If you wanted to be logical, you might not stick a company or product name on any page more than once; after people learn what the subject is, there’s little reason to repeat the fact. But if you want to be successful in terms of brand SEO, an entirely different approach is necessary.
Repetition is key. If a company’s name happens to involve four or five words, perhaps not all of them needed to be included in every sentence (searchers are likely to type an abbreviated form, anyway). Here’s a point again, though: repetition is key. If a name occurs once on one page, and sixty times on another, the second page is likely to be judged more relevant.
Linda Bustos notes in regards to the Zappos site, “[I]ts Nine West page . . . includes 272 occurrences of “Nine West” on this page – that’s 4.55% of the entire page copy. This is what is referred to as ‘keyword density.’ Though keyword density is not as important to SEO as was once thought (title tag, keyword rich backlinks from other sites and the domain’s overall authority have more impact), this page certainly is considered highly relevant to ‘Nine West’ by Google.”
There are other things to learn from Zappos, too. The page Bustos highlights has scads (with “scads” being equivalent to “more than I care to count”) of user reviews and ratings. Some of the ratings are quite low, yet the apparent honesty and existence of a community here will make users trust the site even more. They may go on to purchase other products, or if they can get past the reviewers’ objections, even the same low-rated ones.
What users like, Google likes, of course, and even ignoring the user-generated aspect of reviews, they should count as unique content. Things that make a site stand out from the competition are almost always good.
Consider imitating another Zappos tactic, then, and put tempting offers in title tags. Consumers have little chance of not noticing the company’s free shipping policy; if you’ve got anything similar, show it off. Google’s probably noticed by now that people are drawn to words like “free” and “cheap.”
Add together all these factors, and Bustos states, “Zappos ranks #3 in between some of Nine West’s own domains. This is significant because search engines can recognize brand names’ official pages and consider them ‘vital’ results. To outrank vital results takes skill. Sure, this is just one page, but run a few brand or product searches in Google and you’ll find Zappos in the top 3 most of the time.”
Since Zappos has managed to achieve its success in such a huge market, many of you will hopefully be able to pull off similar victories in whatever sectors you serve. Don’t expect anything magical to happen overnight – Zappos was founded in 1999 – but at the same time, everything aside from the user reviews can probably be pulled together in a short period of time.
