"Brand Bidding" But for SEO?

[Zach]

I have a lot of experience brand bidding in SEM. Across dozens of brands in my niche.

I had assumed SEM was the only way to get in front of a brand unless you wanted to do "review of brand X" kinda pages. However, recently I've seen organic "fake" brands ranking on the 1st page for brand queries or EVEN outranking the brand in some cases.

Example of this would be:

Branded Keyword: "Ragnar Plumbing"
Result 1: RagnarPlumbing.com
Result 2: RagnarPlumbing.com's Facebook Page
Result 3: RagnarPlumbinc.com's Glass Door
Result 4: RagnarPlumbingco.org

The 4th result is the interesting one. It's not the brand. The page is generic with a leadgen form fill.

In my SimilarWeb tool I've come to find whoever is doing this is doing it with quite a few different brands, but am interested in how they do it.

I am a few years outta the game in SEO (I do all paid stuff now), but do any of you have any intel on how this can be accomplished? Any tools I should order to take a dive into how they do this? My first thought would be plug in the URLs to SEMrush/Majestic to take a look at the anchor text distributions. If this site is "faking" being the brand, it would probably just have a shitload of branded anchor-text links and that could possibly just do the trick?

Any opinions on difficulty of such a strategy? Longevity of the strategy? Could this be an easier play than trying to crank out rankings for non-branded keywords.

 

[lion1978]

The 4th result is a "brand" in itself it just happens to contain the same keywords as result number 1,2 and 3.
So in the "eyes" of a search algorithm they are both brands.
It can be achived in many ways actually both blackhat and white hat, but the first thing you'd need is good onpage seo compared to what ever else is ranking a good place to start is here https://www.buildersociety.com/threads/day-8-on-page-seo.1286/
If you want to do it for many terms or are really serious about doing seo at scale I'd recomend getting Cora which is an tool that messures over 500 know ranking factors and does correlation calculations on them and then outputs what you should be focusing on doing it does have an option for also pulling in ahrefs data if you have an account with them but the onpage alone should do magic for you.
Once you've got your onpage done you can then start utting in time and effort towards link building, when it comes to link building start by doing your relevant knowem's and start building an authority stack arround your brand, then later you can do either outreach or pbn's or even run good old gsa or any other "spam link" tool if you want to.
And although you can run it with 100% exact match anchor text, it's probably better to use a little diversity.

And then remember that if you start to see a google dance for your domain at some point, then do absolutley nothing, typically it will happen for a week or two where google is basically trying to catch you out to see if you start deleting links or using the disavov tool or anything like that, and guess what if you do any of those things that is your way of admitting to google that you've been a naughty boy and they will drop your rankings, where if you do nothing and just let the dance happen you are telling google I have no control over the links that are build and then you will settle on the spot that you ranked in before or potentially higher.

On another note about link building keep in mind that if you build links on sites with high traffic and achive a good ctr through your links you can do much more with few links than you can with low quality links with no traffic through them. so start thinking clickbaiting. Also clickbaiting is very usefull in your titel because the higher your clickthrough rate from google is the higher they will rank your site/page.

As for the longevity of this I'll say it has a long lifetime, very long actually, espacially now that link spam is no longer a demoting factor. there are ofcourse other "blackhat" things that you can apply such as cloaking for example which would probably reduce the longevity of your venture.

On a last note here I will point out that there is one thing above them all that you need to take in to consideration and that is trademarks and copywrights if a brand is trademarked then it's not worth going after it, simply because you legally aren't allowed to and the brand could should they choose to sue you and on top of that get the domain that you spend so much time and energy to try to rank.

Hope this was somewhat helpfull and that my spelling wasn't completeley awfull