Forget Keywords, Authoritative Branding Is Where It’s At!

Ok, maybe not forget keywords entirely.  I still say the future of marketing is predicated upon how non-brand loyal people search online.  However, gone are the days when the name of the game was shoving as many keywords down Google’s throat because, like a cat’s hairball, Google has coughed all that back up.

The good news is truly understanding what it means in 2015, in a post-Panda world, to build your company’s brand. Google now wants to get to know you. Ahh…that sounds nice, doesn’t it?  Well they really do. The introduction must be respectful and based on relevancy or like-mindedness.  Like any good long lasting and meaningful relationship, it takes time to build.  We must continuously strive to develop this relationship into an endgame scenario, which is to be deemed as an ‘authority’ for all things trenchless in the eyes of Google. How the heck do you do that you ask? Good question.

Google knows what services you offer and where you offer them without the need for obnoxious keyword stuffing.  This still happens to this day, however those who continue this practice will eventually find themselves on the outside looking in.  Google understands this based on deep, rich, original content and how you have your site structured.   Once we have accomplished this, we must get serious with how we approach backlinking.   Just as with over optimization of keywords, the practice of using link farms or non relevant linking is a thing of the past.   With effective backlinking you must have a real person on both sides of the backlink. Which means a lot of hard and follow up work, over and over again until you slowly build it up.  One really good (High Domain Authority) relevant backlink is worth more than 100 non relevant link farm backlinks.

It still doesn’t end there…allow me to digress for a moment.

I remember living in Boca Raton one summer when I was 15, and we had a canal running through our back yard.  My brother and I had two cast nets to catch fish.  There was a 13 foot diameter net and a six foot diameter one.  Can you guess which cast net consistently caught more fish?  Don’t get me wrong, the smaller cast net did catch some fish, however, it was the larger net that caught the most fish, day in and day out.  So, what does cast net fishing, authoritative branding and your website have in common…ask me.