Control your brand traffic with SEO and logic
This article (published it the iGaming Business Magazine) is about managing and protecting your brand traffic. We will discuss several potential dangers and some solutions.
Domains, brands and affiliates
Building up a brand is a difficult and expensive work especially in the gambling industry. Therefore it is even more troublesome if someone abuses your brand to get even more money from you.
Your brand
Usually your domain is yourbrand.com or some country top level domain, which makes it easy to rank number one in Google search engine result pages (SERPS) for “Yourbrand”. Still there are 9 more positions to be filled up. To have full control of your brand reputation management you should dominate all 10 positions, this way you can avoid bad publicity and affiliates or other competition who try to use your brand to gain profits from you. But do not forget it is still better to pay an affiliate their comission than sending your brand traffic to your competition.
There are more ways to fill the SERPS up, a good example are social media accounts related to your site, like your facebook or twitter account. Help them to rank for your brand linking from your domain to your accounts using your brand name plus twitter as anchor. Sometimes it is even necessary to get some more backlinks from elsewhere to make them rank in the top ten.
Maybe you have a corporate blog on an subdomain, this could be another position in the top 10 for your brand.
This way you are filling up the top ten SERPS for your brand keyword and not only gaining more and more visibility, but also gaining more control about the news publicated about your company, you gain control over your search engine reputation.
Monitor your online reputation
Knowing what is said about you gives you the opportunity to react, write a statement, press release or even gives you hints how to better your services.
Part of the brand reputation management is the monitoring. These days there are a lot of data and news collectors out their which can be searched for your brand. You can set up rss feeds with google blogsearch phrases, use google news alerts or monitor twitter search for your brand.
This is a list of services you might consider to monitor for your brand:
- Google Alerts
- Yahoo! Pipes
- Technorati
- Twitter search
- Facebook search
- socialmention
Domains, typos and redirects
Owning a domain is like using a slot maschine, you never know if you will hit the jackpot at the typo wheel. A good example is the owner of DIG.com, the Disney Internet Group, which enjoy now free traffic from their “neighbour” DIGG.com.
And once a tube manufacturer was wondering why his server was going down everyday. He owned his business website UTUBE.com. The website has an Alexa Traffic Rank of 23,541 and is getting his main traffic from two keywords and probably direct type ins.
These two examples are showing us how important it is to have control not only of your brand domain, but also possible typos of your domain/brand.
Possible typo domains consist of following false type ins of the users:
- QWERTY keyboard slips
- Missing letters
- Double letters
- Letter swapping
- Look alikes (the letter l and the number 1)
- Extra or missing hyphens
What can be done with these typo domains? Well if you are the owner, I would recommend you to 301 redirect them to your main page, or use it as part of your search engine reputation tactic, this way you will not loose the mistyping user. An affiliate could also do a redirection by just adding his affiliate cookie or code before he redirects the user and gets payed for it.
If someone else is using your brand name in the url this might be a reason to call your lawyers and check a possible brand violation. The first step should always be to contact the domainowner in a friendly way, telling them to give you your domain, and not threaten them with legal actions, be polite and think about your online reputation, harsh actions might have harsh answers and online communities are pretty fast.
Common brand traffic and SEO issues
Usually affiliates try to rank for keywords like “brand review”, “brand bonus” and “brand promotions” or something similar using some more keywords like “latest”, “casino” and “no deposit”.
These type of keywords usually are more easy to rank top 10 in the SERPS and probably even more easy for the brand owner, but most of them are not aware of it or have a poorly optimized domain.
You are losing a lot of traffic to your affiliates and pay money for it if this is not recognized.
The key to find these keywords is using statistical data and the brain to build a separate page on the website for it. This page has to fit in the website structure and must be well optimized for searchengines (keyword in title-tag, heading, content, internal linking and much more).
If you now try to include the typos in this strategie you will rank for a lot more keywords and get a lot more traffic you used to pay for.
Special hint: Search engine advertisment (SEA)
All the topics discussed above can also be included in your SEA – strategie. Usually you have the option at SEA providors like GoogleAdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Bing Search Ads to report brand violation, which resulst in you beeing the only ad shown, which also is a lot cheaper.