You prob­a­bly spend a lot of time per­fect­ing your home­page. Opti­mis­ing the page title, improv­ing call-to-actions and check­ing that the copy cor­rect­ly aligns with your user per­sonas are all impor­tant tasks to ensure you make the most of your traf­fic. Chances are you see your home­page as one of the most impor­tant user touch­points.

Your home­page is impor­tant but it’s also impor­tant to con­sid­er that not every­one search­ing for your brand actu­al­ly clicks through to your site. Your brand’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is just as impor­tant.

This post explains why you should opti­mise your brand’s SERP and details 10 things to pri­ori­tise. Chances are you’ll have spent some time on these tac­tics but you’re bound to find some­thing you can improve straight away.

Peo­ple search­ing for your brand name in Google may vis­it your site but they will also have oth­er options avail­able to them. For exam­ple, they might vis­it your Google My Busi­ness page or read some reviews, they might check out your Face­book page or even the site of the com­pa­ny who has a sim­i­lar name. Some peo­ple might Google you and then Google your com­peti­tor. It’s there­fore vital that your brand’s SERP sells your brand fast. Here are 10 ways to opti­mise your SERP:

Sitelinks

Sitelinks are the links that appear below your home­page which go to oth­er pages on your site. You’ll want these to be the pages for your top ser­vices or prod­ucts as well as oth­er impor­tant pages like your Con­tact or About Us page.

Google has help­ful­ly got­ten rid of the abil­i­ty to demote these sitelinks via Search Con­sole so remov­ing pages you don’t want to show is a lit­tle more com­pli­cat­ed than it used to be (thanks, Google!). It’s still pos­si­ble to remove pages though as this post explains.

Image: Google Search Con­sole Help

Reviews

Most brand SERPs have some reviews from Google, Face­book or review sites like Trust­pi­lot. Any­thing under 3/5 stars gives the impres­sion you have a cus­tomer ser­vice issue. 4/5 stars is okay (but not great) but you should obvi­ous­ly be aim­ing for 5/5. Here’s a good post from Econ­sul­tan­cy that explains how to get more pos­i­tive reviews.

Directions

Some­times peo­ple are only Googling you to see where you’re based or to get direc­tions. If your Google My Busi­ness list­ing has an incor­rect address (or if you’re hard to find) then you’ll be start­ing all your meet­ings on the back foot as your vis­i­tors will already be annoyed.

As well as awk­ward first encoun­ters, hav­ing poor direc­tions (or no loca­tion list­ing at all) doesn’t say good things about your brand. Even if you’re an eCom­merce site and don’t expect vis­i­tors, peo­ple are much more inclined to trust a com­pa­ny if they know where it is locat­ed.

Images

Images are a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to quick­ly com­mu­ni­cate your brand’s val­ues and show­case your­self to poten­tial clients. Typ­i­cal­ly the only images that will show on your brand’s SERP will be ones con­nect­ed to your Google My Busi­ness list­ing. That’s why you should ditch those unin­spir­ing, out-of-date pho­tos of your office and invest in some pro­fes­sion­al pho­tog­ra­phy.

Sap­phire Spaces uses the images on their Google My Busi­ness list­ing to show­case their beau­ti­ful show­room as well as their loca­tion.

PPC Ads

Stud­ies show a com­bi­na­tion of organ­ic list­ings and paid ads tend to result in more traf­fic than either result type in iso­la­tion. This is often the case for brand­ed search­es — I always rec­om­mend that all busi­ness­es at least try a brand­ed AdWord Cam­paign. If noth­ing else, a PPC ad gives you con­trol over more of your SERP and anoth­er oppor­tu­ni­ty to com­mu­ni­cate with poten­tial cus­tomers.

Meta Data

If you’re active­ly man­ag­ing your SEO, you’ll already be giv­ing thought to your page title and meta descrip­tions and how poten­tial vis­i­tors respond to them. One of the best ways to do this is to mon­i­tor your Click Through Rate in Google Search Con­sole. With this you can see if changes result in a high­er per­cent­age of users click­ing through to your home­page and any oth­er pages from your site list­ed on your brand’s SERP.

The Title on your home­page should clear­ly describe what you do as well as fea­tur­ing your brand name. This typ­i­cal­ly takes the form “[main key­word | [brand name]”. If your home­page Title is “Home” then fire your SEO (or your­self).

Linkdex’s home­page Title includes brand­ing and a brief sum­ma­ry of what they offer.

Social Profiles

Your brand’s social media pro­files can appear in your SERP as organ­ic results and also in the Knowl­edge Graph results on the right-hand side. If some­one wants to find your social pro­files they prob­a­bly will, but it does­n’t hurt to have them dis­played here. If noth­ing else, it makes your SERP look more com­plete and saves peo­ple time.

Adding links to social pro­files from the Knowl­edge Graph pan­el in Google’s SERPs involves adding Struc­tured Data markup. Here are instruc­tions from Google on how to imple­ment this.

Asos’ Knowl­edge Graph results link to five social media pro­files.

Reputation Management

You’ll prob­a­bly already know if you’ve got a brand rep­u­ta­tion issue, par­tic­u­lar­ly if there is some­thing unto­ward show­ing up when peo­ple search for your brand. I won’t go into detail about rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment here, but if you can’t remove the issue, a good thing to con­sid­er is push­ing the result in ques­tion off the front page by get­ting more pages to appear above it (e.g. social pro­files, news results, list­ings on oth­er sites).

News

If your brand is news­wor­thy, you may be fea­tured in sto­ries in Google News and these may show up when peo­ple search for your brand. This might be pos­i­tive, but it could also be pret­ty neg­a­tive. If the news is real­ly bad (i.e. if your brand is a trend­ing top­ic) you might find that Google News results appear above your organ­ic list­ing, in which case you’re real­ly in trou­ble.

Unroll.me’s SERP is cur­rent­ly dom­i­nat­ed by some bad pub­lic­i­ty.

Warnings

There are a few rea­sons Google might warn users who are in a posi­tion to click through to your site. Need­less to say it’s pret­ty impor­tant to avoid these warn­ings like the plague. If your site is some­how still not mobile friend­ly, Google might dis­play a warn­ing say­ing so. If you’ve been hacked, you’re also at risk of poten­tial vis­i­tors being put off by a warn­ing in the SERP.

Conclusion

Hope­ful­ly this post has con­vinced you the search results for your brand terms are as impor­tant a cus­tomer touch point as pages on your site. Even busi­ness­es that are doing a great job in their dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing are like­ly to be able to find some­thing to improve on their brand’s SERP in order to turn browsers into vis­i­tors into cus­tomers.