How Brand Reputation and Mentions Impact SEO

Just as brand perception changes the behaviors of society, it also finds a place in Google’s algorithms and affects the search results. This post will take a comprehensive look at how brand perception, trend, reputation, and direct traffic affect the brand’s organic rankings. All four of these factors strongly impact a website’s SEO and function in different ways as you’ll soon learn.

SEO impact 1: Understanding brand mention and reputation

A brand mention is exactly what it sounds like, it’s when people talk about, or mention, the brand and is a strong indicator of brand awareness. Needless to say, a high level of brand awareness is at the forefront of every marketer’s mind since more brand awareness is correlated with high rates of customer loyalty. Logically, that makes sense because people tend to trust things there are familiar and comfortable.

Brand reputation is slightly different. It is how an audience knows a brand and affects consumers’ trust in your brand and ultimately, their decision to do business with you. To put it simply, brand mention and brand loyalty are indicators of how many people have heard of you, and brand reputation is what they’ve heard about you. 

Understanding this terminology has probably raised a few questions for you such as:

• How do brand mentions on digital channels impact your organic ranking on search engines?
• What happens if you are able to increase the search volume for your brand name?
• Do brand mentions impact organic rank more or less than external links to your website?

Let’s dive into some of these details.

According to Google’s Search Quality Raters Guideline document, it does evaluate brand mentions when considering how reliable a website is. Google uses those mentions as strong clues to understanding what the brand serves, what it stands for, and what it is related to.

While Google doesn’t explicitly reference “brand mentions” in their recent patent it does reference “implied links” which hints at how the search mogul uses mentions when calculating a website’s reliability. In brief, it appears that Google uses unlinked mentions, or implied links, in its quality score website calculations.

One quote that stands out is: “An implied link is a reference to a target resource, e.g., a citation to the target resource, which is included in a source resource but is not an express link to the target resource. Thus, a resource in the group can be the target of an implied link without a user being able to navigate to the resource by following the implied link.”

So, How Does Google Evaluate Brand Reputation and Mentions?

Anyone can make a claim about how great they are. On your resume, you can say you are the top SEO specialist in Ecommerce, but if you go on a job interview you’ll still need references to back up your claim. The same is true for brands. A brand can claim anything it wants about its reputation on its website, so Google gives external mentions precedent. If you want to improve your site’s quality rank on Google, you must have a strong brand reputation from external sources that serve as social proof.

Neutral content referring to your site won’t help or hurt you, so to help ensure you have a high-quality score, prioritize getting positive mentions from these types of external sources:

• Expert recommendations
• References
• Prestigious awards
• News articles
• Information is written by a person
• Wikipedia
• Customer reviews
• Forum discussions

The three external links that provide the most impact on your brand reputation the most are the ones bolded above.

Other factors Google considers

In the case that Google doesn’t have enough information from its usual go-to sources to properly understand your brand reputation, it evaluates the comments of journalists, authors, vloggers, YouTube influencers, and other influencers. What does this mean for you? Simply, investing in a strong influencer marketing strategy can actually positively affect your website’s SEO.

Google examines the brand reputation for YMYL (Your Money Your Life) sites in much more detail since its May 2020 update. Since their misinformation about COVID-19 was rapidly spreading during the time of that update, Google decided to make the weight of brand reputation impact SERP’s appearance much more than it did previously. YMYL sites are huge factors in that consideration since they are known as websites that help guide major decisions in people’s lives.  If you have a complex reputation (partially positive, partially negative) for your YMYL site, then your brand reputation is unfortunately determined as negative.

Another major factor is how the brands based in North America are rated by the Better Business Bureau. The BBB is a non-profit whose mission is to advance trust in the marketplace in the USA and Canada. It relies on a grading system of A-F based on the degree of confidence that the BBB has that the brand is operating in a trustworthy manner and will make strong efforts to resolve any customer concerns filed. The grade takes into account 17 factors based on objective information and actual incidences of a business’s behavior that have been verified and evaluated by BBB professionals. The higher the BBB grade, the higher Google’s quality score. This a very clear example of the relationship between brand reputation and SEO.

SEO impact 2: Brand search volume

To best understand the impact search volume, otherwise known as brand awareness, has on organic traffic, let’s start by looking at Boyner’s implemented TV commercial strategies across all active channels over the beginning of the summer and Black Friday. Unsurprisingly, the company’s campaigns helped the brand successfully increase its brand awareness and made the brand trend on Google Trends during May-June (A special campaign called “Kelebek İndirimi”) and October-November (Black Friday) as shown below.

To get a clearer picture of the full impact of the campaign the search volume trend for the brand’s name also has to be analyzed.  The image below shows the growth of branded search volume from 1.2M to 1.8M in May.

So, how did the improvement of branded search impact the site’s organic traffic? Using Similarweb’s platform you can see the site gained huge organic momentum during the time period analyzed as well. The impact of this is shown below.

Looking at the total website traffic (both branded and non-branded traffic) and brand analytics, we can see the brand traffic kept its position and increased in November. As you can see in the graph below, the non-brand traffic is also growing quite well in campaign periods, however, and still accounts for the majority of the website’s search traffic.

To verify the traffic trend data, it is important to dive into the keyword count. In the chart below, you can see that the number of competitive keywords the website targets has taken off and increased with momentum since May. This makes sense given the organic traffic growth and is simply a continuation of the story told by the traffic data.

Although there are many factors that can impact organic growth, in this case, the two main factors that led to the increase in brand searches were brand mentions and brand reputation.

How to create a positive brand reputation and increase brand search volume

SEO cannot be properly evaluated from a single point of view. Digital PR is an important factor that indirectly affects SEO, as proven by the impact a TV commercial had on the website analyzed. Looking at the holistic view of a brand’s health is the only way to effectively improve SEO performance, meaning you have to combine Your Offline and Online Strategies. 

Continuing with the example of an advertisement on TV, let’s walk through how and why it impacts organic search. If your business is completely online craft your TV ad using your target keywords and expression. Then when your potential customers go online to search for you they will run queries using those terms and increase your organic growth.

Below I show you a nice TV advertising strategy for an e-commerce site. Cimri is an e-commerce site that offers price comparisons. The example below was taken from the company’s YouTube channel.

At the end of the ad, they encourage users to search with “non-branded keyword + brand name” query. Here we see a good perspective of the digital marketing team and collaboration with the creative team.

Of course, they got an increment in organic keyword count.

How to Fix Negative Brand Reputation and Grow Positive Reputation & Mention

If your brand has a negative reputation, it is up to you to fix it. So, where do you begin?

User reviews: If your brand has a Google My Business account, follow user reviews and let them evaluate your service quality. Strive to improve your service quality and have that improvement reflected in your page’s comments. It’s crucial that you respond to the comments, both positive and negative.

Additionally, you should also follow user comments on forums or Q&A sites. Create a business account and comment on users’ topics to show that you care about their opinions and experience.

“The best way of dealing with negative reviews is to answer them, deal with them, learn from them, and improve your services.”

Knowledge Graph: Present all the information about your brand on your homepage by using Organization Schema Markup on your website. This allows Google to establish a connection between the information you provide and your brand. There are many properties you can add.

• Pro Tip: Add as many properties as you can to let Google will collect as much information about your brand as possible from your Organization Schema Markup.

Knowledge Graph of NASA

Wikipedia: Create a Wikipedia page for your brand if it doesn’t already exist. Try to include information about your brand’s founders, foundation date, services, offers, logos, and other personal brand details. Google always evaluates a brand’s Wikipedia page when considering how reliable it is. Most of the time Google also takes Knowledge Graph information from Wikipedia as well. Moreover, your Wikipedia page also increases users’ trust in your brand.

Become well-known: Work with experts and other websites to get them to mention your brand. Notable projects your brand partakes in will attract the attention of news sites and help you make headlines. If your brand’s work has not reached a large enough audience, you can cooperate with site owners to make it easier for them to give you a shout-out.

• Pro Tip: Not all mentions are good – Steer clear unnatural paid links!

Mention of your brand by the people or sites in your industry, will both contribute to your reputation and organic ranking.

Social Media & Influencer Marketing: As mentioned above, Google cares what influencers, bloggers, and vloggers say about your brand. Collaborate with relevant influencers so you can increase your reach and improve your organic performance. Make deals with influencers and redirect users to your brand’s website.

by Sinan Yeşiltaş

SEO Manager, SEMTR

Sinan boosts e-commerce traffic through SEO and UX expertise. He has worked with major brands and is with SEMTR, Turkey's top data-driven marketing agency.