Following Google’s algorithm change, we’ve been offering our clients various PR and SEO services to help them remain top of search and stay ahead of the competition by showing up among super competitive keywords. One service that we’ve successfully deployed for several of them recently is non-branded keyword SEO.
What is non-branded keyword SEO?
In a nutshell, it’s search terms that do not use a brand name or contain backlinks with anchor text to a brand name. Instead, non-branded keyword SEO anchors text around terms that our clients want to be indexed against by Google and also for what potential customers are searching for online.
This SEO technique is highly relevant for our iGaming and gambling clients who want Google to index them as highly as possible for terms that new customers will be searching for, and because these terms don’t feature a brand name, it offers our clients highly targeted brand awareness and exposure to plenty of new customers.
The classic example that is used online is someone searching for ‘running shoes’. Google will then provide them with a list of results of brands that have content with term ‘running shoes’ across earned, owned and paid channels.
A powerful way to reach new audiences and acquire new customers
The benefits for our clients to successfully deploy non-branded keyword SEO are huge. The most challenging element of providing this service is having a forensic understanding of the media landscape and which titles are happy to play ball by providing the non-branded keywords as a credit.
At Volume Communications, we specialise in delivering earned media at scale for our clients. When we speak to journalists about non-branded keywords, anchor text and the difference between ‘do follow’ and ‘no follow’ backlinks, for some it is if we’re speaking a totally different language. Most journalists don’t understand SEO, that’s just the nature of the beast and highlights the need for your PR agency to have top-tier relationships with authoritative journalists.
What success looks like
- Ensuring the journalist(s) are completely clued up to the size of the request and task prior to any content or access to talent has been arranged
- Having the correct non-branded keywords anchored with a ‘do follow’ link
- Ensuring that the non-branded keywords are featured in an organic way within the article
Doing the above is the easy part, but identifying top tier media that are happy to play ball is a different kettle of fish altogether. That is when you need a highly skilled PR agency with the right connections and the insight to go and earn those non-branded keywords.
Of course, you could quite easily pay for the editorial and have non-branded keyword articles appear. That approach can be successful, but it lacks prestige and doesn’t have anywhere near the same authority or SEO power as placing these terms on top tier websites (DR 60+) via an earned lens. It’s also very expensive to go out and pay for coverage in this way, and if Google catches wind of it, it renders the works meaningless, and in some cases can actually damage a clients SEO ranking.
In a campaign we ran recently, we secured non-branded keyword coverage on five unique domains with an average DR score of 75. These are sites that don’t sell links or provide sponsored posts, so the value of these placements can be conservatively estimated at £10-12k. Our client achieved those results for about half of that spend, plus they got bundles of backlinks from additional earned media secured.
Give it a try
While we specialise in delivering earned media at scale, we appreciate that for some clients and marketers, paying for coverage and links is a technique that can bear fruit.
We’re offering a mix of different non-branded keyword SEO services. If you would like to find out more about those, or which media titles we’re confident we could land for you through an earned lens, drop us a line / joe@volumecomms.co.uk.
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