Why even household names need SEO

You may think that a large, household brand name brings with it guaranteed page one rankings and SEO success. However, despite instant brand recognition, even the most well known brands can experience difficulties in growing their organic traffic. 

Here are just a few reasons why even big brands shouldn’t neglect SEO.

The rise of the aggregator

Aggregator sites (or comparison sites) such as Confused, Compare The Market and Money Supermarket are super sites which often dominate the market. In addition to these, Google themselves have started to offer the likes of Google Flights, Google Jobs and Google Hotels.

The rise of these super sites (and Google services) means a huge chunk of the search pie is taken up by aggregators across many different verticals, making SEO even more important than ever, even for big brands, in order to try and compete against the aggregators.

In it for the long term

Nowadays, launching a business online is easier than ever, making it fairly common to see younger businesses rising quickly. With this in mind, even larger, well known brands would benefit from building up some protection against new entries to the search market, which will inevitably arise in the long term.

SEO is a long term strategy, results are not instant and can require a lot of dedication over time to achieve results. 

The more time and effort put into SEO over a period of time, the better (and longer) a website stands for ranking well in your market. 

Relying on brand

Relying on brand name alone is risky, with many verticals seeing branded searches fall or stall in growth, whilst generic terms are on the rise.

An example of this was recently shown by Moz. Moz looked at two key players in the property market, Zoopla and RightMove, comparing the search interest in their brand names, with the search interest in the generic term ‘houses for sale’.

Their findings showed that when comparing interest in the terms ‘Zoopla’, ‘RightMove’ and ‘houses for sale’, the only term showing an upward trend over time was ‘houses for sale’.

Having a well known brand is a massive advantage when it comes to SEO, and branded search will always be important – but remember not to neglect non-branded search terms. 

Need help?

No matter the size of your brand, or how well known it is, a strong SEO strategy will boost your organic traffic, as well as help to protect your brand in the long term. 

If you need help with your website’s SEO strategy, get in touch with the Forever Agency team today.