The Power of Branded Searches - Boosting Your Online Reputation with Gert Mellak

The moment when somebody types in your brand name in search is much more significant than a lot of people think. So it's really crucial that you control as much as possible, page one, at least about your brand. That can actually impact how engines, but also users could think and what decisions they're going to make.

Hey, I'm Joe Fear and welcome to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. This is where we talk all about building businesses so they give you the freedom and fuel for your life. I'm not here to help you build.

A billion dollar business.

I am here to help you create a business with systems that work for you so you can make more money than you need just by working part time. You know, I was a chronic Hustle mode kind of guy and I want to share my experiences and mentors I've met along the way to help you reframe things to be the most effective as an entrepreneur. I wish I had this guidance and insight when I was younger. So that's what I'm doing here for you. Please share and enjoy.

Hey.

Hey. Welcome back to the second episode of the SEO series I'm doing here. And it's been really incredible to deep dive into this topic, especially with the abundant changes when it comes to SEO and how your website, your content and your brand is discovered on all the different search engines. I mean, Google's changing, Bing has changed, all these other search engines are changing and how people are finding you and the information that they're seeking. We want to make sure that you are top of mind and actually visible because there's a lot changing and that's why I am doing this SEO series and Gert Melick is the SEO expert that I'm featuring here and he is basically, he heads up his SEO agency.

That's incredible.

I've used him for years as well. They are over@SEO leverage.com and go hit them up if you like what you're hearing here and go check out their website, their podcast. Go give them a shout. They have so much information on this. What we're gonna do is talk specifically about search branding and how you can really increase your online reputation if you do some very simple techniques that Gert is going to explain so you'll understand what is going down with search branding and how to optimize your online reputation. You're gonna understand the importance and how that actually drives traffic and conversions and.

It'S all about simplifying what you're putting out there.

You'll be able to beat out competition. He's Telling you some ways to leapfrog so you're showing up on page one instead of these competitors that might be pushing you down. And then there's a bunch of ways to measure your success and make sure.

You'Re actually doing it properly.

And I'll give you some tools here because this episode is sponsored by Ahrefs. They're giving you a free tool called the Webmaster Tools.

And I'll just shout it out here because I.

You definitely want it. It's over at www.ahrefs.com awt. You'll dig it.

They'll love you.

You're gonna love this episode. So take some notes, get ready for it, and I'll see you in there.

We're back.

This is round two of the SEO series.

Good to have you back, my friend.

I'm so excited. Thank you so much for having me again, Joe.

Of course. Yeah. And this whole series, I think it's like we were talking about. It's so timely and it's for everyone. I want to reiterate, like, even if you're not an SEO guru or know.

You know, watch, pay attention.

This is the second of multiple episodes we'll be having in this SEO series. Search engine optimization. If you're unfamiliar, some people still don't know what it is, and that's okay because maybe it's a good time to kind of figure things out because things are moving, things are changing.

Absolutely.

Yeah. And Gert, you're the expert of Hustle and Flowchart when it comes to SEO. So where do we start? And maybe there's like a quick little recap of what we've already talked about and then we can get into the bigger topic that we have planned today.

Yeah, absolutely. So today we definitely want to focus a little bit more about branded searches, online reputation, things like those we discussed last time, how AI is actually impacting search in general, SEO, search engine optimization in particular, how to leverage it, really with the day to day SEO work and get a little bit behind how a search engine might actually think about a content, how they might analyze it, which is absolutely going to be the basis of how they understand your content and how they are going to rank it.

That's the thing. We need to play by their rules. But there's there, there's things that we can control on our side. Yeah. The previous episode really deep dove into that and kind of like, where are we at right now with SEO and then leveraging the tech that's out there. I know you provided some tools that folks can go use. So definitely listen to the previous episode. It's all in the show. Notes for links.

Hey, I want to pause this really fast and shout out the sponsor of this SEO series. And best of all, they're giving you a completely free tool that you can use to enhance your SEO and your monitoring. And the sponsor is Ahrefs. These guys are incredible. Been using their tools for years. They've been a sponsor of the podcast years ago. And I know a ton of people who are listening are using Ahrefs. And what's really cool is they have this completely free tool called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools and they want to give it to you. So you should go get that. So pause this really fast and go to www.a hrefs.com awt and go download that free tool. Because what this thing will do is it monitors your website's SEO health. It scans for common SEO issues, over 140 of them, and will actually give you ideas about the competitors and where you're showing up in terms of your brand in the search results. So it's exactly what Gert is talking about here with making sure that your online reputation is tip top shape. The way that you monitor that stuff is using Ahrefs and their webmaster tools. So go get it for free over at www.dot a h r e f s.com awt. All right, back to the episode.

Yeah.

And branded search.

And it's always been powerful and there's so many strategies and ways to approach it. So let's start off with understanding, like what is branded search and why is this important for everyone listening right now?

100%. So one situation we see all the time, and this is really where people are losing thousands of dollars actually, is that they run a lot of budget on paid ads, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, whatever, TikTok. Now what, whatever it is to raise brand awareness, which is amazing.

Right?

It's so powerful. I'm all for this. We do paid ads on our own as well in a limited form. And what you get is a lot of brand awareness. And a lot of brand awareness ultimately triggers a lot of people to search for your brand on Google because they see you, they don't trust you right away. They want to check you out, they type in your brand name on Google. And then it's really this search branding you have on Google, as we call it, that's going to decide what they're going to do next. So I always remember this story. We had a reputation project we were working on a while ago and this was a high ticket coaching program. This guy spent, I think seven figures, sorry, six figures a month on ads and had like four or five results that showed up for his brand name were not his own sites. These were affiliates. These were competitors trying to sneak in. They just saw, hey, this guy runs a lot of ads. Let's try to rank for his brand name. There was a negative review in there, etc. So he reached out and said, hey, I can easily invest into SEO if we get rid of those people because I'm spending so much affiliate commission and losing so much traction. So we just cleaned this up and made sure that he was actually in control of page one. So this is the situation we have really when it comes to branded search. We think about people typing in your brand name, but also typing in your brand name in connotation with other things. So imagine in your case, people typing in Jo Fear AI Chat. What are they going to find? Right. Is this somebody talking, how you help them, how you had a positive impact? Is this something neutral? Is this something where you ask on a forum post how this actually works a few years ago, maybe, or whatever. Right. You define or people are going to have any. Get an impression and everything. Branded search is really where they already know you from somewhere but are now going to take you out. And this very often is the moment that's really decisive on whether they're going to move forward.

It's so true. And I've seen that as an affiliate marketer, there's a lot of strategies to obviously show up on page one for certain brand names or someone's name. I've used it to grow this podcast is SEO or brand brand, someone else's name alongside mine in Hustle and Flowchart. It's worked really well over the years and that brings great evergreen traffic, organic referral traffic. And I remember Perry Marshall like he's been on the podcast a couple times and you know, he wrote the book on AdWords back in the day. Right. And like the number one thing I remember that stuck out is always at least pay for your own brand, you know, as an ad on Google. So you're showing up there and you know, obviously then there's the whole SEO element too. So there's. Yeah.

Thinking about how to show up as.

Your own brand and it could be a negative review. You mentioned that there's a lot of ways to allow yourself to kind of rise to the top and give that first impression.

Absolutely. And it's just such a strong intent. Right. So it's A very strong intent moment. Not something who is searching for this kind of service, what is this about, et cetera. It's somebody who already pretty much picked a provider or a source where they can get this, buy this from. And now they just want to have some sort of security. Right. They might type in your brand name and reviews, type in your brand name and scam, type in your brand name and opinions or experience or something like this. Right. Just to see if other people shared a negative experience or if they're good to go. There are articles out there, especially from affiliates. We see this all the time, where they say, hey, read this before you buy from Jophia, for example.

Right.

So why wouldn't you click on this? You type in Joe Fear, there's an article, read this before you buy from this guy. Everybody's going to read it. Just at the end there, they say, yeah, his program isn't bad, his service isn't bad, but you can get this cheaper elsewhere. So why would you want to have something like this ranking. And this is where search branding, or active search branding as we call it here very often, often actually starts, where we try to dominate what is on page one and really be as much as possible in control.

I love it. And that's where there's strategies I'd like to get into on how we can kind of control and optimize those search rankings as best we can. And keeping in mind, yeah, it's like it's all about trust, it's about loyalty. And you want to set that first impression ourselves as best as we can and then leveraging not only Google, but probably maybe social media and some other aspects and some tools we can get into. Yeah, like where do we start in terms of optimizing where we're at right now? Like, what are some of the, I guess the foundational items here?

Absolutely. So I think one of the foundational items is that we see Google, that needs to be educated.

Right?

They need to be educated. Google is learning. As the Internet evolves, as the content gets created, nobody's typing in exactly telling them who to fear is, who getmelloc is and what they do. They learn this based on consistent information. Now, I've got two children and I know exactly that if I tell them today they can stay up until 10 and tomorrow until 9, the third day, they don't know how long they can stay up at night. We're in Spain here, so they stay up a little bit longer. We want to be consistent because wherever is consistent information, the search engines are going to accept it as the reality. What happens so often with. Just think of personal brands. For example, if people have a personal brand, they might have a personal website or blog where they say what they do. Then on their social media they say lifestyle designer. On their other social media, they say, I love talking about tech. And on another website, there might be some information from a previous company they were on. And this is a little bit unrelated again. So if you're a machine, if you're a Google, think about what do you think about this person? You have no idea what they stand for because there's contradictory information. The person themselves on the social media doesn't even give consistent information. So how should you actually rank this person? Well, who would this person's material be a good result for? Just really hard to figure out. So the initial stages, we ask our clients to be very specific and explicit about what they're doing, and we actually assess for them all the sources the search engines might take into account in order to figure out what they stand for. And this is where we have our frameworks, our internal process to go through those. But if somebody wants to start this, the first step is definitely to be very, very explicit on your website, on your homepage, on your about page, about who you are, who you help and how you help them.

That's incredible. And be consistent, it sounds like, across all of the platforms.

Absolutely.

Is that something where Google and the search engines, I mean, they're crawling all of this stuff, so yeah. So it's not only our own websites, but yeah, I think the key, and I know I've forgotten this for a while, and especially when we're rebranding or maybe launching something new, maybe it's a good practice to kind of review all of our social links out there, the public profiles we have, and update those across the board. What do you think?

Absolutely. You want to really, really start and see this strategically, which is a little hard to do this for your. For yourself, because you have a lot of things going on.

Right.

But the way we, we try to do it, we. We really first start with those texts. And so in my agency, we have a corporate channel where we type in all those standard texts we want to use. So the entire team knows that these are the texts that are going to be used. So whenever we put something out, we go back to those texts. And this is how we define who I am. This is how we define what the agency stands for. This is how do we define who we work with? And this is then going to be just Part of our processes. So if somebody goes out and creates an article, they have a text to reference and we always phrase this in the same way. If you have been doing local, local SEO for a while, this was a. Consistency has been a thing for many, many years. Name, address, phone number.

Right.

Whoever has ever touched local SEO has heard that these pieces of information help you identify local business across the Internet are important for search engines to identify this business. But this consistency now that search engines are much better at understanding content really translates to the text. How do we talk about this? We had single variable tests here where we just. The only thing we changed was how this person refers to what they are doing on two websites. One was Amazon on their profile, one was their homepage and was changing those two. Suddenly they jumped to page one from an eternal page two ranking. It is absolutely important that Google finds the information consistently not only on your website, but for a start on your website. But others need to back you up.

Thanks for sharing that case study too because that's some real world things. I mean I'm imagining a lot of us who have been. We've had a website for a long time, we've had social media accounts, we have a brand out there that is kind of known at least from Google somehow. And it doesn't mean like we need to be getting a lot of traffic but as you said it doesn't. This, this works for everybody because at that point if they're searching for your brand name, they're very intent on learning about you. It's. It makes sense to kind of come up with a standardized doc or whatever it might be. Maybe it's in Slack like you said, share it with your team where everyone is speaking consistently or maybe even looking out and spotting hey, oh, that's inconsistent from what we. How we're defining ourself and who we're helping.

Exactly. The earlier you get this into your process, the better it's going to be implemented. An ideal scenario Google would very quickly see all kinds of sources that took into account be updated. It doesn't work that way. Everything takes its time. But the faster you can really update all those sources around you, the faster the search engine is going to notice. Hey, there's something important happening here. Let's reassess what we know about this so called entity then entity we already know that's called to fear. This is now doing something else.

When it comes to content that we've created in the past or maybe even pages. Is there a process or how would you suggest to go back and possibly update or optimize some of the existing content we have on our website or potentially on other places.

You just want to definitely be consistent with it and also for your clients. For example, my personal history, I was doing lead generation for gyms fitness marketing in Spain for quite a while. I was doing some E commerce in the past as well with E commerce support and SEO and stuff like that. I still get hit up by people based on lead generation for gyms based on the e commerce support stuff.

Why?

Because there's just content out there still that I was contributing a guest post. There was a guest on a podcast. I had some. Maybe on some blog. I have an old blog post still flying around. So obviously it's not ideal. We usually provide like a specific list of what we think should be dealt with first. You're not going to be able to update 10 years, 20 years of history. I think the more recent, the more important, but also the more authoritative, the more important. So if you now want to get positioned in AI, having written a book about how to train dogs is not going to help Google understand what you stand for. So if, if you have an Amazon profile where you're the dog trainer, I would potentially see how can we turn this into AI? Are you going to write another book where you're not only a dog trainer but also an AI expert? Or do we consider even taking down this dog trainer book? Or give this some sort of AI touch? So Google can connect the two concepts somehow. So we will try to figure this out somehow. Because Amazon, for example, is a trusted source. It's like Wikipedia saying something about you. If you have a listing on Wikipedia, it's a highly trusted source. So you want to also look at the authority of those things a little bit. But we, for example, we do proactively reach out to past podcasts that have an inconsistent information on an episode where I was a guest and we kindly ask them to update a couple of sentences or point a link elsewhere, things like those. And most of them are really open to this and help us out there just in order to make sure that more sources that we have more sources that are consistent with the new messaging.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Like what's your process?

Maybe simple process, because I'm sure you can go super deep too. But for finding those types of sources out there that might not be on our website, you know, the one that we own, but actually looking outward to these places you might have been featured.

We are using a little bit of a blended approach. So one is directly Google Search, just searching for your brand name. What is it that Google search ranks high is going to be one of the most important sources. So if you type in your brand name, the higher it ranks for your brand name, the more relevant it's going to be. And then there is software like one we are using right now is Kaliq Pro from Jason Barnard, who is an expert here and really a thought leader. And this software makes the process really easy. So they just help you really go through those sources. It's still really a tedious process because you need to go one by one and evaluate the source. Is there something we can do? How can we do this? How can we claim this listing, how can we edit the client content, etc. This is where my team is really helpful here. But at least you have like a little bit of a focused list and those tools then really also help you to track. So where. What is this page one look like right now? Do you have a knowledge panel on the site? This is something that's also important. The more Google knows about some brand or a person, the more likely Google is to trigger what's called a knowledge panel. And this is the box on the side of the search results that shows usually mostly for authors or big brands, important people with some details. So you type in Barack Obama. There is a box showing. But this also works very often with authors. You type in get me luck, there is a box showing. It's a little bit smaller, we're working on this, but it's still a box. It still shows that I'm an author, I have published a book, might show the podcast, it might show SEO, leverage my agency, somewhere my social media profiles. And this just shows us that Google has me in what they call the knowledge grab, which is pretty much their brain connecting different concepts. So they connect me to my social media, they connect me to my book, they connect me to my podcast maybe, and then this knowledge panel can be triggered. So the knowledge panel is essentially doesn't only look good and gives you a professional image, an impression when somebody searches for you. But it also is the ultimate confirmation that Google knows enough about you to think they know certain true facts and this is what they present there.

Then that almost seems like the pinnacle, right, is to get a knowledge panel from Google because that's like their stamp of approval. It's like the verify. Okay, Gert Malik, here's your book and here's all of your other links in one spot. You mentioned book. Are there any other. Do you think being an author is the key thing to get featured by Google and for them to kind of take you seriously on that.

It did help in the past. I think it's not that necessary anymore. It did help in the past because Google was very reliant on this information then from Amazon or from Google Books directly right now. Now I think it's not that important anymore. But the knowledge panel definitely shows that Google has enough consistent information. So this is where it's okay, we are doing something right. And it always goes really back to the main site that has all the information from you. So this could be the homepage on a personal brand, an about page, on a company page, for example. This is where the entire information should be. And there needs to be a cross referencing between your site and those sources that confirm your messaging. If you just link out and nobody links back or the other way around, Google has a very hard time figuring this out. But if there is a back and forth validation between the sources. So I say something about you, you say something about me or I say something about my service, you say the same thing about my service and we link to each other. This is then a loop that Google can understand and say, hey, both parties agree this is the truth. So let's connect this dot and if this happens a lot of times then actually the knowledge panel can be triggered and Google can actually learn.

And it sounds simply start with your own about page and homepage and then connect those to the social of of these other trusted sites in Google's eyes. And then from there and then go to the other sources where you've been featured and ask them to update. Makes sense.

How about any other?

Because leapfrogging, you know, ranks, I think, I feel like these are, these are really good strategies. Are there any others that we can do? Because these seems like probably, probably like the foundational, like the, the ones that we can all kind of update or have our team update fairly quickly. Are there any consistent maybe principles or strategies that you can see to make sure that we' kind of consistently, I guess, beefing up the first page rankings. Also keeping future in mind because I know there's changes happening.

Absolutely, absolutely. So on the one hand we want to identify what kind of results Google wants to rank even before the next changes are coming Here, for example, we had a client that had an old Reddit thread ranking with some negative opinions from eight years ago when he had just launched his program. He refined it over the years and got really good reviews. But Google was just really big on having a Reddit thread there so the solution was just to start a new thread. So Google picked up and said, okay, I want to have a Reddit thread on position number four. But we pretty much took control over this and started a new one, bought the exact same brand and made sure Google could really rank this one. Because it's not like you could move things around. You don't control this. You can just impact and pretty much do SEO for those other results like you would for your own website. Place links to certain websites, have internal linking as much as possible, optimize the content, educate Google, be consistent, etc. But then also strategically say, okay, what does Google think should be on page one about this brand? And is there a way we can either leapfrog them those results we don't want, or optimize them where they are? And this is where a little bit of strategy comes in as well on how we do this for different types of websites.

Yeah, and that's reputation management, right?

Like that's absolutely. It's online reputation management. Yeah, yeah.

And that's where. Because I've seen this, I mean, yeah, reviews are a great example of many brands, courses, products that when they first launch, you might get one customer that has an experience and, and maybe they chose to take it to Reddit or wherever instead of writing to your support or wherever your community to actually ask for help there. Which that's usually the better way because you'll probably help improve it for everybody, ideally. But yeah, so in that sense, like the Reddit, let's just use that as an example. So you would say start like a whole separate thread on Reddit yourself and then essentially. Yeah. Cause you can't control the existing thing, but Google's gonna see. Okay, here's a relevant. Similar keywords, more recent.

Yeah, the Reddit one is a diffic one. And this also happens with forums, threads, for example. So the intuitive first step people want to take is to add something to this old thread and say, hey, let's now tell everybody on this old thread that we now have a better program. And the only thing it does is just tell Google that look, this thread from 8 years ago is still relevant, people are still adding to this, let's even push it further up. So just give this a little bit more energy. But if you analyze it and say, hey, this is a Reddit thread and apparently this is what Google wants to rank, let's give them something better, fresher and maybe more comprehensive and with some SEO tweaks and tactics, try to get that one positioned. Could be a Good strategy, but it really needs to be evaluated in each case. Definitely it is a little bit risky because you really don't know if those old unhappy clients come back or whatever happens. But you need to figure this out position by position. More interesting it's going to be really with the new search generative experience where Google or other search engines actually summarize an opinion about your brand. And this is what's going to really change the game a little bit in the future. A very quick recap. We are part of the NextPermental group here from Google where we can play with this a little bit. And it's shocking how easy it is get a bad brand reputation from those language models.

Okay, let's talk about it because this is brand new stuff.

For example, I just asked specifically, it's pretty much a Chat response like ChatGPT, but the search engine responding in this case Google. So I typed in the search like the top 10 running shoe brands and Adidas came up and Under Armour came up and I don't know what. And for some reason Nike wasn't there. Right. So why isn't this brand there? And it just comes back because it has some manufacturing issues. I was like what? And then I did some further research and at this stage it's obviously going to be improved. But there was one negative review about one particular model they were selling that had some issues apparently and the search engine just took this as a reality and now is telling people that this is not a good shoe brand.

Yeah, it's doing like this is definitely something.

Absolutely. It's a language model. And a language model essentially is just predicting reality. Right. It's just giving an answer that sounds like an answer doesn't have to be correct at this stage. And I really hope Google is going to do some double checking and fact checking before they actually launch this. But at this stage page, it's just guessing. It's guessing what sounds like a good answer without any attempt to only say things that are correct. And this is a huge brand reputation issue and you just might see your brand referenced with your competitor's brand where they say something or they sound similar to your brand name and suddenly come up as well. So this is a huge issue. Nobody really knows how it's going to impact us and at which stage it's going to be launched. But it goes again back to SEO. So. So those answers come from top ranking search results. So the more you control what comes up on page one, page two, page three, page four about your brand, the more likely you are to get a positive brand impression across. Whereas if you only focus on your website ranking on top. And that's great, that's what everybody wants to see, but you ignore what comes below this ranking number five, ranking number eight suddenly might be the source for an answer for a client who is inquiring about your brand.

Yeah, that's more important than ever, it seems like. And I know with any large language like Google, I'm sure as well, it's going to improve with more of the usage of that bot, you know, the chat interface. But at the same time, what we can do is, yeah, start looking at page one. And would you say, and maybe this is a dumb question, but yeah, Incognito window, like something that isn't. You logged in under your normal browser just to kind of keep a look at page 1, 2, 3, 4. I know hrefs is a tool that I've used for a long time and, and yes, they are sponsoring the series, so thank you. But it's legitimately like, I know that can kind of track your rankings a little bit. Any other ways that you would suggest to kind of.

Yeah, Ahrefs definitely. Also one of my preferred versions here we have definitely incognito window. Then depending on the location, you might be using different IP addresses. So we very often change our IP address or the geographic location. There are some Chrome plugins that allow you to simulate that you're based in New York or in Sydney or wherever to get a localized version of the search results. There are settings in search as well that you can take to tell Google they should pretend you're somewhere else. You definitely want to make sure you're logged out. It's just really making sure that you're not logged in. So Google is not personalizing the search experience because otherwise Google tends to rank sites that you visit more frequently higher in your personal search rankings.

Right? Yeah, exactly. So those are good steps to avoid that and see the true results. And I like the idea of bouncing around different locations. That's one I don't think about often, but you're totally right. Like there's different search results for wherever. I'm sure that's why it's good to understand who is searching for you and what countries are they looking you up.

Exactly. And also the. Also the knowledge panel and Google's understanding about your brand is going to depend on the location and it's going to depend on the language. So for example, there's some information in Spanish about me out there that is not consistent with what's in English out there. So in Spain it doesn't show my English podcast for example or things like those. So Google does adjust. So if you have different markets, markets like we are in the states and in Canada and Sydney and UK et cetera, it's a good idea really to track the search results and the knowledge panel across these different locations just to have an idea. Even if you have a knowledge panel and you have a good brand search branding in one country it might be completely different in another one there might be someone else with your exact name or a very similar brand name ranking there with a completely different information.

Yeah, I know like Matt Wall Wolf used to be the co host and he has another Matt Wolf out there, he's still battling. I think he plays golf in the PGA or something.

So I'm like it's a difficult one. That's a tricky one.

Luckily my name's not too common. My dad had the same name but he didn't care about the online stuff.

So I wish you there.

So social media, we talked about other platforms of how that influences Google's look at us because the idea again is to appease the Google gods and and maybe Bing as well. I'm sure searching on other search engines are probably helpful to understand where you're ranking there as well.

Are there any other, I guess common.

Mistakes that you would think that we should know about that could be resolved fairly quickly at this stage of understanding?

I think one common mistake is definitely that we are too fancy describing what we do. So I can describe what I do in a paragraph or I can describe what I do in one short sentence. Just imagine the engine processing your content is an 8 or 10 year old kind of thing. So this just forces you to really talk in simple terms, at least initially in the openings and when you start make it a little bit easier. And then the second thing I think it's not so much a mistake but a lost potential is the usage of structured data schema code on websites which is just a standardized code that machines can read and automatically, not only from the text but specifically from the schema code extract the information they're looking for for. So imagine you have an article about a book. There is code that you can put into this article that's only going to be read by machines that give them specific details about this book and this makes it easier for them to recognize this. There is schema code that tells engines that there are different ways to write your brand in capital letters with a space, without a space and things like those and you are the same as the Jo fiat written as one word with a dot com or whatever it is behind it. Right. So you really get can give additional information. And I think this is probably one of the most underleveraged aspects or features that we have right now available in SEO and specifically in search branding. Because it's like talking the search engines language, technical language, and not only relying on them analyzing, being able to understand our text. One big misunderstanding is that Google and other engines can just figure things out based on what they see on the page and that's by far not true. They still have issues if there are no synonyms there. They still have have issues with longer phrases. They still have issues based on the semantics of the content. So it's been getting really technical for a while in SEO but now even more and specifically when it comes to.

Search branding, that makes sense with the schema is give them what they need to get your information as quickly and obviously simplify that. Don't get fancy. Yeah, you don't need to put all these adjectives and all these extra things that search engines really don't care about. So for schema code people on WordPress websites, is that a plugin or do you recommend a way to optimize that?

There are plugins, so normal rank math Yoast plugins are going to do like a basic schema, but there are additional ways to add like more advanced schema to the different pages. There is specific schema for an about page or for a product page, etc. It really depends on the platform you're on. Platforms like Shopify do a lot of this already automatically where they would mark up the product. So Google can automatically as a machine read what's the availability, what the cost, shipping, etc. Is. But sometimes we still see some manually coded themes out there where there's no schema at all or something like this. And it's not something you would notice. You look at your website, you just got your website from the web designer, it looks great, everybody's happy, it might even convert. But maybe this technical step wasn't done or not as detailed as it actually could be. And this would be one of those missed potential points probably.

I would definitely raise and I know we don't have the time to get into schema and all the details there, but that's something that, that is great to be aware of. And yeah, Yoast SEO, great plugin for WordPress. There's a lot of instructions, so I'm sure going deeper on any platform you're on. You can just kind of type in, you know, schema code and figure out how to optimize that for your platform. But yeah, absolutely on the themes because you never know. You know each one's built.

You never know.

Yeah.

Well, Garrett, before we wrap this episode.

Up, any last remaining little bits, maybe tools you want to recommend or anything that can just.

Yeah, just really this piece of information that this. The moment when somebody types in your brand name in search is much more significant than a lot of people think. Because we have like this notion of SEO is search marketing is good. People are in this moment where they check this out. Perfect. This is exactly what I'm saying all the time. But when they actually pick up your brand name because you have already impacted them, you have spent hundreds or thousands of dollars to get the word about your brand out there, about what you're doing, the moment they then type in your brand. Brand in search is very, very decisive. And the same way as a two star review thing that you might not even control, it's just a fake from a competitor or something like this might destroy the sale. The same an affiliate could take their attention away or the same as somebody just talking about your brand on their blog could take their attention away. So it's really crucial that you control as much as possible, page one, at least about your brand. That can actually impact how engines but also, also users could think and what decisions they're going to make.

Yeah. And it comes back down to trust. Right. And that first impression, if we can control 100%. Yeah. I mean it's, we all know that that counts for almost everything, first impressions. And then it's like, okay, give them a little bit more down that path and, and this is the way to do it. So kind of like a game in a way. You know, obviously we can't control it all, but there's a lot of answers out there waiting for us. Us once we start diving into our own brands.

Absolutely. And it's all really about leveraging the ads budget you spend to its maximum. Because if you spend a lot of money on ads and then a lot of people Google you and don't like what they see and don't take the next step just as a result of this, it's really going back to your cpa. And this is ultimately, I think the step a lot of people ignore completely. They just look at the KPIs from the paid ads campaigns and say, okay, this is all good or this is what, what we can get, but maybe we could get better Just by also taking into account how people then search.

For us, I mean, you can dramatically drop the costs and your effectiveness goes much higher.

So there you go.

Yeah, man.

All right, Gert, I appreciate you, and I don't know the exact topic for.

The next series quite yet, but you know what?

We got a whole bunch of different.

Topics that are, you know, that are definitely. They're all timely, they're all relevant, and they're made for everybody. That's the goal of this SEO series here.

So, Gert, remind folks, folks where they.

Can go find you and some of the cool stuff you're up to. And then also your podcast, because you deep dive on all these topics all the time.

Absolutely. Yeah. So if everybody wants to have more information, seoleverage.com would be great. A podcast is there information is there about the search branding as well. And I'm personally getting on a call with everybody checking out what the situation is. So if anybody wants to hit us up there, definitely let us know. You have heard this here.

Awesome. Yeah. Seoleverage.com Gert and his team, I mean, very thorough. They've worked with me and Matt for, over the years. And also with the transition of going to this new site, hustleandflowchart.com, which, Gert, already, I'm seeing organic search and traffic coming already.

I love it.

So it worked. So thank you.

Awesome. Happy to hear that.

All right, guys, well, thank you for listening, and we'll catch you in the next one.

Thank you so much.

All right, all right, that's what I got for you today. And remember, it's not all all about living to work. It's all about working to live if.

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