So till date, we have been focusing on making content that can be a good read and also rank well on Google. If you look at the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) today, despite having low or no topical authority some sites rank really well, the point is that they merely rank based on the fact that some of their pages receive very good traffic and that the Click Data signals to Google that overall the site is good.
If you are not ranking Organically, then you will need to make efforts to become somehow visible and then generate that Click Data which would in turn send signals to Google to rank the page/brand for those particular search intents. But obviously, rankings are going to depend on a lot more varied parameters than just these mentions over the internet, but it’s all connected, what gets seen and clicked, gets to rank better and stays stronger.
With the Google Leak and Helpful Content Update (HCU), it has become obvious that Brand value carries significant weightage in rankings. The most difficult part for small or mid-sized businesses, bloggers, or news sites is… how can you make your Brand Visible? Because, in the current scenario, rankings are dependent on the Click Data (from leaks).
So now what are your options to generate Click Data that Google would consider?
The challenge for a new brand (or an HCU-affected website) is that you need clicks to rank better, the first problem that needs to be solved is to be seen.
There have been several suggestions by experts that can be tried, here today I am going to highlight a different approach for doing this, the way most new tweets would do…Usually, news appears first on Twitter, which then gets picked up by news agencies and shaped into articles, which then start appearing on Google. In a few cases, some news also tends to appear first on other social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram before making its way in the form of articles to Google.
So it’s about time to focus and develop your social media handles, your followers, and your influencer network. Start posting on your social media (doesn’t have to be News always), when you publish new content on your site, do social posts to link to that content, don’t give it to Google first or wait for Google to pick it up, rather create signals using your social posts, that would further take traffic to your web page, over time you would see the click data of that page would start making the page appear in search results.
When this works for you, replicate this for a few pages on your site, preferably on different topics that your site is about, as a few pages of your site start receiving a good amount of clicks, it will send signals to Google that overall that site is GOOD.
Making a brand on the internet is tough, and ranking when you do not have traffic is even tougher, so the route suggested above is not easy, it will take time to implement and see desired results.