trademark infringement. Courts have upheld that websites exploitation another company's proprietary
name in its meta tags is piquant in trademark infringement. For instance, a site simply about cats would-be be infringing if it put the name Better Buy in its meta tags in hopes of gaining traffic from this proprietary
word. Large companies have to protect themselves from others stealing traffic that is truly
theirs. These companies cannot however protect a generic term such as "electronics" as that is fair game for all physics companies.
So in order to create the largest return on investment, large companies need to optimize their websites some
for their own brand names and for the generic, high-traffic keywords and keyword phrases relevant to their sites. Otherwise, they are lease tons of online business simply slip away.
Copyright © 2004 SEO Resource
http://www.seoresource.net
Kevin Kantola is the CEO of SEO Resource and has promulgated galore articles over the past 20 years.
