How to Rank Your New Brand

Starting Point

You already know you need a user-friendly site, with high quality content, that is equally accessible on mobile and desktop. Mobile is especially important in 2018. You have described your company, and used your company name in the meta-titles and throughout the page content of your home page. You have avoided keyword-stuffing, because you know that Google has been ignoring meta keywords for years now, and is good at working out for itself what a page is really about. But still your site doesn’t show up when you Google for your company name. How annoying!

The rest of this post takes you through some simple steps to help Google realise that you are the brand owner, and when people search for your brand, the best page to show them is the home page of your company website. We’ll take you through what we did at The Content Guild.

Structured Data

Structured data, is a way of embedding semantic information on your site. Sure, Google can process the text on your site, but if there were a way to tell it explicitly what your company is called, say, you would want to use that, right? That’s what you can do with structured data, also known as Schema.org.

Once you have added structured data to your site, Google can use it to return rich results, previously known as rich snippets, in the SERPs.

There are many types of structured data defined by Schema.org. Google understands a subset of these. Of these, we will focus on Organization and LocalBusiness.

The golden rule for structured data is that it must be representative of the main content of the page. In fact, this is one of the reasons Google give for not using the structured data in results pages.

Organization

Google demonstrate how to use the Organization schema type to define a corporate contact or a company logo. We will use the following fields:

Being careful to follow the golden rule above, we added this schema to our Contact Us page, for which the main page displays exactly this information.

Local Business

At this time, Google are trialling use of the Local Business data type with a small set of initial providers. Having got to grips with structured data for the Organization data type, it is only a small additional step to do the same for the Schema.org LocalBusiness fields. We have no online appointments system, which is part of the Google trial, but we choose to use the following fields at this time.

Again we are careful to follow the golden rule, so choose to put this structured data on our home page.

Social Media Connections

The social media sites have really high domain authorities, and while some such as Facebook nofollow their outbound links, others such as LinkedIn do follow them. Linking the company website with your home page on these social sites is surely worthwhile.

So, firstly we created pages on the social sites that link back to our website. And created social buttons on our site in the standard page footer.

Then, we added to the Organization schema links to our home pages on social media sites using the sameAs field.

The golden rule says put these on pages which have visible links to the social media sites. In our case, that is the Contact Us page, which does by virtue of our standard footer. So we’re good to go.

Refinements

Having taken the steps described, we saw searches for “The Content Guild” showing our website high up on page 1 of Google. However, a more common search for our company name would be simply “Content Guild”, and at this stage, that was not working. What to do?

We decided to make use of the alternateName field of the Organization type, so we could capture both “The Content Guild” and “Content Guild”.

Final Schemas

Organization

Our Contact Us page now includes the following structured data.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "http://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Content Guild",
  "alternateName": "The Content Guild",
  "legalName": "The Content Guild Ltd",
  "url": "https://www.contentguild.co.uk/",
  "sameAs":  ["https://www.linkedin.com/company/contentguild/"],
  "logo": "https://www.contentguild.co.uk/img/the-content-guild.png",
  "contactPoint": [{
    "@type": "ContactPoint",
    "telephone": "+44-161-327-0903",
    "contactType": "sales"
  }]
}
</script>

Local Business

Our home page includes the following structured data.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "http://schema.org",
  "@type": "LocalBusiness",
  "@id": "https://www.contentguild.co.uk/",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "St David's Park",
    "addressLocality": "Ewloe",
    "postalCode": "CH5 3DT",
    "addressCountry": "GB"
  },
  "geo": {
    "@type": "GeoCoordinates",
    "latitude": 53.18947,
    "longitude": -3.05206
  },
  "name": "Content Guild",
  "alternateName": "The Content Guild",
  "legalName": "The Content Guild Ltd",
  "telephone": "+44-161-327-0903",
  "url": "https://www.contentguild.co.uk/",
  "image": "https://www.contentguild.co.uk/img/vista-st-davids-park.jpg"
}
</script>

Conclusion

Ranking your new brand isn’t hard. After all, Google really wants to show your home page to people who are searching for you. User intent is everything, and Google are really good at working that out. But as we saw, it really helps to have structured data on your site for at least your company name and location, and links to your home pages on social media sites. So don’t forget to do that!

And if you need any help with this, that’s what we’re here for.